This story mentions an eating disorder and GLP-1 drugs, which are FDA-approved for weight management in adults diagnosed with obesity or with overweight and at least one weight-related health condition. For your safety, only take medication that has been prescribed to you by a licensed health care professional and dispensed by a state-licensed pharmacy.
My husband was the one who held the syringe a few centimeters from my stomach as I loosened my towel. We were in our bathroom while the kids finished cereal and pancakes before heading off to school. I’m not afraid of needles; I just can’t bring myself to pierce my own skin.
I’d been living with migraines for more than 20 years—sharp, searing, pounding interruptions that dictated the texture of my days. Over time, they became so frequent they felt like part of my personality, unwelcome tenants in my nervous system. I tried everything, but none of it worked: Botox, acupuncture, anti-seizure medications, elimination diets, homeopathic remedies. In a typical month, I’ll have some version of a migraine for 12, maybe 16 days. And they only go away if I take a whopper of a drug called Sumatriptan, which makes me feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest and my fingertips are buzzing with electricity.
At one point, I had weekly sessions with a guy who carried the air of a shaman-healer. He was married with kids, though he sometimes used his office as a bachelor pad—his toothbrush and damp towel proof of other lives. He said my “incorrect breathing patterns” were the cause of my ailment. So once a week he hovered behind me while I inhaled and exhaled to an animated tree that grew and shed its leaves on a screen. Some days he’d play a large singing bowl on my stomach. It didn’t help, but I kept showing up anyway.
Persistent physical suffering does a great job of training you to submit to being an experiment. Years later, after offering myself as a guinea pig in a clinical trial in Connecticut, I was blissfully headache-free for six months. I got to experience what life was like for regular people who don’t live with chronic pain. But when the trial ended and the drug’s magic wore off, I was back to square one. I yearned to feel pain-free again—like someone remembering a dream they’re desperate to re-enter. Ketamine infusions—an off-label migraine treatment with a small but growing body of research behind it—were an option, but I wasn’t ready to delve into psychedelic territory. I’d started a quarterly IV infusion of another drug, prescribed to me by my neurologist and administered by a kind man from Queens named Imanuel. We watched Gossip Girl reruns together while the drip went in. It helped, but not enough.
A few months ago, when my hairdresser—not a doctor, but sometimes hope comes in unexpected forms—mentioned GLP-1-based medications, I listened. A microdose, he explained, could potentially help with the inflammation that often triggers migraines. My neurologist was clear: It wasn’t clinically proven and would be an off-label use. Still, he told me, it likely wouldn’t hurt to try, and he shared that a handful of his patients had experienced some relief. I was glad to have a doctor’s permission to chase something new, even if it was unconventional, maybe even a little reckless. I wasn’t thinking about side effects or cultural baggage or what it might mean for my body; I was thinking about the ease of living in a body unbound from its constant thrum of pain.
The thing about chronic pain is that it’s always there, even when it recedes. Eating disorders work the same way—when they go quiet, they don’t actually disappear; they still take up residence, like a squatter in your brain. My body carried both—the migraines since my 20s, an eating disorder since my late teens—though I’d long convinced myself the latter was safely dormant. “Convinced” being the key word.
“Just make sure you’re eating enough, especially protein,” my neurologist warned. “You’re not using this to lose weight.” The idea seemed ridiculous. Me—not remembering to eat? I’d spent most of my life thinking about food. And yet I’m ashamed to admit there was a small part of me that wondered what would happen if I did lose that weight.
A week later, in our bathroom, I closed my eyes and waited for the prick of the needle. A small sting. A curl of my stomach muscles. I knew the therapeutic effect wouldn’t be immediate, but part of me still expected something to shift instantly, some epic sense of relief.
Instead, there was a different kind of silence—the absence of food noise.
For the first time since I was a teenager, the running commentary in my head—How many calories is that? What can I have for breakfast and lunch if I want to eat a satisfying dinner?—was all gone. The counting, the bargaining, the ritual math I’d done since I was 16 had simply vanished.
It felt like stepping out of a crowded restaurant into night air and realizing how loud it had been inside. I told myself that even if the GLP-1 didn’t end up fixing my headaches, at least I was finally free from the unhelpful food and body image thoughts that still crept up on me all these years later.
Suddenly, food became something technical rather than pleasurable. It was fuel to help my inner battery feel just charged enough to make the machine sputter along. I finally understood how my kids could shrug at their dinner plates and forget to eat.
I texted my friends: “It’s like playing kitchen with your kid. You sip invisible tea, you chew pretend food. You know it’s fake, but you go through the motions.”
What I didn’t tell them was that this feeling of going through the motions wasn’t only reserved for mealtime. Nearly every aspect of my days started to feel like I was removed from the moment, like my body was in the room but I was somewhere behind the walls, watching and listening in. My youngest would stand beside me on their step stool at the sink brushing their teeth and telling me their usual morning stories about their dream the night before, but I couldn’t connect like I used to. When I was trying to write on my laptop, I could only stare at a blank screen. Sometimes driving even felt surreal, like I was in a race car arcade game instead of behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. At the time, I didn’t understand exactly why this was happening to me, but I know now that dehydration and low blood sugar probably had a lot to do with it. I may have also been experiencing “flatness,” or even depression, something some GLP-1 users report feeling though no large-scale studies have proven it as a side effect.
And while I told myself this was all worth it, that at least I was no longer thinking about food, another, older part of me stirred. When I stepped on the scale—something I hadn’t done in 15 years—I saw a number that seemed almost impossible and felt a dizzying euphoria.
There’s a bit by the comedian Iliza Schlesinger that sums up my old attitude about weight aspirations perfectly: “You wanna be the kind of thin where your friends are worried for you…. I wanna look like the girl on the cover for Les Mis."
And here I was. Finally too thin. The disordered part of me that used to think I was never small enough—the one I thought I’d kept at bay—roared back, gleeful. I felt that familiar superiority: that I was above appetite, above human needs.
I’d spent years undoing the toxic messages of the ’90s and 2000s, when thigh gaps and cigarette diets and sexy Lolita-type pop singers prevailed. I’d sworn I was done chasing smallness as a virtue. I’d lived enough life, birthed children, and rebuilt enough versions of myself to know that thinness isn’t peace. I thought I had built something sturdier within me. And almost as quickly as the fireworks of elation had exploded when I learned what I weighed came a heavy realization, and a sense of despair.
How am I back here again?
At my next therapy session, I confessed: “I’m not sure this drug is helping my migraines. But I know it’s doing something else.”
My therapist nodded. “It’s not ideal for anyone with an eating-disorder history,” she said, gently. “I know,” I said. “But what if it just takes some time to work?” Secretly, I was desperate to have a “valid reason” for staying on the drug. It was helping me get skinny.
Chronic pain teaches you to gamble with yourself. There’s always one more treatment, one more possible cure, one more specialist. It’s the economics of hope: You trade parts of yourself for the promise of relief. With eating disorders, you’ll whittle away parts of your body for the dream that one day you’ll feel that you’re enough.
At first, my migraines seemed to ease—most likely due to a placebo effect, my doctor later said—but after a few weeks, they returned in full force. At a follow-up appointment, I told him the truth: The migraines hadn’t improved, I’d lost a significant amount of weight, and I could feel my eating disorder reawakening.
“If this was the slam-dunk solution to your pain,” he said, “I’d tell you to stay on it. But it's not enough to justify the trade-off to your mental health.”
My neurologist—the one who prescribed me the shot—agrees that I should stop, but I haven’t, and I still have some refills to use. I told him I would try to taper off slowly, but that hasn’t happened yet either. There’s always the voice in my head that asks, What’s one more week of living in this body? How much damage could I be doing? I tell myself I’m waiting to see if it helps with the migraines. The truth is, I’m scared of what might happen when I go off of it—scared of wanting again, of needing, of being hungry in any sense of the word. At the same time, I’m scared of who I’m becoming while I stay on it and of the rich contours of life that I’m turning away from. Lately, my days have begun to feel like I’m moving through a simulation.
Every morning, I wake up and scan my body. Is it a whisper today, or a scream? It’s hard to tell what part of me is speaking: the migraines, the food noise, the appetite, or the old rules I once lived by. They all register the same language now—urgency without context, need without a clear source.
The GLP-1 quieted one kind of pain, but it revived another—the familiar logic of an eating disorder I thought I’d outgrown. And in that stillness, I hear something I can’t medicate away. Like a ringing in the ears, there’s now a constant battle of a body still trying to negotiate with itself—not to be something smaller, or less hungry, or even pain-free, but for its very right to exist.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, help is available. You can contact the Alliance for Eating Disorders' fully-staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235 or visit their website for additional support.
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