Who is Erica?

Every weight loss story ends at the after photo.

Mine kept going, and the part that came after was harder than anything before it.

I had weight loss surgery in December 2009 at 399 pounds. The first two years the weight fell off. Then it stopped, and I spent years figuring out why on my own, because by then my surgical team had discharged me and every guide I could find was written for somebody in month three.

I’m 149 now. Sixteen years out, on a GLP-1 and hormone therapy, lifting four days a week.

Between those two numbers there was a divorce, forty pounds back on, menopause that took my joints and my focus and probably my job, and a long stretch where nobody was watching and I had to build something to stand on.

This letter is about that stretch. The years after.

What actually changes in a body over a decade. What the research says about muscle and medication and menopause, as opposed to what gets repeated in comment sections. How to read your own numbers instead of drowning in them.

I spent twenty years building data systems for a living, the kind that take a dozen contradictory inputs and turn them into one decision somebody can act on.

Somewhere in here I stopped waiting for someone to hand me a plan and pointed that at myself.

It’s free, it comes out weekly(ish), and it’s written for women years out from surgery, on a GLP-1, or somewhere in menopause, who did the hard thing and found themselves with a body that stopped responding and nobody left to ask.

Let me give my disclaimer, I AM NOT a clinician. I’ll tell you what I take and what worked for me, and I’ll point you to the people who are qualified to tell you what you should do.

— Erica