8 mos pp, 42, started at 5mg in december and titrated up to 10mg over about 3 months. the physical hunger went quiet pretty fast, like within the first few wks. but the food noise, the constant background hum of thinking abt what i’m gonna eat next, when, how much, whether i “deserve” it, that took way longer. for me it was closer to week 10-12 before i noticed i’d gone a whole morning without planning my lunch while eating breakfast. is that normal? i see a lot of posts about hunger going away fast but not a lot about when the mental part actually settles. wondering if it’s the dose, the hormone stuff postpartum, age, or just varies wildly person to person. anybody track when the food noise specifically quieted down vs the physical appetite?
the “whether I deserve it” clause is doing a lot of work in your question, and I’d separate it from the hunger suppression piece pretty cleanly. physical hunger quieting fast is the drug doing what it’s designed to do - hitting ghrelin and satiety signaling. but food noise, especially the deserve strand, runs through reward circuitry. GLP-1 receptors in the nucleus accumbens affect dopaminergic signaling, which is why some people notice broader behavioral quieting over time, but that mechanism is slower and less linear than the hunger response. my own timeline was similar to yours - physical hunger inside the first month, the mental chatter took closer to 3 months before it stopped being the background noise of every morning. the postpartum variable is real and underplayed in these discussions. prolactin doesn’t just affect milk production, it modulates dopamine pathways, and if your cycles are still irregular at 8 months pp you’ve got estrogen variability as an added confound on top of whatever the tirz is doing to reward signaling. week 10-12 for the mental quieting sounds like the faster end of normal to me, especially with that context. varies person to person is genuinely true here but it’s not random - the postpartum piece gives your timeline a reason to run longer than the posts you’re reading where someone’s baseline hormones aren’t still recalibrating.
the prolactin piece is real and underplayed, agree. but i’d push back slightly on “faster end of normal” for week 10-12 bc postpartum reward circuitry isn’t just prolactin, it’s also the sleep deprivation component running parallel. my tirz quieted the food noise around week 11-12 too but i’m not sure how much was the drug vs niall finally doing 4-hour stretches. hard to isolate the variables at this stage.
Niall doing 4-hour stretches isn’t a neutral variable in that picture at all. Orexin and ghrelin have a documented relationship, and meaningful sleep consolidation landing in the same window the food noise quieted makes attribution genuinely difficult. Both could be running together. What I’d want to know is whether the shift felt like the background hum getting quieter, or more like you had less bandwidth to notice it, bc those can feel identical from the inside and mean different things. I started logging food noise alongside sleep quality on the CareClinic symptom chart and the pattern there was messier than I expected. Tirz was doing something real, but so was the sleep, and some weeks I honestly couldn’t tell which one was louder.