Saw the photo-in-memories thread and I’m not pushing back on the feeling, it’s real and earned. But one line keeps snagging me as a hypothesis worth splitting: “years of being at rock bottom without even realizing it.” The not-realizing part is interesting. The default read is that the emotional shift is downstream of the visible change plus social feedback. You look different, people respond, the mirror stops being an enemy. Fine. But that’s one mechanism wearing the label “I feel like myself again.” The second one I can’t rule out: GLP-1 receptors sit in reward and affect circuitry, not just the gut. So some of the “I finally see how bad it was” could be a direct CNS effect on mood and interoception, running partly independent of the kilos. Two different curves that happen to move together. What would separate them? Someone whose mood lifted before meaningful weight came off, or maintenance folks whose affect tracks dose timing more than body comp. That’s a within-person pattern, hard to eyeball from a single photo. Fwiw I log mood daily and the dark-mode chart colors actually read without straining, which matters when you’re squinting at trend lines at night. Anyone notice affect moving ahead of the scale?