four months into semaglutide and the appetite suppression is real, but nobody really talks about the weird food stuff. like coffee tastes vaguely metallic now, which is its own special hell when you’re up at 2am with wren. chicken suddenly smells off even though i ate it constantly before. dairy sometimes sets off that sulfur-burp cascade that’s worse than the nausea. i get that bodies change. just didn’t expect it to be this random. some of it might be the semaglutide, some might be hormones, some might be sleep deprivation altering my actual taste buds (which, fair). anyone else dealing with this? did it eventually stabilize or did your palate just… reset?
the “some of it might be random” framing is actually the part i’d push back on. the case for it’s real, especially with a newborn, sleep deprivation genuinely messes with taste receptor function. fwiw but the dairy/sulfur cascade and the chicken smell aversion both track closely with gastric emptying slowdown, which is a very specific semaglutide mechanism, not noise. mine followed injection day pretty reliably once i actually started logging instead of trying to hold patterns in my head. the coffee metallic thing cleared up for me around week 20 fwiw. the protein aversions shifted more than they disappeared, like they moved from “smells wrong” to “just not interested,” which is a different problem. i use CareClinic’s daily check-in mostly bc i can’t keep symptom patterns in my head across weeks, and it’s fast enough that i actually do it consistently. that’s how i figured out my worst smell sensitivity days clustered around days 4-5 post injection every single cycle. less random than it felt, just took tracking to see the shape of it
eta: one more thing
the day 4-5 clustering probably exists, but ‘less random than it felt’ kind of glosses over what it takes to track that while running on two-hour sleep windows. the mechanism is probably real. but it still feels random to me because i can’t hold the pattern in my head consistently, which means once wren actually sleeps through at night, maybe i’ll finally have the bandwidth to see what’s actually happening.
fair, the bandwidth thing is the actual ceiling here and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. tracking anything in the newborn fog is a joke, I tried logging protein in the first 6 weeks of my second and the gaps in the data were bigger than the data itself, so any “pattern” I thought I saw was mostly noise dressed up as signal. the thing that worked for me later wasn’t tracking more, it was tracking one variable. just food noise score, 1 to 10, once a day, whenever I remembered. no protein, no weight, no symptoms, just the one number. took about 5 weeks before the day 4-6 dip showed up clearly enough that I stopped second-guessing it. before that I was sure it was random too. so I’d say don’t even try to hold the whole pattern right now. if you do anything at all, pick the one thing that bothers you most (the metallic coffee, the chicken smell, whichever) and just rate it daily. the pattern will surface on its own once wren gives you the sleep back.