After Five: Brittany Rose GLP1
“Ultimately, I’m enjoying living life, not being the fat friend, not being focused on diet culture, not being focused on weight loss, chasing a number on the scale.” ~ Brittany Rose GLP1Welcome to After Five, a new series on Dinner Party on a GLP-1. Each episode, I ask the creators shaping GLP-1 culture five questions about life in maintenance.My first guest is Brittany from Brittany Rose GLP1. She’s known for her honest takes and interviews with people living real life on a GLP-1. I’ve been a guest on her show, so I know firsthand how easy she is to open up to. Now I get to turn the questions around.Intro:This is After Five with me, Suzy Chase, where I ask the creators shaping GLP-1 culture, five questions about life and maintenance. Since it’s my first episode of this series, I wanted to have a guest on who I think is making waves in the GLP-1 community with her honest takes, her interesting interviews, her gift for turning real life on a GLP-1 into real conversation, and her way of making guests feel so comfortable they open right up. I know because I’ve been one of them. Five questions. Let’s go!Brittany Rose:I’m Brittany from Britney Rose GLP-1, and this is my After Five.Suzy Chase:Welcome to my new segment called After Five, five questions about life after weight loss. Okay, number one, when you were actively losing weight, what did you think maintenance was going to look like and what turned out to be completely different once you got there?Brittany Rose:I’m going to be real honest with you, Suzy. When I was actively losing weight, I was not thinking about maintenance. I am habitually a person who deals with the now and doesn’t look too much into the future. The jury is still out, if that is a good trait or not, my husband says, but there is one thing I’ll say about this. When I did get to a point in my journey where I just knew that it was going to work, I just knew that this was going to be a forever thing. I’d have moments where fear of regain crept in, of course, I’m a human, but for the most part, I knew that this was different and I knew that I was never going to weigh 255 pounds again. I just kind of approached it as like, this is going to work. It has to work.I will not weigh 255 again. And so I had no idea what maintenance was going to look like. I took it as it came.Suzy Chase:Okay, number two. This one is about your goal weight. Now, was there a moment when you realized, okay, I’m not trying to lose any more weight? Was it easy to stop focusing on a lower number or did that take some work mentally?Brittany Rose:This is a loaded question because it goes a lot into mental health and all of the various ways that GLP-1s affect us. I did get to a point where I realized that my number one goal wasn’t to lose any more weight, and it’s like a switch that just happened. One day I woke up and I looked in the mirror and I liked what I saw. And so I decided in my brain that my weight loss was done, but that’s not what my body decided to do. And I actually went on to lose another 35 pounds beyond what I picked as my goal weight.Suzy Chase:Wow.Brittany Rose:Yeah. I stopped around 180, which I know a lot of people would say that was still too much, but again, I felt good there. I liked what I saw when I looked in the mirror and I now weigh between 140 and 145. So that kind of goes back to question number one too, where with maintenance, I didn’t have a hard shift from weight loss to maintenance because I was already accepting in my body and I just let it do what it wanted to do or what it needed to do, which I think is a really important aspect to mention when talking about that shift from weight loss to maintenance, that on these medications when specifically taking GLP-1s, your body is going to do what it needs to do to be healthy, not necessarily what you decide it should do. Does that make sense? So our brain’s goal weight and your body’s ideal weight can be two totally different things.Now, I don’t ever think that I was honestly chasing a super low number. So to that part of the question, I think I would say no, it wasn’t hard for me. I just wanted to be healthy for my kids and live a long life and hopefully that’s what I’ve achieved.Suzy Chase:And I think you started before I did, we didn’t really even know about these drugs, so we just started taking them and let’s see where this goes kind of thing.Brittany Rose:Right, right. I talked about this in a live I did yesterday. People ask me about hair loss and muscle loss and did I worry about these things when I was losing weight? And my answer was no, because nobody knew about any of these things. Nobody was talking about them. I didn’t have to worry about that. And I think that it’s much more difficult mentally now to start on a GLP-1 than it was in 2022 because we didn’t have all the noise, all the people telling us how to do it correctly.Suzy Chase:We were clueless.Brittany Rose:We were clueless. And I am glad that I was because I’m not sure that I would start. I think it would be a much bigger decision for me now than it was back then.Suzy Chase:Now that weigh loss isn’t the goal anymore, what’s your goal or goals in maintenance?Brittany Rose:Interesting. So I would love to tone up. I mean, will I actually follow through with that? Who knows? I say all the time, literally weekly, that I’m going to start lifting weights and I still have yet to do that for four years into a weight loss journey. Although I am wearing my weighted vest more, so I feel like that counts for something.Suzy Chase:You just got to have your vest. How much does that weigh?Brittany Rose:So the vest that I’m currently wearing is 16 pounds.Suzy Chase:Does that hurt your neck?Brittany Rose:No. So it’s like sand, I think is what is in it. That’s what it feels like is sand. And it’s pretty well dispersed all over the entire vest.Suzy Chase:So it hurts all over. No, I’m kidding.Brittany Rose:No. I feel pretty good in it. I was using a 12 and I just recently went up to a 16 and you can get them as much as like 50 pounds. Now I will say that carrying around 16 pounds, two days ago was the first time I used that one. I was like, how did I use to walk around with 115 extra pounds? It was a bit of a shock to me, but I would love to tone up. Who knows if I’ll do that.And my main goal, honestly, is to remain in this head space, to keep myself in the space where I’m not being pulled back into that diet mentality that I feel like is such a slippery slope right now.Even in the world of GLP-1s, I know you see it. There’s been a lot of crossover and one of my main goals for myself and for my community is to totally separate the two. And so if I could pick one goal in maintenance, it would be like I want to keep this head space that I’m in currently and protect the peace.Suzy Chase:Amen.Brittany Rose:Amen.Suzy Chase:So number four, you’ve talked to so many people in the GLP-1 community. What conversations about GLP-1 maintenance do you wish more people were having?Brittany Rose:Easily the biggest struggle that people are talking about is dealing with the increased in cravings and hunger that comes when switching over from weight loss to maintenance. I don’t think that anybody’s expecting that shift. Were you going to say something?Suzy Chase:That’s shocking to me. I didn’t think you were going to say that because for me personally in maintenance, I feel like I have a different relationship with food. So the cravings aren’t really there. That’s so fascinating.Brittany Rose:Yeah. I hear a lot about... I mean probably two times a day I get an email that is somebody saying, “I’ve hit my goal weight, but I’m so hungry or I’m on 15 milligrams and I’m just so hungry and I don’t know what to do about it.” I think this needs to be discussed more because the shift that happens obviously is when you go from weight loss to maintenance, you’re eating more calories or you should be because your body is trying to keep you steady, you don’t need to b… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit suzychase.substack.com
