Woman reveals brutal reality of going 'cold turkey' from Mounjaro - and others on the jab seriously relate
Freya, who is in her mid-twenties, shared a good-humoured clip of herself delightedly digging into a stacked cheeseburger.
She wrote: 'Take this as a sign to NEVER go cold turkey from Mounjaro.
'I would have done very sinister things for this burger.
'My hunger is out of control, I want to punch everyone who is not food in the face.'
Freya explained in the comments of her post that she had been forced to skip a dose because she was waiting for her next injector pen to be delivered.
'Having issues with getting my next dosage which is the only reason I'm cold turkey right now, it's not by choice as I think drastically dropping is far too risky for weight gain,' she told one follower, telling another she was on a 'high dose'.
Freya's funny video really landed well with other TikTokkers, and it wasn't long before scores of jabbers were replying to Freya, who posts under @freyatheblondieee, in their droves, sharing how they had got on with the return of 'food noise'.
Food noise is the term given to the near-constant stream of thoughts about eating which some people are unable to 'switch off'—or ignore—triggering them to binge on calorie dense but low nutrient foods.
Some of the anecdotes shared by Freya's 12,000 followers were really quite eye-opening.
One wrote: 'Mate I gained three stone in six months after I stopped it. Went Turkey had the [gastric] balloon.'
Others said, 'The hunger that comes after it awful, I've put a stone on in six weeks. Waste of money'; and 'I forgot to order my jab in time and was a literal feral person. This has made me laugh so much but equally terrified to come off.'
However, others pointed out that medicines like Mounjaro aren't meant to be a permanent crutch but a tool to help learn healthier habits.
One follower shared a very inspiring story, writing: 'I was absolutely starving when I came off it, took so much willpower for a couple of weeks and now I'm off Mounjaro and eating exactly like I was when taking it. Lost three stone with it and about another two stone since stopping it, so you just gotta have willpower till the hunger passes!'
Another said: 'Been off it three days and I'm already deffo eating more. But this is where willpower will come in. I'll never be the 26 stone that I was last year.'
Medics advise that people looking to come off of Mounjaro or other similar jabs—whether because they have reached their goal weight or another reason—should gradually taper off the medicine under their doctor or prescriber's supervision, taking a lower dosage over time.
Professor Giles Yeo, a geneticist at Cambridge University and an expert in obesity and the brain's control of food intake and body weight, previously explained the science behind food noise to the Daily Mail.
He said: 'Food noise is a manifestation of appetite and appetite is rather complex. I like to conceptualise it as a triangle.
'Appetite sits in the centre and the three points are: hunger, fullness and reward. All three talk to each other but use different parts of the brain. If you tug on any points of that triangle, you're going to change its shape.
'If you are really hungry, then the simplest foods – bread, rice, cheese – are going to taste delicious and will be enough to trigger the reward element in the brain.
'But if you're really full, then the food will need to have a seriously high reward element for you to want it, and that's going to be something sugary or fatty. This is a phenomenon known as the "dessert stomach".'
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