START HERE: With Mounjaro into a new era

Where I am coming from

I am a 47 year old male, weighing in at 122 kg at 180cm height a week ago. I’ve been overweight for most of my life, starting at my teenage years and slowly and steadily gaining more. I had some dietary and training successes over the years (for example with intermittent fasting or ketogenic diet), losing quite substantial weight but also gaining it back afterwards.

Since I have a pretty sedentary job as a company founder and CEO and stress and workload continually rising over the years, I didn’t only gain weight, I also noticed a slow but steady decline in mobility and the rise of some health issues (high blood pressure, back pain, knee pain, …) - and decided to act against that.

A word on self improvement

I’m not one of the people who just advocate using weightloss drugs to combat weight. I’m fully aware that without a lifestyle change and habit breaking, the chances to either gain back the weight quickly after going off of Mounjaro or having to inject a drug every week for the rest of one’s life are 100%.

That’s not what I am for. I want to live free without the need for a (at least in my country pretty costly) medication I have to stick to for the rest of my life.

That’s where self improvement and selfcare factor in.

Long ago, I started to learn about these concepts and incorporated them into my life, especially

mindset
habit breaking & implementation
meditation
introspection
visualization
gratitude
tracking & analysis of body metrics
stress relief (e.g. breathwork)
excercise (walking mostly at the moment)
and more

I can’t stress enough how important the mindset factor is - without it, all is lost. Because without the right mindset and right “self programming”, I’m sure I’d slide back into my old habits (and weight) easily again - and that’s what my priority #1 is to prevent.

Prep work for working with Mounjaro

Before jumping into this head-first, I had an “Aha” moment when I saw a video on YouTube on Mounjaro and how it is better suited for weight loss than Wegovy or Ozempic (sorry, didn’t think of saving the link but there are plenty of videos on this on YT).

That sparked my interest and I decided to look into the matter, how it works, what it does, what the effects (and side effects - more on that later) are etc. - and decided to think about it.

That was about a month and a half ago. In that time, I watched a ton of stuff on the internet, checked with various sources like blogs and medical studies etc. and had AI create a full report on everything for me, custom-tailored to my mental, physical, economical and overall situation.

If you want the prompts and how I went about it with AI, drop me a line at email@mounjaroblog.com and I’ll set you up so can do your own research!

The masterplan

Moving on from this, I created a custom-tailored plan for me to follow on a one year journey with Mounjaro. This basically incorporates:

Phase 1 (starting weight -> 99kg)

slowly ramp up from 2.5mg Mounjaro to a suitable dose (if necessary at all)
switch nutritional patterns away from carbs + sugar towards protein-first
focus on portion size control and mindset
reestablishing a calorie / nutrient tracking protocol that I’d also stick to
ramp up walking from less than 8,000 to a steady 10,000+ steps every day
towards the end of the phase slowly start to incorporate resistance & cardio fitness training

Phase 2 (99kg -> ~85kg)

ramp up resistance training
ramp up cardio fitness
towards the end of the phase when nearing ideal weight start tapering off of Mounjaro slowly towards 2.5mg

Phase 3 (maintenance; life-long)

keep the established (doable) workout / fitness routines
stick with good nutritional patterns
come off of Mounjaro entirely (if suitable / possible)

Managing expectations

During my research, I quickly learned that a lof of folks on Mounjaro (or MJ) have expectation issues:

Expectation	Reality
Drop weight immediately regardless of dietary habits	Not gonna happen, MJ needs time AND habit changes to be successful with it long term
Drop a lot of weight consistently	It seems that like with every solid diet(ary change), you might lose a big chunk initially but then fall back onto a steady weight loss of around 1% of your bodyweight throughout your journey
Mounjaro (or Wegovy or Ozempic) are an effortless quick fix	Many “haters” postulate that this is the “miracle drug” for lazy fat people - wrong. If you don’t change, implement workout routines and change your diet, bad things will follow
I can jab once a week and then hit McD, BK or the next best fast food joint every day for my fix	Nope. Unless one might get away with that weight loss wise, it’s simply not sustainable and healthy and will lead to consequences.

The check-in framework

Using my AI agent, I devised a check-in framework that has me check-in with it every day, answer 5 quick questions and thus be forced to keep accountable and consistent. I also use the app “Macros” (download here, no affiliation) to track the stuff I eat. This helps me stay under my 1,500 cals goal and have an eye on my key macros like protein, fats, carbohydrates etc.

For tracking my walking I use “Pedometer++” (download here, no affiliation) which is pretty awesome because - among other things - it offsets steps tracked with my Apple watch so they don’t get tracked twice.

Lastly, I started this blog to keep accountable as well as inform and help other folks with deciding on wether they want to go on their own MJ journey and provide them with as many clues as possible to make an informed decision.

Off we go!

So this concludes this rather lengthy introductional post, I’ll soon follow up with a week 1 recap as well as more info on my initial metrics, the process and who knows what ;)

Thanks for reading!