Liquid Willpower
No shortcuts to humanity
“The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” — John 10:10
"Everything in moderation, including moderation" — Mark Twain
"The thing that matters is not what tasks God has set us, but that God has set us tasks." — G.K. Chesterton
"What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God." — Hans urs von Balthasar
When I was 36, just before my third child was born, I had my first real health scare.
I went to a physical therapist for some back pain. I had been lifting heavy in the gym, focused on powerlifting, and had some persistent muscle pain which turned out to be the rhomboid muscle. But the physical therapist did two other things. The first was he weighed me, and the scale read 276. I've always been a big guy but not that big. You wouldn't have guessed I weighed 276 - think linebacker not offensive lineman. But over a few years of stress and work and life, it had crept up from my normal-for-me 240.
The second thing he did was take my resting blood pressure. It read 170/115.
He said, "Now I think this is probably wrong, it's a wrist monitor, but you should still get it checked again because that's really high." On the way home I went to a CVS and used the monitor there.
It wasn't wrong.
So started a wakeup call that included an EKG, an echo, a diagnosis of essential hypertension and a combination of BP drugs and statins. Happily, my heart was perfectly fine aside from the blood pressure. But it still freaked me out.
After all the tests said there were no acute concerns, my cardiologist, a spry and fit 70 year old who saw my anxiety, finished the last appointment with some wisdom. "Listen," he said, "you’re going to live a long life and play with lots of grandchildren. You’re just an adult now and you’re not invincible anymore.”
I wasn't invincible. So I set about adulting. I went on a ketogenic diet and dropped 36 pounds in about 13 weeks.
Sometime well after this transformation had begun, I was at my favorite Saturday breakfast spot during Lent, ritually eating my eggs and bacon (very keto) while watching an older guy sit outside ritually eating his Saturday breakfast. I’d seen him before, but had never really noticed him. He was probably 65, way overweight, chain-smoking cigarettes with shaky hands while inhaling black coffee and a chocolate donut. He was feigning interest in the sports section, but he couldn’t seem to maintain his concentration in between puffing, slurping and chomping.
A one word description of the scene popped into my head: this scene was morbid. That word connotes death, and I felt like I was literally watching someone actively kill themselves. It finally clicked in my head why the medical field had chosen the term “morbid obesity”. It means you are actively killing yourself through food. It’s not the fault of the donut. It’s the context and responsibility around the donut that can make it either a fun treat or a deadly habit.
Since then, I’ve paid closer attention to all sorts of people in public and the decisions they make about what they eat and how they move. It’s become very clear to me that the everyday decisions we make all the time, each one, can either bring us a fuller life or take us closer to death. I’m sure that seems extreme, but that’s why it’s so frightening. Eating a delicious pizza once a month is a feast. Eating a whole pizza every day is fucking morbid. It’s a very slow, gradual process and so we don’t notice it everyday. But it adds up over time and these habits become part of the building materials of our life.
Sometimes we build prisons.
We build prisons for ourselves from the oddest materials. We build them from habits we must keep daily. We build them out of our parent’s expectations and pets that we can’t leave and foods that we must eat. Some people build prisons out of their own bodies. Some make prisons, oddly, by surrounding themselves only with knobs and dials they can turn and control. Some prisons are made from office politics and paid leave limits. Some are built out of loss and some out of schedule.
We all do this. I have a prison of my own, specially constructed for me, by me, and surrounded by a concertina wire of the very best intentions. I try to escape it as much as I can.
The work of escaping it, in fact, is the entire spiritual landscape of humanity.
It's been 8 years since that first freak out. The bars and walls of my prison that were made of too much adipose tissue and mediocrity had been built slowly from laziness and habits and decisions. What's built over time is strong. Meaningful escapes take time. I was able to blow up some walls quickly, but to stop living in the ever-present shadow of that prison meant more building using different materials. They require a reimagining of self.
I've kept most of that weight off. My diet and training has ebbed and flowed, but I've stayed in really good shape for the past eight years. I've always been goal-oriented, setting athletic achievements as markers each year — from fast running records to strength targets in the gym.
I'm athletic but I'm still a big guy. On medical charts I technically hover around the cutoff for "obese," though you wouldn't think it. Linebackers are built different. I'm not someone who is deeply destroying their metabolism. I don't have a hundred pounds to lose.
But weight has always been on my mind as an adult, because I've felt perpetually on the verge of being in very good shape. On the edge of something more.
And as you age, extra weight punishes your joints and your organs. The best your body will ever be is now.
I'll be 45 this year. That's young enough to do nearly everything I've always done, even if I feel a twinge in my hip and get breathless more quickly. But that breathlessness means I'm old enough to make sure I set myself up properly for the next few decades, if I want them to be good ones.
I want them to be good ones.
So this year I set a different goal related to weight: Visible abs. I haven't had those since my very early twenties. It's pretty rare to see. And it's teetering on the edge of absurd for a 45 year old 200 plus pound guy.
Look, I don't want to get bodybuilder lean and hop on a stage. I just want to stop giving a shit what the BMI chart says. Stop balancing on the edge I've built up in my own brain between "in shape" and "out of shape". I want to turn and walk away from that edge and not visit anymore.
Why do I want this? Certainly there is a part of me that looks at my own body and wonders at the miracle of it. Every body is capable of different things. God made them all and I honor Him by showing what mine is capable of. I have memories as a kid of laughing at the sheer delight of running and I remember athletic performances that felt as much like prayer as anything else. They weren't world class, but they were still gifts my body could give back to God. As Eric Liddell said, "God made me fast and when I run, I feel God's pleasure."
But is there vanity? Yes, there is vanity. I want to be hot. Not just for my wife. Or myself. The goal-oriented are oppressed by mimesis more than anyone — we don't just want what others have; we want what they want, even if they don't have it. I want to be impressive. To achieve. To walk down the beach shirtless and carefree and let others stare. I want to do what few can.
Why do I want this? There is a little devil that sits in a corner of my mind that says, "you're not good enough." I want to shut that little shit up. His constant call is the cruelest warden of my prison. He is the interior echo of the mimesis I feel around others — a voice that compares and measures and constantly finds me wanting. And the Chinese water torture of his chattering is exhausting. He has worn me down and I became tired of the long game. Of trying for daily discipline even though I frequently failed. I just wanted the end, and freedom from the constant grind of shortcoming. I wanted proof — visible proof — that I had strangled that devil and transcended the walls of my prison. The end was what was important, regardless of the means.
So being the engineer I am, I worked backwards. I calculated the weight I'd need to hit to have abs and the number was further away than I wanted to admit, especially after a season of holiday feasting.
I really wanted to make a change this year. Because I was tired of worrying about whether my weight was good or not. Because I was tired of feeling imprisoned. Because of vanity. Because I wanted to be more of what I could be when God created me. But perhaps most of all, because I see my kids growing up and I want to run around with my grandkids.
The reasons piled up and led me to a by-any-means necessary approach. And there's this new wunderdrug that everyone is talking about called a GLP-1. It works miracles straight from the mouths of gila monsters to your waist line. I started doing research, learning about how the drug works and the side effects that can affect some people. I talked to my wife about it. I talked to a few close friends about it.
The responses I got were interesting. One friend, who is overly rational and logical like me, said yes of course: use every tool available to achieve your goal. My wife had a very different perspective. She warned me of a more spiritual concern. I'm not morbidly obese, so she wondered why the ends justified the means. She worried why I was doing it and whether I would be satisfied unless I did it myself.
I followed the advice I wanted to hear.
In the middle of January I received the first dosage of tirzepatide, the generic name of Mounjaro you can get from a compounding pharmacy. It was $300 a month and it came in a tiny glass vial I could close in my fist.
I had never injected myself before so being an infinitely confident man, I wisely waited until my wife had left to take the kids to school (she's a nurse by the way), read the instructions, filled up a syringe and stuck it in my belly.
With 4 times the starting dose.
Let's talk about those instructions again. They say "10 mg per 100 mL". Then somewhere else very much not obvious at all, they say 25 units. I read one and not the other. This is what you get from a compounding pharmacy. Mounjaro comes pre-filled and ready to go, no thinking required.
So after a couple of frantic phone calls to my PCP (who wasn't immediately available), to my doctor friend (who laughed and said I might have a couple of rough days), and finally to my wife (who reminded me I am not always a wise man), I decided I wasn't going to suddenly die. Then I laughed and resigned myself to a couple of rough days.
Which didn't come. At least not immediately.
The first day I felt the same. I was cognizant of what I ate, but that was from the experience of injecting myself with a drug rather than the effect.
The second day I was less hungry. The third morning I puked in the toilet.
Not violently. Not relentlessly. In fact, it was the most casual vomit I've ever had, if casual can be used as an adjective for vomiting. More like moseying to the bathroom to relieve myself before heading to the car to drive to work. The rest of the day passed uneventfully, except that I was less hungry.
After a few more normal days, my stress over the dosage waned and I began to relax and enjoy my new routine. Eating 1800 calories or less was suddenly not only possible, but easy. My days were breezy and busy, filled with things other than worrying about food except when it seemed socially correct to munch. My meals became mechanical. Boring. At some points, it actually felt hard. As in, "I don't really want to eat this right now, in fact I find cheese disgusting in a novel sort of way, but I guess I'll force it down because I should have more than 300 calories today."
The world seemed bright.
I went through two more weekly doses of tirzepatide before the bottom dropped out. I had lost 6 pounds in just three weeks, and the whole process seemed easily sustainable. I continued working out 3-4 days a week, focused on weight training. I was highly focused on protein intake too, because I wanted to make sure that whatever weight I lost was fat not muscle. Being strong is a part of my identity.
On the way home from a workout my stomach decided to begin its revolt. A little queasiness dictated a path straight to the bathroom. But I didn't feel better at all, and 10 minutes later I was right back in there. Thus began five days of hell.
At first I thought it was food poisoning — it had the same kind of violence, but then it just kept going. I couldn't eat anything, and if I tried, it came out one way or another within a couple of hours. By day 3 I was adding electrolytes to my water just to get something in my body. By day 4 I was convinced something more dramatic was wrong and wondering if I should go to the hospital. My stomach was constantly sore and felt rigid, as if I had swallowed a pound of concrete and let it set. I slept 15 hours straight. TWICE.
Day 5 found me lying in front of the toilet crying. My ribs hurt. My stomach still hurt. My throat hurt. My head hurt. My pride hurt. Other things hurt too. I was dehydrated. I was desperate for this to end.
At this point, I received my single dose of consolation from my wife who, as a nurse, was not known for an overly compassionate bedside manner. While I was trying to pick myself up off the floor, she came in to make sure I was not dying, gave me a quick pat on the back and a "there, there", and then rushed off to do something with the kids again.
This was the practiced detachment of an excellent nurse, not cruelty. While I was sleeping or puking, she had done more research. She had investigated the side effects, she knew tirzepatide could be worse than semiglutide, she knew that the stomach cramps and diarrhea and vomiting could be extreme in 20% of the cases, she knew this happened especially when dosages were high or increased quickly. She saw this coming and had already moved past sympathy. More than that though, she knew I was not desperately unhealthy and morbidly overweight. She knew this was a tool. A desire to change, not a need to change.
And so she knew I did this to myself.
And she was right. Whether it was for vanity or as genuine longterm improvement to my life is a jumbled up mess of questions I'm still working out. But she was right about one thing: I am far more satisfied doing this myself than I would be having it done for me.
Here's what upsets me the most: I used my agency to give up my willpower. This realization hit me harder than any physical side effect. In trying to find a quick fix for my body, I had traded one kind of prison for another, this one with walls built from the surrender of will — the very thing that makes freedom meaningful. Our humanity is tied to our ability to struggle, to feel, to exercise discipline, to fail at it, to stand up again after falling, to be locked constantly in between angels and demons. The middle ground is our battlefield. And we are called to wrestle and brawl and tear ourselves apart if need be, not to shuffle around under sedation.
Before my ordeal, I had lost about 6 pounds in 3 weeks on a GLP-1. In that single span of 5 days, I lost 14 pounds.
It's been a bit over a month since that horrible weekend. Once I started eating again I regained 10 of those pounds. I'm still above the weight I had dropped to. But I'm also a lot stronger. I'm carrying more muscle. I'm working out 4-5 days a week, hard. I feel good.
And I'm enjoying food again. I fucking love food. I love the taste and the smell. I love homemade pizza and chocolate and protein shakes and bananas and asparagus. And bacon. Bacon is the best. I love a cocktail at 5pm to unwind before dinner. I love a chai tea to wake up in the morning. Our relationship with food and drink is part of how we interact with the rest of the world just as much as our relationships with other people or our activities or our passions.
This relationship can go awry sometimes. It can become an addiction and an evil in our lives and lead us to weigh 400 lbs or need 3 drinks just to make it to the end of the work day. These things can become morbid and our modern food systems and processed food factories make it nigh impossible to societally maintain the light and easy metabolic health we once had. But if we end up sliding down a path towards morbidity, a magic pill or shot isn't going to be the only solution we need. These medications don't just affect our bodies based on the food we do or don't eat. They alter our relationship with struggle itself. They diminish our will.
What we need is to recapture our humanity, and a big part of that is agency.
A GLP-1 — as best I understand it from a medical perspective — is a vial of liquid willpower. It doesn't just make people lose weight. It also stops drunks from needing a drink, and workaholics from working until 10 each night, and gamblers from placing another bet.
This is not medical advice. If you are morbidly obese, or morbid anything, use all means necessary to get yourself physically healthy. But do not think this is the end of your journey. Like many of the travails of our material existence, the real problems lie inward at a spiritual depth that cannot be resolved with a medication.
After trying it, I think it's better to think of this wunderdrug as a vial of apathy. The world promises you liquid willpower. What you get is her evil bitch sister, apathy.
Exercising willpower requires agency. It is the ability to maintain a certain level of pain, interpreted as discipline, to achieve a given end. It requires achievement and provides soulful fulfillment that we humans interpret as joy. GLP-1s take our willpower away. Freedom requires the possibility — the capacity — to fail, so these drugs starve us of our participation in both the feasts and the famine. They replace it with less feeling and less discipline. They are a bandaid on a spiritual blackhole. At the end of a course of GLP-1 drugs you may be skinny, but you will be no less vacuous.
This is the reason that people who go off GLP-1s after losing weight beyond their wildest dreams end up gaining it all back. Too often, they've learned nothing. They take the shot and don't do any of the needed work to think about habits and agency and moderation. Apathy will not make you more human. Apathy will make it harder to feel human. It will make you fearful of revelry, of feasting, of fullness. The bandaid gets torn off and the addiction underneath hasn't been turned into joy; it remains the same empty and urgent and morbid desire it was before.
My tirzepatide battle was one duel at the front lines of humanity's diminishment. We now have technological competition in two magisterium that have been our sole dominion throughout history. The first front is intelligence and creativity — now challenged by AI. The second is agency and will. The more powerful our technology becomes, the more it changes our humanity. We must decide whether tech crowds out the possibility of redemption, or enhances it.
The front line of the second battlefield is GLP-1 drugs. When you see a person who ate their way to 400 pounds, there are two problems that need solving. One is physical. The other is spiritual. Drugs can help us with the first but they cannot help us spiritually. They cannot fill the void that created the hunger in the first place.
The spiritual landscape of humanity is found in the engagement with struggle and its relationship with fulfillment. The season of Lent is intended as a desert for us to wander through for forty days. It is valuable not just because discipline and the purification of appetite are goods in themselves, but because the contrast makes the feast of Easter that much sweeter. Without the desert, the oasis loses its meaning. Without struggle, victory has no sweetness.
I am not perfect. I am remarkably imperfect. And yet I crave these imperfections. I cherish them as the potential for future sanctity. I know some will remain unrealized — as a fallen creature, perfection is not something I can obtain. And yet God calls me to seek it, to find it, to will it with whatever my being can withstand.
I only spent 3 weeks on tirzepatide. It was long enough for me. I want the daily pain and toil and struggle of working to be a better human, even if the demon sometimes remains on my shoulder. Even if I never reach what I'm capable of. Struggles aren't an obstacle to our humanity — they are its very substance. Our agency and our will, our intelligence and our creativity, these are the tools given to us to mark the boundaries of our humanity. They drive us towards God and what His vision intended us to be.
I want the feasts and the famine both. I want to feel them. To exercise my discipline. To practice my humanity even if the world offers technological shortcuts around it.
The path to becoming more human isn't in diminishing our struggles but in living them fully and willingly.
