‘If you’re not plump, you’re not healthy.’ Breaking cultural food norms, 1 injection at a time

When she was growing up, food and a clean plate were the center of everything in Tatiana De La Rosa’s life. “If you ever go visit a Hispanic family, they will feed you until you burst,” she tells Yahoo. “To elder Hispanics, if you’re not plump, you’re not healthy.” But as an adult, nurse and mother of two, De La Rosa knew her weight was not healthy. She was prediabetic and had sciatic pain that made even short walks painful. Severe endometriosis had prompted her to have a hysterectomy in 2023, but the pain and inflammation persisted.

De La Rosa was always thinking about food. She was constantly preoccupied with when she’d eat next and what she’d have, and she spent a lot of time policing these thoughts. She tried countless fad diets and bought into all manner of supplement pyramid schemes. Working out left her with no consequential weight loss, and trying to build strength seemed pointless because she thought, as De La Rosa puts it, I’m fat, who cares?

But a year after starting the weight loss medication tirzepatide, De La Rosa is feeling like an entirely new person. The rigid meal plans and shame have been replaced by a sense of utter “freedom,” she says. Her blood sugar is healthy, her workouts are regular, and even the inflammation that was a hallmark of her endometriosis has subsided — so much so that she’s had to have her wedding ring resized three times as the swelling in her hands disappeared. In this installment of Yahoo’s On My Weigh series, De La Rosa explains in her own words how a weight loss medication has given her “so much more space in my life.”

The weigh-in

Day in the life

Rise and shine

Before, there was no amount of sleep that would wake me up. Back then I still worked in person doing three 12-hour nursing shifts a week in the ICU. I would get up and get my kids ready for school. On the days that I didn’t have a shift, sometimes I would go back to bed once they left. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave bed all day.

I now wake up around 7 a.m., and I’m no longer sluggish. I feel ready for my day. That’s a big change. I admit, I’m still very dependent on coffee, but I used to have two cups in the morning and now I have only one, so that’s a win for me. And there used to be arguments every morning while I was getting the kids ready, but I think that’s improved significantly just because my mood is better.

First bites

Before tirzepatide, I never had breakfast. I wouldn’t eat until maybe noon. I wasn’t fasting; I just didn’t feel hungry. I would go all morning on just coffee.

I now have one cup of coffee in the morning, and add my protein shake to it. This morning, I ate eggs and waffles for breakfast. Other days, I’ll have scrambled eggs with toast or avocado, or sometimes a bagel sandwich. I’m pretty hungry about an hour after I wake up, so I have breakfast around 9:30 or 10 a.m. Now that I’m in maintenance mode, I’m hungry often, but it doesn’t make me panic anymore. I used to tell myself I could only have oatmeal and egg whites and follow all of these unwritten rules about when you’re supposed to eat and make myself wait. But there are no rules!

Get ready with me

I now work from home, so I’m often in sweats and a T-shirt. But I used to just stay in my pajamas. Now that life has shifted and I work remotely Monday through Friday, I do at least get up, get dressed and do my hair. Even though I’m home more, I feel like I’m more put-together than when I would go out before starting tirzepatide. And I don’t try to cover myself anymore, at all. I wear clothes that actually fit me, instead of buying even bigger sizes to try to conceal my body. Now I look forward to buying things for nice events.

Dose time

I’ve tried taking my injection at basically every time imaginable. I don’t think that much about it now; it’s kind of second nature. So typically I’ll do it on a Monday, or if I forget, I’ll do it on a Tuesday. I get absolutely zero side effects, especially now that I’m on a baby dose. But I never did have side effects, really. I do try to take it in the morning, because it does make me alert. It won’t give me insomnia exactly, but if I take it at night, I’ll just be up wanting to do things.

Let’s do lunch

Before starting tirzepatide, I would absolutely do the drive-through for lunch, and I would binge because I wouldn’t have had breakfast. I’m talking two cheeseburgers, large French fries and a Coke. Then I’d get the insulin spike and crash, leading to the 2 p.m. groggy stage. And I live in Miami, where part of the Hispanic culture is that at 2 p.m., everyone has an espresso shot. I was like, “I don’t want to; I have acid reflux, but I have to survive the slump!” And then, of course, I couldn’t sleep at night because I had that afternoon espresso shot. I don’t know how I lived like that for so many years.

I’m a person of habit, so I have the same two meals every day. I’ve always been that way, and I think it’s why I tried so many fad diets (and all the multi-level marketing schemes): I knew I could do a shake every day as a meal replacement. I can follow structure and routine — I need it. But now I’m free, and I can ask myself, “What do I want to eat?” Most days that’s a turkey or ham sandwich with tater tots that I make at home. I often can’t finish my whole lunch, but that’s fine. I’ll get hungry in an hour or two and have the rest, or grab some cheese sticks or Goldfish crackers.

Happy hour

The difference in my “happy hour” activities is night and day. I am actually a tequila connoisseur. My husband and I have taken trips to Tequila, Mexico, and we easily have more than 120 craft tequilas in our house. Sometimes I felt caught up in the culture of having a drink if I’d had a big day. But often my husband and I would have half an ounce of one of the tequilas we’ve collected and sip on that, comparing notes about what flavors we tasted. It wasn’t about getting drunk, just enjoying the experience. But still, I probably drank every day.

That has disappeared since starting a GLP-1 medication. It’s not that I’ve learned it’s bad — we’re well aware of the dangers of alcohol — I just don’t have the urge at all since starting tirzepatide. I’ll still have a drink now and then, but going from daily to maybe once a month is a big deal. And since I’m not drinking much, my husband isn’t either. For the Fourth of July weekend, my husband made me a margarita from scratch, and we realized he probably hadn’t made me one in months! Our friends are like, “Wow, we don’t even recognize you.” But we still go out to dinner, or to barbecues, or our friends will come over to swim in our pool. Our social life is the same; we’re just drinking less.

Dinner bell

My food noise has always been centered around carbs and dinner. I always felt like, if I didn’t have carbs, I hadn’t even had dinner. I used to be so preoccupied and worried about whether there would be enough food for me to feel full because that feeling of satiety was my comfort zone. At the same time, I would try to meal-plan — especially dinner — to try to control my carb consumption. I would tell myself that I could have as much greens and chicken as I want, but I couldn’t have carbs after 6 p.m. I had to give myself a pep talk in order to not have two servings.

That’s gone. I have no idea what will be for dinner today. My husband is the primary cook in our household, and he’s super health-conscious — we survive because of him! So what we eat hasn’t really changed. We don’t fry things; We use the air fryer or grill and we cook with avocado oil. We’ll have salmon or chicken breast with mashed potatoes and a vegetable. But I’m just not stressed around planning it anymore. I no longer feel the need to measure a cup of mashed potatoes, and if I want a little bit more, I’ll have it. I’m just much more in tune with my hunger cues, and I respect my satiety.

And I get to enjoy my food more. My daughter likes to cook too, and the other day she made a chicken marsala with roasted asparagus and couscous. In the past, I would have been worried I’d starve because there weren’t enough carbs, but instead I was just so excited to try it.

Make a move

I grew up playing volleyball and running, but in my adulthood, that changed. I used to be what I call a “binge exerciser.” I would start working out and exercise hard-core for 30 days and lose 1 pound and it just sucked. So then I wouldn’t do anything.

I didn’t repeat that cycle on tirzepatide. During the eight months when I was losing the bulk of the weight, I just walked for 30 minutes a day, and I reached my goal weight in that time. Now I lift weights two or three times a week, but I don’t do it because I need to continue losing weight. I’m just cognizant of the benefits. My husband has always gone to the gym a lot, and he would tell me I needed to work out to build muscle, and I’d just say, “I don’t care!” But now I’ve learned that muscle-building is important for longevity. It was painful at first, but your body has muscle memory. Mine is like, “Oh, I remember this!”

Let’s get the bill

Compounded tirzepatide isn’t cheap. At first, I was paying $650 a month for it. But now that there are more telehealth providers and there have been advancements in the field, I pay about half that.

Even with that additional cost, I’m still saving more money than I was before starting the medication. I think eating out is the key. My life was always centered around food, so that’s a big change for me. My family and I used to eat out four times a week, which is a lot for anyone in the United States. We’d easily spend $100 to $150 for the four of us each time we ate out.

Now we mostly eat at home and I buy things in bulk. For example, I was at Costco and looking at a $30 slab of salmon. I can’t believe that in the past we would spend so much money. My husband, kids and I would go out for dinner and each order salmon. Now we just cook it at home. I’m now saving probably $400 a month on outings, and around $200 a month on groceries, because I don’t buy two tubs of ice cream every two weeks now.