When He Loses Faster Than You

The week I started counting his

He started three weeks after I did. He did not read anything, did not join anything, did not weigh his food, and by week six he had lost more than me.

I want to be honest about how that felt, because I do not think the feeling is silly and I do not think pretending otherwise helps anyone. It felt like being overtaken in a race I had signed up for alone. I was the one who had made the appointment, sat through the intake, argued with a pharmacy, and worked out how to keep the pens cold on a trip to my mother's. He just did what I told him and the scale rewarded him for it.

So I went looking for whether this was a real thing or a me thing. It turned out to be both, in a way I did not expect.

The part that is only arithmetic

The first answer is boring and it helped more than the interesting one.

He is a much bigger man than I am a woman. When we started, he was around 250 pounds and I was around 175. If both of us lose exactly the same proportion of our body weight — say five percent — that is about 12 pounds for him and about 9 for me. Identical progress. Different numbers.

Nobody at a kitchen table says "I am down five percent." They say "I am down twelve." So the comparison we were actually making, every single week, was rigged before it started — not by him, and not by the drug, but by the fact that we were comparing pounds instead of proportions on two bodies that are not the same size.

Once I started writing both numbers as percentages in the same note on my phone, the gap that had been eating me shrank to almost nothing.

Then I found the study that flipped it

This is the part I did not see coming.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic looked back at 1,039 adults with overweight or obesity who started tirzepatide and stayed on it for at least twelve months, and asked what predicted how much weight they actually lost¹. They measured total body weight loss at fifteen months and split it by sex and by age.

Women lost 15.1 percent. Men lost 10.7 percent. That gap was statistically significant, and when the researchers adjusted for other things, being female was independently associated with greater weight loss — alongside not having type 2 diabetes, not having used a weight-loss medication before, not taking other drugs that promote weight gain, and being on a higher dose.

Age, which I would have bet money on, turned out not to be an independent predictor at all.

So the thing I had been quietly grieving in week six — that he would simply always do better at this than me — is not what the longer data shows. If anything, the opposite.

What that study does not say

I am trying hard not to do to this study what I did to the scale, which is read it for reassurance and stop there.

It is a look back at records, not an experiment. It is one health system. It is tirzepatide only, so I cannot stretch it over every drug in this category. The average age was 56, which is older than I am. And crucially, everyone in it had stayed on the medication for at least a year — so it describes people who kept going, and tells me nothing about the ones who stopped.

It also does not explain why, and I am not going to invent a reason. The researchers did not offer one either; they said the finding argues for taking sex into account when treating obesity, and left the mechanism open.

Most importantly: 15.1 percent is an average across a thousand people. It was never a promise to me.

What I actually changed

I stopped comparing pounds. Percentages or nothing.

I stopped treating his line on the graph as the control group for mine. He is not my baseline. He is a different body, on a different starting weight, at a different point in his own thing.

And I stopped reading week six as the verdict. The number that turned out to be interesting was measured at fifteen months, and at week six neither of us had any idea what our own fifteen-month number would be.

The honest bit at the end

The comparison was never really about the scale.

What I actually resented was doing all of the work — the appointments, the pharmacy calls, the planning, the reading — and watching someone stroll past me while carrying none of it. That is a much older argument in our house than this medication, and it turns out a weekly injection is very good at handing you a fresh number to have it over.

The evidence helped with the smaller half of that. The rest of it we had to talk about, which we did, eventually, badly, and then better.