Last month I spent nearly $200 getting a stack of old trousers taken in at the waist. I had been keeping them folded up on a top shelf in a closet, in a kind of Carbohydrate Lover’s Strategic Reserve, because I know from past behavior that just because they’re too big for me now, there’s no reason to think they’ll be too big for me next year. This has been a lifelong pattern, and I have learned the hard way not to toss the XXLs just because I am now slipping into the mediums.

Mounjaro has changed all that. Ever since I was told, in a very somber and serious voice, by my doctor that my blood glucose levels were way too high, measured by a number called A1c, which is basically a 90-day average of blood sugar, I have done everything possible to get that number down. Everything, that is, except stick to a sensible diet. I tried every home remedy, every supplement, any product of the pharmaceutical industry no matter what the side effects. But nothing worked for long, which is why there was always a stack of clothes on a top shelf in the closet that were either aspirationally slender or reproachfully roomy.