14 months ago, I was preparing for death. A box of medicine changed my life.

Michael Donnelly-Boylen calls March 10, 2024, his “second birthday.” It’s the date he gave himself his first shot of the weight loss and diabetes drug Mounjaro. “Fourteen months ago, I was pretty certain I was getting ready for my death,” he tells Yahoo Life. “I had given up because nothing was working to help me lose weight and get healthy. But that box [of medicine] changed my life.”

Donnelly-Boylen was in Weight Watchers by age 12. In the decades since, he’s tried everything from the South Beach Diet to the cabbage soup diet. “Any version of ‘eat less, move more,’ I’ve tried it,” he says. These diets would work for a little while, and then he’d gain back the weight he’d lost and more.

By the time he was 50, Donnelly-Boylen dreaded trying and failing another diet. “What people forget about the disease of obesity is that we know more about it than anyone else and we’ve gained and lost weight more times than they can imagine,” he says. He’d heard of Ozempic but felt too ashamed to ask his doctor about it. Then, he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. “I knew I had to fight to lose weight,” says Donnelly-Boylen.

Despite being married to a doctor, getting his Mounjaro prescription was no easy feat, thanks to insurance changes and shortages of the medication. But once he had the box in hand, Donnelly-Boylen threw out all the processed food in his house and “really started fresh.” But the Mounjaro was the “tool that made the success stick,” he says. It all but muted the food noise that had filled his mind. “For the first time, I realized what it was like to be somebody else, to be able to know when I’m full and move away from food.”

In this installment of Yahoo’s On My Weigh series, Donnelly-Boylen tells us how Mounjaro has forever altered his day-to-day. With a GLP-1, and a lot more mental space, he’s gotten a new lease on life and his relationship, an appreciation for even the simplest chores, and a mission: using his social media and meeting with lawmakers to advocate for better access to the drugs that he says saved his life.

The weigh-in

• Name: Michael Donnelly-Boylen

• Age: 51

• The method: Mounjaro, 10 milligrams

• The goal: To reduce my weight and my A1C to get my type 2 diabetes under control

• Progress report: I’m exactly 100 pounds down, from 360 to 260. I can take the stairs to my third-floor walk-up without huffing and puffing, I can finally fully participate in my relationship and travel confidently. And I just constantly want to be moving!

• Food noise volume: It went from a 10 to a 3! I still find myself stress eating at work, but I keep my drawer stocked with high-protein snacks, such as meat sticks. The difference now is that I can control what I eat; I’m not going to go running to the vending machine for Pop-Tarts and a sugar rush.

Day in the life

Rise and shine

I find myself getting up incredibly early compared to what I used to do before starting Mounjaro. I used to be able to sleep in, but now I have a hard time sleeping past 7 a.m. The bigger problem is that I haven’t adjusted to going to bed early, so I get less sleep than I used to. It’s especially hard during vacation days or on weekends, when I just find myself more alert.

But once I figured out this was just going to happen, I stopped fighting it. I know now that I can make that time useful. The early mornings are now when I do housecleaning and make my TikToks, so I don’t bother my husband with them.

First bites

There is a rest area at the dead center of my hourlong commute to work. I used to stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts there every morning and get a bagel with strawberry cream cheese on it and a Strawberry Dragonfruit Refresher.

I’m still a creature of habit, but now my routine is to leave the house with a 32-ounce bottle of water with electrolytes in it. Every other day, I add MiraLax to my water too (to help with constipation, a side effect of Mounjaro). I also bring a Fairlife Core Power shake. That has 42 grams of protein in it, so it gets me about a third of the protein I need every day. And usually before I leave for work, I have a high-protein, high-fiber bagel with some cream cheese.

It actually took me a while to start eating bagels again after starting Mounjaro. It took me about 10 months before I could forgive the food and recognize that the food didn’t cause the problem of my weight. It’s actually a bit of a victory for me to have found a way to reincorporate a healthy version of that food I loved back into my diet.

Get ready with me

I have become obsessed with skin care. I never had a skin routine — I don’t think I ever even moisturized! — before starting Mounjaro. But as a result of being on this journey and actually starting to care about my body and not just being mad at it — when I tell you I have a skin care routine, I mean I have a 12-step skin routine each morning and evening.

In the first nine months after starting Mounjaro, the hardest part of getting ready was looking professional while your body is constantly shifting and your clothes are getting too baggy too quickly. I’ve gone through at least two rounds of donating all my clothes since starting the GLP-1. My husband started taking a GLP-1 shortly after I did, but thankfully, all of his old clothes are the size I am now. One of the benefits of being in a gay relationship!

But a few months ago, I realized that I didn’t know what my style was. I’ve always worn extremely preppy clothes (think: Polo everything), simply because it was easier to get in larger sizes. I didn’t know how I would dress if I had a full range of choices. I’m not quite there yet, but I have more options. Now, I dress much younger than I probably should. But I don’t care! I dress in brighter colors and tighter clothes than most men my age, and I’m OK with that because I was robbed of that experience when I was younger. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s expensive.

Dose time

I take my shot on Thursday mornings. There’s a lot of collective wisdom within the GLP-1 community about how to reduce side effects right after your shot. I do what many people online call a “pregaming day.” The day before I take my shot, I set a really high protein goal and make sure I’m fully hydrated, with the help of electrolytes. On shot day, I get up and have 59 grams of protein and 32 ounces of water before I take the injection. After, I have very mild side effects, and I want to say it’s a result of my ritual, but I don’t know what it’s like to do it any other way. I do get some mild constipation, but really, my biggest side effect is that I got my life back.

Let’s do lunch

I work at a law school, so lunchtime for me used to mean going down to the cafeteria and ordering something — anything — they had available. I was close friends with the cafeteria workers. They all knew me as the friendly guy who said hello every day. They don’t really know me anymore, because I bring a healthy, high-protein frozen meal and have that.

I still sometimes have lunch meetings, though. Starting Mounjaro hasn’t affected how I interact with people in those meetings, but it’s changed what’s going through my head. Now, if I have to eat with other people, I don’t worry constantly about being judged by others. I’ve been very successful professionally and personally. But my weight was the one thing I hadn’t been successful in, and you can’t hide that. You wear it on the outside of your body. But I don’t have to think about that anymore. I recently had a two-hour work meeting in the cafeteria, and I never once thought about getting up and getting food.

Happy hour

My husband and I used to go to bars with friends pretty regularly. We do that a lot less now, but I don’t miss it. I don’t know if it’s the medication or my age, but when other people are having two to four drinks, I have one. For a while, I thought people thought I was judging them for drinking. I wasn’t, but it was hard to explain. But ironically, most of my friends are on GLP-1s themselves now! And we’re much more likely to go to someone’s house to enjoy ourselves these days. If we do go out, we eat more family-style.

But the biggest change in how I spend my leisure time is my ability to travel. Before starting Mounjaro, my size was very limiting. I needed a seat belt extender to fly. I have friends all over the country, but my world was getting smaller, instead of larger, because of my size. Three months after starting Mounjaro, my husband and I flew cross-country and went to the Grand Canyon. We walked the rim for miles and hiked. That had been on my bucket list for years, but without Mounjaro, I never could have truly enjoyed it. My most recent trip was to New York City, where I climbed the stairs to the top of the Vessel in Hudson Yards on my own two feet, and fit comfortably into a theater seat to see Gypsy. I love Broadway, but it had been so uncomfortable for me before.

Dinner bell

With my long commute, I don’t have a ton of time to cook, and I’m the person in my household who has to cook. We used to rotate through ordering Thai, pizza or Chinese every night. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts a mile away from our house, but we wouldn’t walk. We would order that or Starbucks or Playa Bowls. We would collect Marriott points from Uber Eats; it’s insane how much we spent.

So after I started Mounjaro, I was struggling to find good options that I could make quickly and that tasted good. Then I discovered Kevin’s meals. Their frozen entrées, with options like chicken tikka masala and General Tso’s chicken, are, like, restaurant-quality meals. And they cost something like $11 and are available at pretty much every grocery store. So one of those and a bag of steamed vegetables, that’s dinner four to five nights a week.

Make a move

How is my exercise routine different? I’m exercising, that’s how it’s different. In fact, I’m moving constantly. I call it an “involuntary body movement” that I have now. I find myself randomly walking up the stairs when there’s an elevator. I’ll think, Why did I do that? My brain assumes I should be looking for the elevator, but my body is looking for things to do. I found this program called the Fit Collective, which consists of 10 minutes of resistance training a day, and it’s designed to be done three times a week. Now I do it five or six times a week. But my DEXA scans showed I was maintaining muscle and bone mass doing it just three times weekly. I love it because you can do the exercises from a chair. The founder designed it for elderly people, so now that my mom is on Mounjaro too, I’ve got her doing it.

More importantly, I enjoy chores like taking the trash out now. About six months after I started Mounjaro, our hot water heater exploded. My husband and I were downstairs cleaning up from that, and we looked at each other and realized that I was equally part of the relationship for the first time. Before starting a GLP-1, I never, ever would’ve been physically able to be there helping him. I’m present now.

Let’s get the bill

Our expenses haven’t changed that much since my husband and I started our GLP-1 journeys, but what we spend money on has changed dramatically. Instead of spending crazy money ordering from restaurants, we find ourselves ordering a lot of fresh produce on Instacart, which costs a lot more. And we both drink Core Power shakes daily, and those cost a lot of money.

I’ve had to spend a lot buying new clothes. But there’s a fat tax. You already spend so much more money on anything name-brand when you’re fat compared to if you’re skinny. So now I can buy two pieces of clothing for the same amount I used to spend on one. Destination XL has gotten a fortune’s worth of my money over the years and I’m very grateful to them, but I’m also very grateful to be branching out to other stores!