GoKawiilI went on a weight loss journey before going on a real journey. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
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ZDNET's key takeaways
My Apple Watch and a $110 scale did the real work.
I found a lot of apps useful, and some that weren't.
My scales helped me keep an eye out for muscle loss.
Last year, on April 1 of all days, I started a weight-loss journey. I needed to shed over 100 pounds. Part of the reason was health -- I'm a 50+ year-old man who wanted to keep doing the things I enjoy without various parts of me complaining too much. Part of it was pride -- I'd promised a friend I'd walk a section of the Camino Francés, from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela, with them that November.
While my work involves a fair bit of sitting, I'm an avid hiker who spends a lot of my spare time outdoors, but covering about 80 miles in a week would be a lot easier without 100 extra pounds of timber strapped to my frame.
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When it came to the weight loss itself, I chose the GLP-1 Mounjaro route. (Technically, Mounjaro is a dual GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonist, not a pure GLP-1 semaglutide like Ozempic and Wegovy, but even medical professionals call it a GLP-1.) The relatively constant side effects of that -- from indigestion, nausea, and gastric upsets to lethargy and weird things that I'd never heard of before, like allodynia -- meant that it wasn't a particularly easy route. However, it was incredibly efficient and allowed me to shift the bulk of the weight in 7 months at about 14 pounds per month.
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