It is clear from thousands of social media posts that real people are facing a very real and uncomfortable truth: for most of them, weight-loss medication is not a temporary intervention. It is for life.

People stop taking Mounjaro, the hunger returns and the weight begins to come back. They try weaning themselves off slowly. They start counting calories again. They make new gym plans, download new apps and write new resolutions. Yet no amount of careful tapering or renewed determination can guarantee that weight loss will be sustained once the force that made it possible has been removed.

This is especially true for people over 40 managing demanding jobs, families, hormonal changes and full, complicated lives. Human beings do not eat exclusively because their bodies require fuel. Apart from chronic and metabolic conditions, weight gain is frequently connected to emotional eating: stress, exhaustion, apathy, loneliness, low mood, premenstrual irritability, menopause, boredom and the simple desire to experience something pleasurable after a difficult day.

Mounjaro and retatrutide do not merely make people “less hungry.” Mounjaro — the brand name for tirzepatide — acts on the GIP and GLP-1 receptors. Retatrutide acts on GIP, GLP-1 and glucagon receptors, although it remains investigational and is not currently approved for public use in the UK. One is a dual-receptor agonist; the other is a triple-receptor agonist.

Their mechanisms differ, but the freedom people describe is remarkably similar.

These medicines create distance between an emotion and the impulse to eat it away. Stress no longer has the same automatic route to the kitchen. Neither do boredom, sadness, exhaustion or hormonal upheaval.

They remove the need to waver.

Food noise is not simply enjoying food because it tastes good. It is the relentless cycle of wanting it, planning it, resisting it, bargaining with it, regretting it and promising to behave differently tomorrow. When that noise becomes quiet, people gain more than a smaller body. They gain time, mental space and a functional life with one enormous problem removed from it.

It is a fallacy — almost a sin — to suggest that any sensible human being, having experienced freedom from an obsessive relationship with food, should voluntarily surrender it simply to prove that they can.

Some very confused people liken long-term medical weight management to dependency. They call it abnormal or “unnatural.” Yet these same people wash their bedding in a machine instead of the Thames. They take the Tube to work rather than travelling through London by horse-drawn cart. They use smartphones and contactless payments (even if they resist ChatGPT or despise Amazon Prime). They already accept technologies that remove unnecessary labour and suffering from human life.

We do not regard suffering as virtuous merely because it is traditional.

Why, then, should someone abandon an effective medical tool and return to fighting hunger, compulsive thoughts and emotional eating through willpower alone?

Those who have lived in the shackles of food noise already understand. So do the people whose self-esteem has been eroded by decades of weight cycling; the women who entered menopause and watched their bodies change beyond recognition; and those who have felt hopeless or even suicidal because they could not regain control of their eating or their lives.

They do not need another lecture about calories, another gym plan or another demand to prove their character through hardship. They have experienced the difference between fighting themselves every day and living a life in which food is no longer the loudest voice in the room.

They have already made their choice. It's commitment, week after week.