Oslo. I stopped in the summer of 2024, was off for the best part of seven months, and restarted in the spring. People keep asking me what the off stretch was actually like, so here it is in order, and please read it as one body rather than a forecast.
Weeks one and two: nothing at all. I remember being surprised and slightly suspicious, like waiting for a bill.
Weeks three to six: appetite came back and it came back loudly. Not gradually. It was like a radio being turned back up in a room I had got used to being quiet in, and the volume was set where it had been in 2023. That fortnight was hard and I was not ready for it, because everything I had read talked about a slow return.
Months two to four: the reckoning, and the bit I would want somebody to prepare me for. Weight came back, some of it, over those months. My reflux — which had been the reason I stopped — stayed away, so the trade was real. But I had built an entire identity in the previous year out of things going in one direction, and when the direction changed I had nothing to hold on to and no vocabulary for it. That was much harder than any physical symptom.
Months five to seven: steadier. Not because anything improved but because I stopped watching hourly. I got back into swimming. My blood pressure stayed better than it had been before I ever started, which nobody predicted and which I still find quietly encouraging.
Then I restarted, differently, slower, with a prescriber who took the reflux seriously from the first appointment.
The thing I would tell my own self in week three of being off: the volume coming back up is not a moral event. It is a drug leaving your system. I spent about six weeks treating it as a personal failure and that was the only part of the whole seven months that I would call wasted.
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