Beating The Blerch
Hunger vs. Food Noise
Matt Inman, creator of the webcomic The Oatmeal, once proposed a model of obesity called The Blerch.
The Blerch is a fat little cherub that follows me when I run. [...] The Blerch represents all forms of gluttony, apathy, and indifference that plague my life. He follows me home. He comes with me to work. The Blerch is with me morning, noon, and night.
The Blerch is the little voice in the back of your mind telling you to eat all the things. The Blerch cannot be permanently defeated; only temporarily outrun. Matt, for his part, manages his overeating by running ridiculous distances before pigging out on junk food afterward. He started his Beat The Blerch campaign to encourage people to get fit and outrun obesity. There’s an accompanying race every year in Washington state.
I read The Blerch’s introductory comic back in college, sometime in the mid-2010s. I felt both intensely validated and intensely discouraged. I was going to have to deal with my Blerch forever? This was my lot in life? I resigned myself to being chubby.
Shortly thereafter I came across a little subreddit called r/fatlogic. It’s a community dedicated to debunking all the myths about how “impossible” it is to lose weight: slow metabolism! Toxins! Starvation mode! Set points! CICO is wrong! BMI is a weapon of the patriarchy!
The people who popularized this misinformation in the public consciousness did not actually care about the science of metabolism and insulin resistance; they just needed to justify to themselves that there was nothing they could do about their weight. The r/fatlogic subreddit was focused on debunking both the “weight loss is impossible” myths, and this toxic attitude in general.
A basic post would be a screenshot of some meme or example of one of these myths out in the wild. The reddit comments underneath were entertaining zingers and come-backs.
Other times, they were silly encouraging memes:
Meanwhile, weekly threads such as Fat Rant Friday allowed users to come together and vent about any fatlogic we encountered in our real lives. AutoMod’s message always opened the thread:
Fatlogic in real life getting you down? Is your family telling you you’re looking too thin? Are people at work bringing you donuts? Did your beer drinking neighbor pat his belly and tell you “It’s all muscle?” If you hear one more thing about starvation mode will you scream? Let it all out. We understand.
We offered support and encouragement while we all lost weight together. r/fatlogic reminded members, over and over, day after day, that yes, you can actually lose weight. You are not doomed. You can do this. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, you have cravings and a Blerch. But you can do it. It’s just math.
After lurking for a few months, I eventually downloaded MyFitnessPal and bought a food scale. I read the Nutrition Facts labels on all my groceries and rigorously tracked my calories. I mourned the loss of my innocence when I found out just how many calories were in a couple fistfuls of shredded cheese.
And it worked! I lost 20 pounds in the spring of 2017 after I started following them. The weight fell off at exactly the rate it was supposed to.
...But it was hard. Not insanely hard—not the hardest thing I’d ever done—just medium-hard. Some nights I felt The Blerch. It called to me, nudging me toward the fridge. One night, my roommate came home with some nachos, and everyone in my 4-person student apartment was chowing down. I had a couple of guac-slathered chips and hit my calorie limit for the day, but The Blerch demanded more. I knew if I stayed in the vicinity, I would devour the whole bowl. I resorted to locking myself in my room for the rest of the night. I curled up into a ball on my bed, on the verge of crying.
The strangest thing was that I wasn’t hungry at all. I was eating an entirely reasonable amount of food! I hit all my macros and took my vitamins. But still I felt The Blerch.
Despite some rough nights, slowly but surely, the weight came off. It helped that I was in college and walked everywhere. The Blerch got a little quieter.
Years came and went. My first job out of college was pretty active. I reliably walked 10-12k steps a day. I stopped tracking rigorously, and the weight crept back on—5 lbs here, 5 lbs there. I tried to get back on the bandwagon, but every single evening I faced The Blerch. It was easier to just give in. I’d buy junk food, hoping to practice with rationing it out at a reasonable pace. I usually failed. My weak spot was cereal.
This all came to a head in late 2019 when I found out I was going to need a spot of brain surgery. When I got home from my consult with the neurosurgeon, in a fit of anger and self-loathing, I threw my giant box of Reese’s Puffs in the trash.
I maintained my weight while recovering from the surgery, and in January, I moved cross-country for work. I had a new brain, a new lease on life, a new position, in a new city. 2020 was going to be a new start.
...Yeah, we all know how 2020 turned out.
I gained 30 pounds.
I fluctuated around BMI 28–30 for the next couple of years. I’d knuckle down, lose some weight, be unable to maintain the herculean willpower required to fight off The Blerch, then gain it back.
Scott Alexander wrote the first ACX post on GLP-1s, Semaglutidonomics, in late 2022. At the time, I thought, Wow, that sounds cool. I wish I could try that. Too bad I’m not sick enough for it. I was also nervous about side effects. This was back when people were worried about GLP-1s potentially causing pancreatic cancer and medullary thyroid cancer. So many unknowns.
I ended up biting the bullet eight months later, in 2023. I ordered a vial of compounded semaglutide, and injected the first dose.
A couple of hours later, The Blerch was gone.
I’ve been on and off GLP-1s a few times in the years since. I changed to tirzepatide (it’s much better than semaglutide). While on GLP-1s, I forget what The Blerch feels like. I can keep junk food in the house. I can bring home a jar of Nutella or a bag of gummy worms, and I won’t eat the whole package in one sitting.
But as soon as I go off the meds, The Blerch comes back. It gnaws at me. The more weight I gain, the stronger it gets.
People talk about “set points” and claim that it’s the weight your body thinks it’s “supposed” to be. I still get twitchy whenever I hear that term. Old r/fatlogic habits die hard, I guess.
I’ve never had a “set point.” I have a Blerch instead. My Blerch is a continuous, infinite loop of EAT EAT EAT MORE MORE MORE that ratchets up, and up, and up—forever. The only reason I haven’t eaten my way to morbid obesity is because I go through sporadic periods of white knuckling every few years. I tell myself each time that if I only squeezed my fists tight enough, perhaps I’d strangle The Blerch for good.
The latest time I went off tirzepatide was last summer. I was finally in a good place, and I told myself I could maintain my weight.
Unsurprisingly, I started binge eating almost immediately. Every night was a struggle, and it was easier to just give in. After a few months, I had gained back 15 pounds.
One evening I decided to put up a fight. When the cravings started, I locked myself in my bedroom, just to see what would happen. Within minutes I was thrashing on the bed, rocking and crying, remembering that similar evening all those years ago.
The next morning, I told my doctor I wanted to go back on tirzepatide.
We now have a formal name for this feeling: food noise. But to me, it will always be The Blerch.
We still don’t really know what causes it. We don’t know why it sometimes gets better with weight loss, and sometimes doesn’t. We don’t know why some people can quietly lose 30 pounds and get on with their lives, while others have a continuous struggle, year after year.
I’m sure we’ll figure it out someday. But for now—I found my own way to Beat The Blerch.
I know the feeling.
After high school with sports and running around I went to college with all the food and beer and opportunities for hanging out and no regular plan for exercise. I gained 30 pounds. Over the next 20 years I exercised intermittently but felt the same need to chow down, and gained another 30. I'm a big guy and I know the social pressures for men are different, but as my weight crept up i constantly felt unable to control the ongoing gnawing urge to eat. I knew I was hurting myself and I wanted to be different, but I also loved the food and the experience of indulging.
Once I learned about the GLP-1 inhibitors I knew this was something I needed. It was the way that my own weight and feelings about it got in the way of the regular, everyday acts of making good choices. My weight made it hard to exercise. Which made it hard to plan a day that made me want to exercise. Which made it hard to expect myself to drink water, eat healthy, and do active things. I wanted to change and felt helpless to do so.
I started Zepbound in October of 2024. I then understood what it was like to see food in front of me and not NEED to eat it. I could have two pieces of pizza, not 7. There's a scene in the West Wing where Leo says that he's an alcoholic and he doesn't have 1 drink, he has 10, and that's how I felt about food before starting Zepbound. I found apples tasty and appetizing for the first time in my life and could choose that instead of fries.
I had to go off Zepbound when my insurance changed in January 2025 and I switched from the insurance-supplied pens to the syringes. I've only lost 20 pounds total from then, but going from 260 to 240 genuinely changed my life. I want to run, to lift, to walk. The virtuous cycle of being lighter made me happier to run, which made it easier to eat well, which made me excited to wear clothes that fit, which feel good to wear instead of just concealing my body.
I know that healthy living is more than just getting an injection, but the the lift i got from the medication pushed me to a better style of living. My family sees it, my friends see it, and I feel it every day. The "one little trick" is not a solution to everything, but when it gives you the power to do the things you want to do but just find too hard, it's a start, and a blessing. Being open to help, whether it's medical, mental, pharmaceutical, psychological, emotional, or any other is an incredible power of living in a society that recognizes the responsibility of the individual but also provides tools for them to achieve their goals. I'm grateful every day that I live in that society, for all its faults and injustices.