Wouldn’t Ozempic be Easier?

If Jacob is perfectly honest, the arrival of Ozempic annoyed him. He had spent more than a decade slowly figuring out how to stop himself binge eating all the time and, frankly, it had been quite a lot of work. Now he feels like everybody else is getting a free pass. Well, not quite free. It is actually quite expensive, and Jacob never has any money, so it’s a good thing he took the slower route. He doubts he’d be able to afford Ozempic, especially if he was still eating as much as he was when he most desperately needed it.

He also assumes that if there are any overeaters reading this, they’re probably not on Ozempic either. If weight loss drugs had made their food noise problems disappear, it is unlikely they would have stumbled onto this site looking for a food noise solution. Those still roaming the internet trying to find a natural alternative to Ozempic are doing so because they can’t afford weight loss drugs, the online dispensaries are out of stock, or they don’t think taking a new class of drug for the rest of their lives is worth the (yet unknown) risk. Hopefully the other reason these solution-searchers are here is because they still believe there is something they can do to resolve the problem, themselves, and if they can just figure out what that something is they will be much better off than Ozempic-takers, in the long run.

They are right — there is a drug-free solution. It is slower, but the learnings tend to trickle down to the subconscious and stick, which means when the food noise starts to subside, it will really subside (i.e. it won’t just be medically suppressed­), and while drugs may lose efficacy over time, this method will continue to reduce food noise the longer someone does it.   

But why are some people plagued by food noise at all?

What Jacob figured out was that the constant and pressing urge to eat (and eat and eat and eat) was not really him. What was driving him to consume all the things he didn’t want to was an extremely hungry, food-obsessed goat living inside his head. He also figured out that training this untethered goat was the key to regaining control over his eating (not to mention his health, weight, and fragile self-esteem).

To do this, he learned which foods didn’t set his goat off, he turned those foods into simple, enjoyable meals, and then he started to eat them on a weekly schedule. The Goat resisted (and quite often got its way) but, over time, it got used to the consistent meals. It even came to prefer them.

Jacob’s goat was devoted to pleasure, and Jacob assumes most goats are the same. They generally want the foods that make them feel as wonderful as possible. Therefore, the more pleasurable the meal or snack, the louder a goat’s demands for it become. Jacob figured out the foods that didn’t give his goat a joyful high, then he used those foods to build his baseline (i.e. routine) meals and snacks. It took time but it worked, and now these are the foods The Goat generally asks for. It even walks past fast-food outlets that it used to go bonkers over and, while it still likes to point them out, it rarely forces Jacob to go inside.

Jacob’s happy he has got to this place, but now that Ozempic is here, he wonders if anyone else will bother going through it. Why spend years retraining a goat when you can just get yourself a prescription and let the drugs wrangle it for you?

He hasn’t tried Ozempic, but he has read enough about it to be sure that goat wrangling is an adequate description for what the drug is doing. It is lassoing the incessantly noisy goat currently stomping around the front of a binge eater’s brain and leading it to a well-fenced paddock as far back and out of the way as the brain can possibly relegate a hungry and demanding goat.  

Based on the articles Jacob has read, people on weight loss drugs tend to feel liberated from food thoughts (a.k.a. they no longer feel pressured into eating by their food-obsessed goats). Jacob understands what they mean, but his experience with goat training has taught him that food noise is not just about constantly thinking about food or the overwhelming urge to eat. They are just what people tend to notice. What people tend not to notice is the deeply unpleasant physical sensation that accompanies them. That is a goat’s real power. For binge eaters, their goat will create a sensation of extreme discomfort that persists until they finally give in and eat something.

Many, many things, generally.

A food-crazed goat will dial up the discomfort then suggest a range of possible snack ideas, clearly signalling to their human that eating is the only option if they want the torture to stop. Binge-eaters learn quickly that the discomfort shifts to a feeling of pleasure as soon as their food resistance shifts to eating (or even just planning to eat). Unfortunately, as goats aknow how effective this strategy is, they blatantly refuse to stop.

If Jacob is right and Ozempic is taking away that sensation of discomfort, it really is a miracle. People that have been ordered about by an authoritarian food-obsessed goat for decades will suddenly find their food thoughts don’t feel so painful. Food thoughts will still come up, but without the accompanying discomfort, they will be easier to ignore. A goat might still point out the bakery with freshly baked muffins it loves, but won’t be able to compel their human to purchase half a dozen of them. If the medication is really effective, the human may be able to walk right by a bakery without even hearing the faint sounds of a back paddock-enclosed goat suggesting that they ”just buy one for later.”

Relegating an annoying goat to the back paddock may be all that is needed to reassert control over food. Jacob hopes this is the case for most Ozempic takers. He hopes… but he is doubtful. He has lived with a food-addicted goat for most of his life, and he knows they don’t accept defeat easily – especially when attempts to eliminate them involve barricading them in, ignoring them, and expecting them to live on nothing but greenery. That generally only makes them battle harder.

What Jacob has come to realise is that the absence of the unpleasant sensation that drives the urge to eat does not mean that a goat has disappeared or given up. They are usually just napping or, when Ozempic has been taken, trying to find a hole in their back paddock fence. Weight loss drugs may stop a goat digging its hooves into its human’s frontal lobe whenever it is near the crisp aisle in the supermarket, but they probably won’t stop it yelling suggestions. Without the ability to cause discomfort, a goat might not be able to force its human to immediately consume copious bags of Kettle chips, but it can still point out the crisp aisle and remind said human how much, in their pre-Ozempic days, they enjoyed traversing it.

In fact, if Kettle chips were essential to their human’s pre-Ozempic diet, the incarcerated goat might not have to yell anything at all. A long-dominating goat is likely to have adequately indoctrinated their human into believing that crisps are an essential, favourite food, meaning they will continue to consume them regularly, even without the goat saying a word.

“This is fine,” the Ozempic-afficionado might argue, “because the urge to overeat is gone. I can now have a handful and leave the rest for later, which is perfectly normal and healthy. In fact, it is really rather fabulous.” That is true. People without food-addicted goats in their heads often have a handful of chips and leave the rest for later. If a binge eater can suddenly eat in moderation, haven’t they achieved the ultimate goal?

Yes. They have. But if they have only achieved it by locking their goat up instead of retraining it, their goat will still view the overconsumption of these foods as a matter of survival, which means the moment it is let out of the paddock, it’s going to go right back to forcing its human to overeat them (and it will try to make up for lost time). 

Maybe most people expect they will be able to take Ozempic for the rest of their lives and successfully manage their meal portions by keeping their goat tied down. They may well be right, but it is worth planning for a post-Ozempic period. Even assuming they can afford it, the side effects aren’t too bad, and the drugs aren’t discovered to cause some terrible health defect later on in life, these drugs may lose efficacy over time. That is the most probable issue. Goats, after all, are imperative to human survival, and if they still think their person needs them, they will continuously try to re-assert themselves, regardless of how long they’ve been pushed down.

The only way to permanently reign in an overbearing goat is to retrain it to prefer foods that don’t give it so much pleasure. A well-trained (non-addicted) goat will mostly just ask for foods that calm and satisfy it, instead of those that energise it and make it want more. Those foods look a lot like diet foods (i.e. low fat, low salt, unprocessed plants), but this strategy is the opposite of a diet. Forcing too many calming foods on a goat all at once — as diets tend to — will only lead to resistance. Instead, these foods need to be built in at a pace an anxious goat (or geriatric snail) can tolerate.

In one sense, being on weight loss drugs is advantageous during goat training as a person that is containing their goat can get on with building a new food routine without said goat constantly sabotaging the whole thing. The problem is that it is difficult to tell which foods invigorate or calm a goat if it is tied up way down the back. It may also be difficult to convince a newly released (post-Ozempic) goat that there is no longer a problem. More likely, it will immediately use its newfound freedom to reassert its ultra-processed food preferences.  

To retrain a goat when not on Ozempic (or Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, etc.), one would need to work on changing the baseline meals while their goat is actively undermining all meal planning activities. This is obviously a challenge as goats will go to extremes to avoid losing access to their favourite foods. To anyone currently dealing with an overbearing goat, this probably sounds like an impossible task. Jacob would have thought so too, but now that he has been through it, he is glad he did it this way. Goats do better, in the long run, when they are involved in the entire process.

Having The Goat there with him helped Jacob figure out which foods empowered it and which foods didn’t. This was mostly done through figuring out what he wanted to eat and then seeing what The Goat forced him to binge on instead. A big part of it was also just learning to accept The Goat and treat it with kindness, instead of resisting, resenting and despising it; and he doesn’t think he could have done that without The Goat there. As The Goat didn’t want to change, Jacob had to slowly work the goat-calming food routine in and allow his goat to adjust to each change at its own pace.

Some food habits and preferences took a long time to shift, and some of them are still a work in progress, but by not attempting to tie The Goat down, and by consistently eating foods that didn’t overstimulate it, The Goat stopped wanting to binge eat junk food all day and started to want Jacob’s wholefood plants meals, instead.

And that is why this strategy works so well. It was The Goat that changed its preferences, not Jacob.

They are now more than ten years on from where they started this journey and every year their relationship gets stronger. There is rarely any food conflict anymore and when they do disagree, it’s amicable and easily resolved. Jacob knows he will never have to worry about becoming overweight, going on another diet or losing control around food because his goat rarely wants to eat the foods it used to demand (constantly and in truly obscene quantities). It sometimes makes recommendations, and sometimes Jacob agrees to the treat; then they just go back to how they routinely like to eat.

The non-Ozempic way is slow, but it is deeply rewarding for both human and goat. Working with goats, instead of trying to banish and suppress them, is going to be better for a binge eater, long term. It is also cheaper, and it won’t involve injecting yourself with something that may turn out, in twenty years, to increase your risk of developing some terrible tumour. Jacob’s relationship with his goat is a good one. So much so, that, although The Goat knows it will never get locked into the back paddock, it often wanders down there of its own accord. It’s a good place for a happy goat to take long, quiet naps while its human is getting on with the many things they now do each day that don’t have anything to do with food.

Published 10th February 2026