Every diet with a name. Two years of GLP-1 injections. Gastric sleeve surgery. And the part nobody prepares you for — keeping the result when it's just you again. This is where the method comes from.
Keto. Dukan. The Zone. Vegan. Raw food. Low-carb high-fat. Intermittent fasting. If a diet has a name, I've probably been on it — usually combined with serious training. Weight-loss camps, personal coaches, personal trainers, group programs. An eating disorder shadowed most of those years, which made every "just eat less" a little more useless than it already was.
At 40, I crossed 220 lb (100 kg). Eventually the scale stopped at 340 lb (154 kg) — at 5'5" (164 cm). I knew all the theory by then. Knowing was never the problem.
Three different medications over two years. They worked — impressively. And then came the part the prescriptions don't cover: what happens after. The weight came back. Not because I stopped caring — because nothing had replaced what the medication was doing.
Gastric sleeve surgery, three years ago. The honeymoon phase did exactly what it does — quiet hunger, strong restriction, fast results — and then, on schedule, it ended. That was over a year ago. I've now spent longer maintaining after the honeymoon than inside it.
119 lb (54 kg), reached a year and a half ago, maintained since. Not through willpower — mine is no better than yours. Through a system assembled by trial and error across every way this can go wrong: regain after diets, regain after injections, drift after surgery. I became what people in the community call a veteran. The method on this site is simply that experience, written down and made repeatable.
T.E. Simeone is a pen name, and I want to be straightforward about why.
Anyone who has lived in a bigger body knows that weight carries a stigma few other things do. It's treated as a character verdict — as laziness, weakness, lack of discipline — by strangers, colleagues, sometimes doctors, sometimes family. Regain is judged even harder. And if you've used medication or surgery, there's a second layer waiting: "the easy way out." I've spent decades being read through that lens. I'm not willing to hand my face and my body over to it, to be inspected and re-judged every time someone evaluates whether my work is worth reading.
So the deal I offer is this: every fact in the story above is true — the numbers, the medications, the surgery, the timeline. What I keep is my anonymity; what you get is everything I learned. The method is the face.
If anything, I'd argue the pen name makes the work more honest, not less. It lets me write about regain, eating disorders, and the absurdities of this process with a bluntness I couldn't afford if every sentence had my name, my employer, and my neighbors attached to it.
T.E. Simeone is an author brand: one author — the story above is mine — supported by a very small team behind the scenes. No content factory, no ghost-written empire. Small enough that everything published here passes through the same lived filter.
The mission is specific: to help the people whose lives have been marked by this problem — and above all, the ones who are alone in their transformation right now, fighting to keep what they achieved with so much effort. In exactly that moment when the external help — the surgery, the injections — has stopped doing the work, and it's just you at the front. That's the moment this entire brand exists for.
One honest boundary: these are educational and organizational tools built from lived experience and research — not medical or psychological care. If an eating disorder is part of your story, as it was part of mine, please have professional support in your corner too. These systems work alongside your care team, never instead of it.
The appetite is back and the injections aren't there to do the quieting anymore.
The honeymoon phase is over and old patterns are quietly creeping back.
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