Every diet with a name. Bariatric surgery years ago. Then three GLP-1 medications, started and stopped. And the part nobody prepares you for – keeping the result when it's just you again. This is where the method comes from.
Not theory studied from the outside. A method written down by someone who lived every stage of this – and needed it to keep working on the ordinary days, long after the medical help stopped.
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.
Bariatric surgery – a gastric sleeve – years ago now. The honeymoon phase did exactly what it does: hunger went quiet, restriction was strong, the weight came off fast. And then, on schedule, that phase ended. Nobody had told me it was a phase.
Not all of it. But enough to frighten me, and enough to make the point: the surgery had been doing the heavy lifting, and when it stopped, there was nothing underneath to take over. Not because I stopped caring – because no one had built me a system for that part.
Three different medications, one after another, over close to three years in total, counting the short breaks in between. Each one worked while I was on it. And each time I came off, the food noise came back within weeks – exactly the way it had after the surgery honeymoon ended. The last time I stopped, I stopped for good. That was the point where I finally had to build something of my own.
119 lb (54 kg), held for more than a year now since the last injection. 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, drift after surgery, regain after injections. I became what people in the community call a veteran. The method on this site is simply that experience, written down and made repeatable.
See the Simeone Maintenance Method →
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 system on this site is for the period after the injections stop – when appetite comes back and nothing is doing the quieting for you anymore.