Finally Doing Something About Timmeh

Let me be straight with you. I’m not writing this because I’ve got my life together. I’m writing this because I’m a 40-something dad from regional Victoria who’s been watching people around him get sick, and I finally ran out of excuses.
Today I pick up my first lot of Mounjaro injectables. Tomorrow the needle goes in. I figured if I’m going to do this, I may as well document it — for accountability, for anyone else in the same boat, and because writing things down is cheaper than therapy.
The Part Where I Admit I’ve Been Lucky (So Far)
A few months back I lost my gallbladder. Went in, had it out, came home, ate a meat pie within a week. The surgeon probably wept. I walked away from that thinking I’d dodged a bullet and then immediately went back to doing absolutely nothing different.
That’s the thing about being “lucky with your health” — it’s easy to confuse luck with invincibility. I’m not invincible. Nobody my age is.
Too many of my mates have been getting sick lately. Cancer. Heart stuff. The kind of diagnoses that come out of nowhere and rearrange everything. Good blokes. Guys who didn’t see it coming. I’ve been watching from the sidelines telling myself I’m fine, I’m busy, I’ll get to it.
Then I look at Paddy — my little bloke — and I think about what kind of example I’m setting. Not in a preachy way. In a very practical “I want to still be here and functional when he’s a teenager and being a nightmare” kind of way.
So. Here we are.
What is Mounjaro and Why Aren’t We Paying $1,200 USD a Month For It
Mounjaro (tirzepatide, if you want the proper name) is a weekly injectable medication that works on appetite regulation and metabolic function. It’s the one that’s been all over the news — the weight loss injection that Americans are paying roughly $1,200 USD a month for, which has turned it into a political football over there.
Here in Australia, because we have a functioning healthcare system and a PBS that occasionally works in your favour, I picked mine up for considerably less. It felt like the universe finally giving me something back after years of paying $6 for a bunch of coriander at Coles.
I went to a dietitian, got assessed, got the prescription, and now I’ve got a little pen sitting in the fridge next to the pickled Korean radish I made yesterday. Context to come.
The dietitian set me an 8,000 kilojoule daily limit. That’s not starvation — it’s just eating like a normal human being, which apparently I’ve been doing wrong for several decades.
Enter: An AI, a Preston Market Haul, and a Suspicious Amount of Coriander
Here’s where it gets a bit unhinged. Alongside the Mounjaro, I decided to actually sort out my eating. Not a diet. Not a detox. Just actual food, prepped properly, so I’m not standing in front of the fridge at 11pm after a late shift eating whatever’s easiest.
I asked Claude — the AI, not a person named Claude, though at this point the line is blurring — to help me build a two-week meal plan. 10 lunches, 10 dinners, full recipes, Sunday prep checklists, the lot. Then it built me an interactive shopping list app to take to Preston Market yesterday morning.
I’m a finance bloke from Kilmore. I do not normally have interactive shopping list apps. And yet.
The plan is Vietnamese-leaning for Week 1 — rice paper rolls, bun cha, beef stir fry, pan-seared barramundi. Week 2 pivots Mediterranean — tandoori chicken, beef kofta, lamb backstrap. All built around protein-first eating, which apparently helps with Mounjaro’s effect on digestion. All designed so my partner Kristie can assemble dinners in 15 minutes while I’m still on shift.
Yesterday I poached four chicken breasts, marinated 500g of beef strips, made three different dipping sauces, julienned what felt like a metric tonne of carrot and Korean radish (I couldn’t find daikon — close enough), pickled said radish, and soft-boiled six eggs.
I also learned that my Temu mandolin is exactly as useless as the reviews suggest, but the slightly less terrible Temu chopper-bowl thing we bought to fill a quota actually worked fine. The bar is low but we cleared it.
The whole Preston shop came in around $262. For two weeks of lunches and dinners for a family of three, that’s about $8-10 per person per meal. I’ve spent more than that on a pie and a Coke at a servo.
So What’s This Blog Actually Going to Be
Honest, mostly. Weekly updates on how the Mounjaro is going — the good, the side effects (I’ve been warned about nausea, which is going to be a fun week), the appetite changes, the weight stuff. But also the food angle, because eating well is 90% of this and I’m genuinely enjoying the cooking side more than I expected.
I’m not going to pretend this is going to be a linear success story. I work 1130 to 8 most days. I have a toddler. I support Richmond. The deck is not always stacked in my favour.
But I’ve got a fridge full of prepped food, a jab in the crisper drawer, and apparently an AI that knows more about Vietnamese dipping sauces than most humans I know.
That’s enough to start.