In the past three months I’ve gone from 210 to 183.
The problem is, I’m not eating. I get hungry but nothing sounds good. And when I try to force myself to eat, I get “full” after just a few bites. And if I continue to force myself to eat, I gag and can’t swallow the food.
I have the idea that you really really need to make an appointment with your doctor. Bad things could be going on and you need a medical professional to rule those out ASAP. It’s probably just stress or situational depression or something — or even a healthy subconscious modification of your relationship to food that allows you to lose weight without feeling deprived — but let’s make sure the bad things aren’t going on.
It could be anything really, hope the doctor gives you good news. People with pancreatic cancer lose a lot of weight preceding a diagnosis. I once developed what I think was an ulcer from taking too many NSAID’s and I felt full very fast and it was painful to make myself eat anymore than a few bites. I stopped taking the medicine and it went away.
I felt this was for about 5 weeks following contracting Lyme disease. Have you been outside a lot? Any weird rashes? If no rash (many people never get a rash!!) did you at any point three months have any weird but brief flu symptoms, especially with strange muscle pain? The latter for me was horrific neck and thigh pain in addition to extreme fatigue - that is the one other symptom that ultimately lasted weeks, - fever, headache, and chills in the 3 days before I started spouting rashes all over.
I got the same thing going on, but not so drastic. Just plain and simply apathy. I’m tired of cooking for people who don’t appreciate it, and tired of dealing with left-overs. So, I’ll just sit in my garage with the stereo cranked up and skip cooking for 2-4 nights in a row. Drink beer and be happy. Lost about 5 pounds.
Nearly 30 pounds in 3 months - does not sound ideal. Does sound like a hiatal hernia might be at play, especially the occasional difficulty swallowing.
How do you do with liquids? If you can tolerate them, adding some protein shakes might be a way to get needed calories and nutrients.
How are you feeling overall? Tireder? Peppier? (supposedly if someone loses excess weight they feel more energetic though it didn’t work that way for me). Any changes in your skin condition (dryness, easier bruising etc.)? Any changes in your bowel habits that aren’t explained by the lower volume of food? These are all questions I imagine your doctor will ask you.
I suspect they’ll want to do an upper endoscopy. Those are easy. You skip breakfast that morning, go to the facility, they sedate you, then you go home, remembering nothing about it. Or perhaps a barium swallow or something - never had one of those, though I gather they are less-than-delicious.
Yup. See a doctor and get checked out. Real soon. Two people I knew had a weight loss that was the first stage of cancer. That might not apply to you, but make sure that that is indeed the case.
Google “symptom checker”, there’s one on WebMD, Just type in your symptoms in the box, then follow the arrows to go to successive pages and fill out additional boxes (medications, etc). At the end you will receive a list of possible conditions you can explore with your doctor.
Write a list of your symptoms so you you don’t forget any or let the doctor rush you.
My first thought was also hiatal hernia. I had a coworker with one, she must have dropped 25 pounds over the course of a month. She was noticeably skinnier. As I recall, in her case, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to eat, she did. She physically couldn’t. IIRC, hers manifested as really bad heartburn, to the point where she was fighting to get every single bite down.
Any chance you could have had covid, and lost your sense of smell & taste? It could be difficult to get food down if your brain isn’t sensing it as really food.