Allison Rankin eagerly anticipated her family’s traditional Christmas gathering.

In 2022, she was set to fly to Indiana, where her aunt transforms her living room and garage into a festive space for an extensive family reunion of 60 attendees.

This particular year marked a change for Rankin, who was then 45 and living in Boston, Massachusetts, as she had begun using the weight-loss medication Mounjaro.

After about three months on the drug, she had shed 20 pounds from her initial weight of 190 pounds, nearing the edge of the obesity category for her height of 5 feet 7 inches.

Upon arriving at the celebration, she opted not to disclose her use of the medication. Given its limited availability then, she was concerned about potential criticism for using a drug initially intended for individuals with type 2 diabetes.

Rankin maintained her usual demeanor, warmly greeting relatives and enjoying a glass of champagne before filling her plate with macaroni and cheese, pie, turkey, and gravy.

Recalling the day in a recent interview with the Daily Mail, she said that around an hour after the meal started, something suddenly felt very wrong.

‘I just had that feeling, you know, that feeling where you are going to throw up,’ she said. ‘I had that feeling that, like, if I could throw up right now, I would. There was enough food bubbling at the top of my throat.’

Allison Rankin is pictured above (left) at a family Christmas get-together in 2022 with her mother (right). She had to throw up in the bathroom at the event from eating too much while taking a GLP-1 agonist

She ate too much. 

Doctors warn users not to overeat while on weight loss drugs because the medications cause the passage of food through the digestive system to slow, which could cause vomiting.

‘When you eat too much at a buffet in Las Vegas, you can just kind of like breathe through it and work it out,’ Rankin, now 48, told the Daily Mail.

‘On a GLP-1, that’s not going to happen. The food’s just sitting there in your stomach. I had that whole like [cold sweat] and feeling like you’re just going to, sort of, explode.’

She said she went pale and felt her body temperature swing from cold to hot to cold again, before telling a relative that she needed to use the bathroom.

Once safely by a toilet, Rankin said she plunged a finger down her throat, which caused her just-eaten meal to burst out into the bowl.

‘It was solid food,’ she recalled. ‘It hadn’t digested at all.’

Wiping her mouth and mopping her brow, Rankin spruced herself up as well as she could before she returned to the party and continued to eat. She said no one noticed the episode.

This marked the second time that Rankin had thrown up privately at a family get-together while on the drug. The first time was at the family’s Thanksgiving get-together in November, after she started taking Mounjaro in late September 2022. She said exactly the same thing happened at both events.

Rankin lost 50lbs over six to eight months while on Mounjaro and then Zepbound. Both use the active drug tirzepatide. She is pictured above after her weight loss

Rankin had been attempting to lose weight for years – she tried the Atkins and Paleo diets along with cutting calories – but said that nothing worked.

Her weight often left her worried for her health. Many people in her family were at least 40 to 50lbs overweight, and a number of people had heart issues. 

Her father and uncle had heart attacks, while her aunt and sister had both needed a quadruple bypass – a surgery where doctors create new pathways for blood to flow to the heart that bypass severely blocked, major blood vessels.

After starting Mounjaro, which contains the active drug tirzepatide, Rankin said she initially did everything wrong, including eating only 600 calories a day because she was not hungry and could not force herself to eat.

She suffered from nausea as a symptom, but said she had never previously needed to throw up.

After the consecutive vomiting episodes, Rankin – who is a co-founder of the company MyCompanionBox, which sends small food samples to weight-loss drug users – made a change. She said she started to eat protein-rich meals regularly, and attended exercise classes.

Rankin was on Mounjaro, and then Zepbound (another brand-name GLP-1 agonist), and lost 50lbs in six to eight months – about 7lbs a month. After reaching her goal weight of 140lbs, she decided to gain back 10lbs because friends told her she looked gaunt.

She is currently still on 10mg a week of Zepbound and says she has no plans to quit the medication.

Rankin is shown above (center) before her weight loss. She is still taking Zepbound and says that she has no plans to quit the drug

Now, Rankin said she has gotten more comfortable with her use of the medication and how she manages her weight and food intake. 

These days, she only places foods she wants to eat on her plate. She has also learned to spread it out rather than piling things high – the latter visually leaves empty space on the plate and makes someone think more food should be added.

Still, dealing with unwanted input is a struggle.

‘In my family, it’s like, you know, nothing is ever quite right, and they will comment on whatever it is you’re doing,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘If you’re too fat and eat too much, people tell you you eat too much. But, if you’re all of a sudden skinnier, people will tell you that you need to eat more because they’re not used to what a skinny person eats.’

After several years of practice, Rankin has come into her own level of acceptance for herself.

‘I’m pretty comfortable telling everybody I know that I’m on a GLP-1 and am starting a company with a GLP-1-related business. So, for me, it’s just one of those things that I am happy with, how it has helped me,’ she said.

‘I feel like if I talk about it, then someone who’s worried or interested can learn about the drug.’