My weight has often fluctuated, but the last time anyone might have described me as “slim” was sometime during the George HW Bush presidency. My mother, who loves me very much, maintains that the problem is that I eat dinner too late. Would that it were: the problem is that I really like food. I’ve always comfort eaten in times of trouble .
Being overweight has rarely held me back. I’ve suffered neither health problems nor social stigma. (Men have it easier.) I walk long distances, cycle everywhere, even frequent a gym, and have been known to snap “I’m not sedentary!” at helpful doctors offering me pamphlets on the benefits of moving about.
But I am cursed with the vanity of a much slimmer man. It had come to upset me that my face had expanded, that clothes had ceased to fit, and photographs become a source of stress. Around 2013, I’d lost a load of weight doing “5:2” (essentially starve yourself until your brain ceases to function, but only twice a week), but that worked solely because I had a job with a predictable rhythm and, bluntly, because I was still in my early 30s. Older, as a freelancer living alone, I’d never quite managed it a second time. “If you were going to do it again,” one friend gently suggested, “I think you’d have done it by now.”
And so, shortly after Christmas, I joined the latest viral health trend. I Googled “Mounjaro” (better than Ozempic, I’d been told), braved the scales, and sent the least flattering photograph I could take to a private online pharmacy. I’ve since lost somewhere upwards of two stone.
The critics of drugs such as Mounjaro (and there are a lot) would suggest that this method of weight loss is, effectively, cheating. They ask, frequently and on public forums, what’s wrong with lifestyle changes? What’s wrong with discipline?
This is a line I suspect is only possible to take if you are not cursed with one of a number of invisible problems. A metabolism convinced it needs to cling onto calories, in case of some unforeseen crisis; a body chemistry that tells you, constantly and in all situations, to eat (“food noise”); a psychological history that’s created an unbreakable link between food and happiness. It’s difficult to reduce your dependence on anything to which you’re addicted.
I’m not convinced that’s all that’s going on there. At least some of those critics, I think, have invested a lot in the idea that others are bad and weak, while they are good and strong. The idea that an overactive appetite might be a moral failing rather than a matter of biology is, for some people, a source of self-esteem, not to mention an opportunity for socially sanctioned bullying.
Which is why, I suspect, there’s an odd code of silence around the use of the drugs. The treatments have, effectively, gone viral. I started because I’d seen what they’d done for friends; others have since started, because they’ve seen what they did for me. Many people, though, prefer not to talk about it. That’s their choice, but, well, bugger that. I’m on it, I’ve had blessedly few side effects, and I feel absolutely no shame about any of it.
And it’s worked. I still enjoy food: I just want less of it, and find it easier to make good choices. As the friend who first suggested it put it: “The jabs are my willpower.”
The result is that I’m down 16kg (35lbs) and counting without feeling I’m denying myself. Clothes I’ve not worn in a decade suddenly fit. My cheekbones, last seen before the pandemic, are back. And the other week, I walked into my therapist’s office after a two week absence, and she said I was looking slim, which is the best thing a therapist has ever said to me.
Ahh, those critics add as final volley, but when you get off the jabs you’ll just put the weight back on. This is potentially a problem. It is, however, a problem that applies to literally any diet or exercise regime ever invented. The new treatments are arguably under-regulated; they’re certainly not cheap if you’re not in the small group placed on them by the NHS, and it’s unfair that right now, access is often dependent on money. But they are, nonetheless, good.
The same cannot be said of the widespread impulse to get your kicks from fat-shaming strangers. That isn’t good at all.
[See more: What Conservatives get wrong about London]
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