I am essentially a thin man with a sunken chest cavity that, if I was lying on my back, a dog could drink from. This thinness is, however, sadly interrupted by a pronounced pot belly that gives me the overall appearance of one of those snakes you see in National Geographic that has somehow swallowed a goat. Thus, I gazed in awe at the actor Sacha Baron Cohen on the cover of Men’s Health magazine. He looked magnificent. He was quoted as crediting his success to a private chef, a personal trainer and Ozempic. My first thought was that being a private chef to someone on an appetite suppressant is nice work if you can get it. However, the very next day, the actor denied the Ozempic ingredient, insisting: “I got this body the honourable way,” seeming to suggest that any help from Ozempic would have been dishonourable.
Of course, having your picture in the newspaper is a common occurrence for celebrities. That Men’s Health cover might end up ironically framed on the actor’s toilet wall, but I doubt he’ll be snipping out the extended press coverage for his scrapbook. Not so when your average person appears in the press to mark some personal achievement. I remember, about 40 years ago, when my local paper, the oddly titled Smethwick Telephone, featured news of a girl who had been accepted to study geography at university. There was a helpfully illustrative photograph of her wearing a mortar-board and holding a globe. I bet that clipping gets an outing at family gatherings to this day.
The only time I remember such non-celebrity individual endeavour transcending local news and actually making the national press was the Big Trousers shot. This genre had a very precise house style. It would feature a man or woman wearing a pair of trousers, the waist of which was way too big for them. They, with a delighted expression, would stand, thumbs in belt-loops, showing the disparity between their waistline and that of the trousers. We veterans of the Big Trousers motif knew that the outsized garment belonged to the person now almost lost in a sea of fabric.
In short, they had, in an admirable display of self-discipline and eyes-on-the-prize determination, lost weight. This wasn’t mere opinion. Their hard work had been charted and verified. It was an example to us all. Old-fashioned perseverance could move mountains. The Big Trousers shot, appearing in the national press, was like the Grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. It reminded us that every citizen can, with courage, earn the right to be ranked among the great and good.
Then came Ozempic. Officially a diabetes treatment, it proved a great help to those who, for valid reasons, could never achieve Big Trousers status without medical assistance: people with serious obesity issues, not just people who wanted their cheekbones back. I don’t mind public figures getting hair transplants and cosmetic surgery – baldness and ageing cannot be beaten by willpower – but just buying weight loss seems somehow wrong when it has for so long been synonymous with self-sacrifice and restraint. Previous Big Trousers heroes must feel like those old cab drivers who gave years of their lives to learn the Knowledge, riding around on a moped with a roadmap on a makeshift lectern, only to see their efforts equalled or surpassed by any idiot with a satnav.
I love those film montages where the flabby hero pumps iron and runs up hills until, after 90 seconds of all-out effort, the Adonis emerges. The sequence would be considerably less inspirational if it was just repetitive shots of an injection pen going in. No one would be honouring Hillary and Tenzing’s conquering of Everest if they’d gone up by funicular.
What upsets me more than drugs for the sick becoming drugs for the vain is the idea of people getting credit for effort and self-discipline they didn’t employ. There’s too much of that going on: people with fake tans who haven’t had to endure the grim tedium of lying on a beach; bright young things in ripped jeans who didn’t acquire that wear and tear via hard labour or poverty; and comedians getting laughs supplied by a team of unacknowledged writers. It’s unjust. My penchant for moral outrage is one of the main reasons I haven’t spent hours in the gym. If I was extremely fit and strong and confronted with stuff like people illegally parking in a disabled bay, the potential for instantaneous vigilante justice would be, I fear, irresistible.
Ozempic has become more prevalent than tax avoidance in celebrity circles and seems to carry a similar degree of shame. Much conversation concerns who is or isn’t taking it. Those who are seem to become entranced by willpower-free dieting and just keep diminishing. They look great for a time but then seem to miss their stop on the dieting train and end up looking like an art-school drapery exercise.
It all reminds me of that old pub debate: if there were a pill that made you happy all the time, would you take it? Perhaps surprisingly, most people said no. The most common reason offered was that happiness that came synthetically would be unrewarding and somehow empty.
Anyway, today I start work on getting rid of that goat. Or maybe tomorrow.
[See also: The politics of murder]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025