Nine years ago I embarked on a weight-loss mission. I shed four and a half stone walking four miles a day and doing an hour in the gym every morning.
I think this is why I have a Pavlovian reaction of envy when I bump into friends who have lost huge amounts of weight on jabs such as Mounjaro and Wegovy.
They’ve done it without stepping into a gym, just by injecting themselves against their desire to eat. I worked so, so hard and am still fat. They haven’t worked at all and are as thin as little pins.
I’m still fat because, in 2020, I injured my knees in a cycling accident and could no longer go to the gym so, like 99 per cent of people who lose weight by effort, I have – gradually – put the weight back on.
Not all of it; at around 14st 12lb, I’m a stone and a half under my heaviest but – now a size 18 – I’ve lost all pretence of svelteness. People now tell me how well I’m looking, not how fit, which is code we fat people understand.
And the truth is, it has felt especially miserable this summer. It seems everyone else is shrinking away at an Alice In Wonderland rate, while I picked the wrong Drink Me potion. Seeing Robbie Williams, Rebel Wilson, Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams and former body positivity queen herself Lizzo (all of whom have admitted using weight-loss drugs) sashaying around looking skinny and amazing in that way I always wanted to be, has made me gloomy and jealous.
What’s worse is that it’s not just the celebs. Four of the girlfriends I love most in the world are now tiny versions of their previous selves.
Susannah Jowitt says she has felt especially miserable this summer. It seems everyone else is shrinking away at an Alice In Wonderland rate, while she picked the wrong Drink Me potion
‘I lost 5st, I look better and I move better: absolute no-brainer!’ says one when I ask her if she will continue to use her Mounjaro, even after this week’s price hike.
One angry plus-sized writer has even dubbed it Shrinking Girl Summer and I’m with her: for women like her and me, it feels like a betrayal, especially when I talk to others who have taken it when they’re not even fat.
‘Oh, you know, darling, everyone thinks they’re fat – and I just wanted to be able to fit into my old Armani clothes.’
It feels like a blink of an eye since the body positivity movement pledged to change all of this, encouraging us to love our curves.
In 2017 the size 16 supermodel Ashley Graham became one of the most recognised faces on the catwalk; in 2018, the truly plus-size Tess Holliday graced the cover of Cosmopolitan, followed by Lizzo on the cover of Vogue. Inclusivity was in; self-love was the sexiest thing of all; everything was curvy and wonderful.
This made me feel infinitely more relaxed about the curves settling back onto my hips and tum. Maybe it didn’t have to be the end of the world that I was back to my usual size 16 self if this was now so acceptable?
American singer and actress Lizzo, a former body positivity queen, on the cover of the September issue of Women’s Health
So I led the fanfare when brands such as Nike, River Island and Lululemon expanded their size ranges. I even saved my pennies and in 2022 went into a Victoria Beckham store when she supposedly launched a plus-size range (only to find she’d only actually made one version of each outfit in a size 18 per shop or outlet – about five in total – and they’d sold out on the first day).
The sheer tokenism of that experience was when I began to suspect that body positivity wasn’t much more than a woke headline. Now Shrinking Girl Summer has proved it.
This year, major catwalks were devoid of larger models. Meanwhile, the more expensive High Street stores are quietly cutting back on their bigger sizes and leaning into their newly-slim, weight jab-using customers.
There are at least 1.5 million users of weight loss jabs in the UK, after all, and likely many more who don’t admit to it.
‘My own research shows me that nearly one in 12 people – mostly, but not exclusively, women – have now tried GLP-1 agonists,’ says Dr Andrew Jenkinson, bariatric surgeon and weight loss expert, referring to the medical umbrella term for Mounjaro, Ozempic and the like.
With an average weight loss of 15 to 20 per cent, that’s a lot of people shopping for a new ‘skinny’ wardrobe. So why haven’t I joined the jab revolution when so many of my peers have?
Oprah Winfrey has admitted using weight-loss drugs
Because I fear it is a trap. Financially, emotionally and psychologically, it seems to me that relying on GLP-1 agonists to stay slim locks you into a regime from which it is very hard to escape.
First and foremost, what its fans never mention, is that it’s expensive – since the price hike this week, the highest 15mg dose of Mounjaro could easily cost you £335 a month. Wegovy is cheaper, but marginally less effective and now at least £200 every month.
Still, don’t you save that on food and booze? Dr Jenkinson – who also wrote How To Eat (And Still Lose Weight) – tells me a fellow surgeon who signs off on 4,000 prescriptions for weight-loss jab courses each day (as an enormously profitable weekend side hustle) has noticed something extraordinary about the demographics.
‘Based on the tens of thousands of addresses, postcodes, names and photos he sees while signing off on the GLP-1s, a noticeable number are from working-class areas in the North and North East,’ he says.
‘These are people prepared to spend £150 to £200 a month on weight-loss jabs because they save that on the food and booze they are no longer consuming.’
Tennis star Serena Williams has slimmed down but kept her athletic physique
For those on Mounjaro, the price hike may well change that calculation. No matter how little you’re eating, it would be hard to save £335 on one person’s food shop. In a cost of living crisis, the maths just doesn’t add up: it’s certainly too much for my overloaded household budget.
But it’s not just the money – it’s the fact that, once you start, these jabs are almost impossible to come off.
‘When you stop injecting the weight-loss drugs, the effect stops immediately and the weight goes back on,’ Dr Jenkinson tells me.
‘Typically, within a year, by two-thirds. Scarier still, within two years, people tend to be heavier than when they started. The problem is that nearly half the weight lost [40 per cent] will be from muscle mass but, especially if you’re over 40, muscle mass is incredibly difficult to regain, so what goes back on is fat and it’s the unhealthy central – or visceral – fat, which then nosedives you into an increased risk of diabetes and cancer.’
Which means, once you pop, you actually can’t stop. You’re on the jabs for life. These people are trapped, both financially and physiologically. I do not want to be a hostage to fortune, or lack of it.
There are many women for whom that’s not a problem: who don’t care that they’ve effectively medicalised their appetite for life. They don’t want to come off the jabs entirely because GLP-1s don’t just get them thin, but help in other ways too.
‘I’ve done my research very thoroughly and it’s borne out by my own experience,’ says my friend Lesley, 61, who dropped from a size 16 to a 12 within a year and now ‘microdoses’ for maintenance. ‘These drugs – in particular the Mounjaro combination of peptides and GLP-1s – create a neurological link between satiety [the medical expression for feeling full] and emotional security,’ she says.
‘In other words, they are proven not only to ensure you lose weight but also to make you feel better. And that, for me and for the thousands of women for whom food and weight issues are inextricably tangled with feelings of failure and low self-esteem, is priceless.’
This does give me pause for thought. I used to torture myself for being fat and I know that for many women, food then becomes the self-flagellating tool by which they punish themselves.
Could the fat jab trap be better than the uncontrolled eating trap? ‘I’m just so relieved to have found Mounjaro,’ Lesley concludes. ‘It broke the malign spell I had somehow cast over myself. I don’t care how much I have to pay to feel this way.’
I am delighted for her, of course, but I am also angry that a £20billion to £80billion weight-loss injection industry has ensnared her – and her bank balance – with the promise of a ‘fix’ to problems that were created by other hugely profitable industries: the fashion business telling us to be thin, the food industry selling us ever cheaper foods to make us fat.
What body positivity offered was a chance to break free from these spirals, liberating women from the pressure to spend money on shrinking themselves. And yet a few short years later, here we are.
Yes, the data about mental health outcomes is good – but this is mostly from research paid for by Big Pharma.
Besides, it is all very new – we are exactly two years into the ‘GLP-1s for cosmetic weight-loss revolution’ (semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy weight-loss injections, was launched in the UK on September 4, 2023) – so we have no real certainty about their long-term neurological effect, beyond the known chances of developing vision problems and an association with the dangerous condition pancreatitis.
Call me Cassandra, but when I quiz Dr Jenkinson about this, the worst case scenario is that there is some more general, and unforeseen, neurological or pancreatic consequence and GLP-1s are taken off the market.
Then we have millions doomed to certain and catastrophic weight increase – an actual explosion of fat – within two years of stopping. Sometimes I feel like the lone grumpy voice in a roomful of happy thin women but I can’t help thinking that we have still failed to address the root of the West’s obesity epidemic.
We blamed high fat in the 1970s and 1980s, so stuffed everything with preservatives and sugar instead. Then we blamed calories and put everyone on low-cal regimes.
Seeing the likes of actress Rebel Wilson sashaying around looking skinny and amazing made Susannah gloomy and jealous
Yet calorie-counting in some ways is an even more dangerous mask over the real problem because that leads to a kind of long-term starvation that can screw our metabolisms and actually make us fatter in the long run.
We have the miracle of weight-loss jabs – but for how long? ‘Weight gain isn’t just about greed,’ explains Dr Jenkinson, who also runs a website called MyMetabology.com to advise on combining microdosing GLP-1s with a targeted diet.
‘So weight loss cannot just be about turning off that greed. It’s built around insulin resistance, your ratio of Omega-3 and Omega-6 oils, genetic metabolic predisposition, stress, how you sleep and your levels of melatonin, the cellular junk created by ultra-high-processed (UHP) foods… I could go on.’
I thank him, heart sinking. It all sounds like terribly hard work.
And that’s the unpalatable truth. Losing weight is hard work. I should know. For whatever the reason you are overweight, it seems to me the only way to safely and affordably get back down again is to understand your body, listen to the experts, and change the way you eat forever, with as much thought to long-term health as the number on the scales.
If this Shrinking Girl Summer proves anything, it is that we are addicted to skinniness, no matter what the cost to our wallets and long-term health.
I’m certainly tempted by the siren of swift and easy weight loss. But I’m going to avoid the fat jabs and instead concentrate on resisting the seductiveness of the food industry, the fashion industry and Big Pharma. Even if I am the only one.
- Fat, So? by Susannah Jowitt (£8.99, Think Publishing) is out now on Amazon
