"It's like people are being eaten away from the inside…"
All the things people* (*insiders, medics, agents, microdosers and other devotees, refuseniks, body acceptance activists, clinicians) are telling me on the DL about the weight loss jabs.
It’s a year pretty much since I ran this interview with a friend - one of the first I knew - who was on Ozempic. It was my most-read post for a long time. The most frequent comment on it? “How can I get this stuff too?”
A year is a VERY long time in weight loss drugs. This whole scene is moving fast and voraciously and inspiring intense passion. I’ve just come off my own form of weight loss drug: 36 hours with the vomiting bug currently taking out swathes of North London. I can’t remember feeling this ill. F**k me, I was ill! Couldn't even tolerate the mention of food. Couldn’t have the lightest form of waistband against my poor, wracked abdomen.
“But hey!” I thought to myself, at the grimmest darkest points. “I’m going to be really thin!” Which is pretty f**ked up. I mean, gallows humour, sure; but also a joke rooted in women’s constant, inescapable desire to be a bit thinner than they already are - even when that thinness will be a consequence of a vomiting sh*t show. Even when they know damn well, as I do, that they’re already thin enough, muscle suits them better these days, psychologically, physiologically AND aesthetically. Yet it’s still there in me, eh? That automated function, that revelry, in the idea of dropping a KG or two.
It could also be, of course, that I, like all of us, am living in a profoundly skinny-centric time suddenly. The skinny-centric-ist ever, probably. One that makes heroin chic look… a little chunky. “It’s different to that, definitely,” a friend, whose job brings her into regular contact with young actresses, Hollywood starlet and Hollywood-starlet-aspiring, many of whom are thin already but, as she puts it “on the jab”. “It’s like they’re being eaten away from the inside. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
According to Dr Susan Wylie, GP and medical advisor for IQ doctor, these jabs have “reset the visual benchmark” for what is considered “skinny”, making it smaller than ever before, making women who are a size 8, feel relatively big. And oh, that does track for me, honestly. Back before Christmas, a friend asked me if I was cross about losing my “USP”, IE, my relative slimness, to the incoming waves of what she called “Nouveau Skinny”. I honestly hadn't thought about it at that point, but now? I probably don’t even look that slim by comparison any more. And that probably is doing something to my sense of myself. Something not ideal.
Yikes.
“You’ve got to stop talking about ‘Ozempic’!” a friend told me. “Literally no one’s doing it any more. It’s all about Mounjaro.” This, then, was the first intimation I had of trends in weight loss jabs - but of course there were going to be fashions in weight loss jabs! Anyway. This mate had just microdosed Mounjaro for a month. She’s naturally slim, but had wanted to ditch the couple of KG she’d acquired over the winter. Of course, this is the kind of behaviour and usage against which we were stringently warned in the earlier stages of the Ozempic - sorry, Mounjaro - revolution (“It’s only for proper obesity! BMIs of over 30! It’s not for dropping a dress size before a wedding!” - remember that?) but which now has become standard practice