7 New Rules on How To Be Skinny
Because: babe! We're living in the Age of Ozempic. And it's changing EVERYTHING.
How was your first Ozempic Christmas? Did you - like me - register a dramatic decrease in canapé consumption? Pigs in blankets, untouched, piled precariously high, limp cheese straws, languishing on sideboards like fainting Victorian ladies, turkey dinners, cooled and gelatinous and wasted? Did also you see a marked increase in palpably slinkier-than-last-year party goers, minxing around in sequinned frocks shorter and tighter than any they’d contemplated in decades, squeezing through gaps they wouldn't have risked as recently as Christmas ‘23, drinking in the compliments, but being vague on the methodology?
If you didn't see all that, this year - believe me: you will, next. Ozempic - the brand name on semaglutide, the self-administered weekly jab which mimics the production of the hormone triggered by your stomach when it’s full, making users just really not want to eat anything much, ever, which means they lose weight, a lot of weight, and they lose it fast - is only just getting started with us.
And, like I say: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.
For starters:
“You realise you’re losing your USP,” a friend hissed at me, one pre-Christmas booze up. “Everyone’s thin now! It’s not just you!”
She pointed at the hordes of the newly-skinny.
“Are you furious?” she asked. “You must be!”
“No! Why would I be? I don’t know! Am I?” I said.
“Depends how much you secretly value being slim,” she said. “Depends how heavily you identify with it, despite everything you say, to other people, to yourself. Depends how much you cherish the tacit approval bestowed upon you by a society which pretends it’s not fat-phobic and skinny-obsessed - but which totally is. Depends how acutely you’ll experience a forthcoming drop in status, how much you’ll care when it goes into freefall in a world entirely reconfigured by weight loss jabs, how you’ll cope, when you’re just one more slim person, in a world full of them, when the kudos attached to slimness is diminished… Although, of course, it will still exist as a signifier on socio economic privilege, because only the relatively wealthy can afford to buy the jabs privately,” she said.
“So I’m going to look like just one more moneyed skinny bitch?” I said.
“Basically.”
Oh God, I thought.
“I’m furious,” said someone else, someone who’d lost two stone through the course of 2023, and kept it off, using old school methods: diet and exercise. “I feel like I bought a dress full price, a week before it was reduced in the sales - by 70%!”
OH GOD! I thought.
The next day, I texted a friend - a lost-weight-on-Ozempic friend - and asked what she wanted for Christmas
“To stay thin,” she replied.
Blimey! I thought. Then: We definitely need some new rules, here.
And so I came up with some.
RULE ONE: Absolutely, categorically no more…