How I Lost Inches in 2023

Or, what happened when I went to see a doctor about taking Ozempic

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Content Warning: this email touches on bad relationships with our bodies, disordered eating and weight stigma. If you’re not into that, I totally understand. There’s lots of other content here to dig into.

---

“157”

“I’m sorry?”, I said, looking at the nurse with confusion. “I think there’s been some mistake. I’m 161.”

“Let me check again,” he said.

I stood back on the machine in the corner of the cold, white room and waited for his pronouncement.

“157”

“It can’t be! I’ve been 161 my entire adult life!”

“Not anymore. Your current height is 157cm”

And just like that, I’d gone from being a shade under 5’3 (ok, 5’2 and a half but the half is important!) to being 5’1 and a bit. Apparently the universe had got my message that in 2023 I’d like to lose a few inches but had taken them from the one place I can’t afford to lose them. Perhaps I should have known that the universe would like to have a little laugh at my expense. You see, that wasn’t just any doctor’s appointment. On that day, not quite a year after I’d written a furious piece about the commercialisation of women’s weight-loss, I’d gone to see a private GP with the aim of requesting Ozempic and putting myself on the skinny drug beloved by celebrities such as Sharon Osbourne and Adele (allegedly).

If you want to be smaller, the universe had said, so shall it be.

---

Way back in 2014 a woman asked me a question that changed how I thought about my body. I’d been explaining how, for as long as I could remember, I had been on a quest to be thinner but this time I really thought I’d cracked the code. I remember her looking at me for a moment and then asking,

“If you knew you were never going to be any thinner, what would you do?”

The answers poured out of me: I’d go on a yoga retreat, I’d write a book, I’d dance more, I’d have more sex, I’d wear whatever felt good with no regard to what anyone else thought, I’d pitch a TV show, I’d do some stand-up, I’d cook more, I’d take up more space, I’d … the list was never-ending. Simply freeing my head from thinking of ways in which I could be thin, had at the same time opened up space for all the other things I could be doing with the time I currently spent trying and failing to lose weight. There was so much creativity which was being starved of oxygen by my obsession with my size.

In that moment I realised how much of my life had been put on hold in a quest for a body that I just didn’t seem able to attain. So I stopped. There and then I stopped aiming for another body and instead focussed on loving the one I was in and really living in it. Ironically in doing this, I dropped a load of weight and became the fittest I have ever been. And then I gained the weight back, my fitness dropped to entirely average levels and I carried on with life. But I didn’t go back to dieting.

That was nearly a decade ago.

The good news was that back in 2014 not only was I embracing my body as it is but everyone else was too. #BodyPositivity was taking off on social media and I learned to curate my feed so that all I was seeing were beautiful images of women of all shapes and sizes loving on their bodies. When this morphed into a feed of slim (if not thin) white women, contorting themselves into strange positions so that they could pinch an inch of flesh and talk about how they’d overcome their body shame, I took it upon myself to find the beginnings of the body positivity movement.

I learned that it was rooted in fat acceptance and the fight against racial injustice. I followed content creators who were larger than me, who were brown and black, disabled, neurodiverse, old - anything other than the young, skinny, white ideal I’d been taught to aim for. I learned to understand the privilege my body held and I started to see it in a new light. There is an uncomfortable shift that has to be made to recognise this, to see your body not just as the physical form of you but as a political tool, a weapon that only sometimes is fighting on your side and occasionally is being used to kill other people. Understanding my privilege as a white woman who is “small fat” (a term used by the Fat Acceptance movement to describe people who wear the smaller end of plus-size clothing) was key to letting go of my desire to change my body. Did I want to be part of a system that pitted women against each other based on male opinion? No, I did not.

Slowly I moved from the teeth-rottingly sweet energy of the online #bopo movement, through an angry rage at the injustice inflicted on myself and others, finally to a gentle acceptance. A place where my body just was and I allowed it to be. Some days I felt like celebrating it, others I found myself in conflict with it but at all times, I accepted it for what it was and loved it anyway.

And then Ozempic happened.

---

I talked to a friend about Ozempic last month and she’d never heard of it. At the time I wondered how that was possible - it has been all I’ve seen in my news feed for the last year - but then I realised, she’s thin.

In case you’ve also missed the Ozempic madness, let me give you a brief history. Way back in 2012, researchers at a company called Novo Nordisk, created a new drug aimed at helping Type 2 diabetes patients manage their blood sugars. The drug claimed to increase insulin production while also reducing insulin resistance. It was finally approved and launched at the end of 2017 and it was a huge success.

Not only did users of the drug report lowered blood glucose levels but they also reported weight-loss. Ozempic “cured” you of the need to eat, people could literally starve themselves and feel nothing. The “skinny injection” was born. Celebrities who’d been targeted for their weight, started showing up on red carpets half the size they’d been six months before claiming they’d suddenly discovered diet and exercise. Friends living in the States reported that “everyone is on it” and stories appeared of models using it before fashion week to drop the 10 pounds that they definitely didn’t need to lose. Black market versions of the drug were being manufactured and sold on the dark-web. And Novo Nordisk saw its stock skyrocket.

It officially launched in the UK in 2022. You could buy it from Boots for £150 a month, as long as you had a prescription. And if you didn’t have a prescription then you could talk to the Boots Online Doctor about getting one. Or if you couldn’t afford that then, their website tells you, they have lots of other products available for weightloss - including those tablets that make you shit yourself every time you put butter on your toast.

My social media feed filled with women taking the drug offering advice on how to cope with the inevitable constipation and burping. Meanwhile, newspapers wrote think-piece after think-piece on whether or not obese people taking Ozempic was a good thing for their health or an example of their inherent laziness.

For a while I ignored the noise. Then I got angry with it. And then I started to think, what would it be like to be thin?

---

There have been a few moments in my life when I have been thinner. Never thin but thinner. The first came when I was about seventeen and had become friends with a girl who I now realise had a very serious eating disorder. We would go to the gym every day after school and I copied exactly what she ate, which wasn’t much. I got down to a size ten and stayed there for exactly six weeks before half term happened. When I returned to school the daily slog at the gym didn’t seem quite so inviting so I stopped going and she made friends with someone else.

There was the summer of 2002 when I discovered Atkins and returned to my second year of university half the size I’d left it. I was so proud of this new body and keen for it to be recognised as the triumph I thought it was. That pride lasted until the auditions for the annual drama society pantomime. British universities in the early ‘00s were still dominated by posh boys and mine was no different. The pantomime was Peter Pan, the director and producers were all boys and the casting of it went like this: the lead role went to the woman they all wanted to sleep with (who was a total delight and couldn’t have been less interested in any of them), the main characters went to their (male) friends and the rest of the ensemble cast was divided into two groups: “the lost boys” (made up of women they deemed to be attractive) and “the pirates” (made up of women they deemed to not be attractive"). I was a pirate. All that weight lost - all those eggs I’d eaten! - and it wasn’t enough. Because of course, to me, thinness wasn’t just about being thin, it was about being good enough. And who decided if I was good enough? Men.

This theme repeated itself across the years. There was 2008 when I took up cycling to my job on the other side of London and met a man who spent four years asking me how much I weighed and why wasn’t I the same size I’d been when we met? And then there was 2012 where I discovered “clean eating”, dropped a load of weight and hoped that the men I worked with would finally take me seriously, only to realise they’d simply moved me from “don’t listen to AND don’t shag” to “shag but don’t listen to” in their minds.

I sometimes wonder if it took me so long to find acceptance with my body because I didn’t want to admit that the thing driving me, taking up so much of my brain-space, was actually about being accepted and approved of by men. That need does not sit well with my chosen identity as a 21st century woman who makes her own decisions and sees no area in which men have a greater authority than women. It’s much more socially acceptable to say that I want to be thin for my health or so that I look better in clothes or because I want to fit in with the cool girls, than it is to say that I want Barry in IT to find me attractive even though I wouldn’t look twice at him.

The key part of the body acceptance movement is, in my mind, this need to admit how much of our lives have been dedicated to pleasing men and reclaiming that space for pleasing ourselves. It’s no coincidence that I first started to find peace in my body when I started pursuing all of the things I was putting off doing until I was thin. I gave myself permission rather than waiting for someone else to approve of me and it freed me.

Learning to accept my body didn’t mean that I never wanted to change it. I didn’t suddenly stop hearing the siren call of thinness but I did learn to listen to it and then let it float off across the ocean to the land of self-hatred, a place I tried not to visit too often.

A few years ago, on a walk with an ex-boyfriend, he asked me what I’d change about my body if I could change anything. Before I’d had a second to think, he jumped in.

“I know,” he crowed. “You’d be thin!”

I can remember being genuinely surprised at this. We’d talked about my weight and how I’d learned to love my body as it was. He certainly seemed to love my body as it was, so where had this come from? I can also remember being delighted by my reaction - he’d offered me what he thought was the obvious answer and I didn’t want it. Being thin didn’t have the same hold over me that it once had. I’d far rather have perfectly straight teeth or eyebrows that never needed plucking or eyelashes that were a darker shade so that people could see how long they were without me having to layer on mascara or spend £25 a month getting them dyed. Changing my body now was tiny tweaks that would make my life easier or show off something I already loved. And besides,

“If I was thin, I wouldn’t be me.” I replied. “I wouldn’t have had my life’s experiences or developed into the person I am now if I hadn’t been fat. My body gave me this, I wouldn’t change it.”

And in that moment, I absolutely meant it.

---

Back in June of last year the lower back pain which had been quiet since I’d had a slipped disc operated on in 2020, returned. At first it was just a general feeling of soreness, then stiffness and then the morning when I couldn’t get up off the floor. As I lay in bed, off my head on prescription pain-killers, I wondered; was this my fault? I was in the same decade my mother had been in when she’d had her first hip replacement, if my body started crumbling would I be able to save it? Would this be happening if I was thin?

I’d moved house and the stress combined with being five minutes down the road from one of the best farm shops in the country had seen me put on weight. Unusually for me though, this weight had gone straight around my waist - like someone had blown up a rubber ring I wasn’t aware I was wearing. I started to panic that this was middle-age hitting me in my most vulnerable spot, that this was the start of a spread that would see me eventually blending into my sofa.

Meanwhile, for the first time in a decade, my social media feed suddenly featured women on diets. Women who I’d admired for their compassionate and gentle approaches to their body, who’d proudly spoken about how the diet culture of the early ‘00s had scarred them, started posting about how they weren’t on a diet but they just wanted to “feel a bit better in myself”. Newspapers published articles about how body positivity was out and thin was in. Kate Moss was the face of Diet Coke.

I cut back on the farm-shop treats and upped my exercise from dog-walking and a bit of yoga, to hitting step-counts and strength training. I bought a set of scales and diligently stood on them each morning - I’m still standing on them each morning - watching the numbers go up and down. I realised how fragile peace was, because just like that mine had been broken.

If I look at it now I can see that I had a lot of change in a short amount of time. I moved to a part of the country I didn’t know and tried to build a life from the ground up. The house I’d rented had numerous problems and I felt like I was living in someone else’s renovation project. I was trying to run a business and keep the money coming in, worrying that leaving London would be the end of my media career. And then my flat in London was flooded and I found myself dealing with insurance companies and mortgage brokers and sheer terror that I’d end up having to sell it because I couldn’t afford to fix it. When I look at that, it seems obvious that going back to the old obsession of weight would be easier than focussing on all the other points of stress. It was comfortingly familiar.

So I started looking into Ozempic. What were the side-effects? It was licensed for use with Type 2 diabetes but could I as a Type 1 diabetic take it? What would I need to do to ensure that it worked but also that I could come off it without regaining any weight I did lose? And how would I feel if I took it and stayed the same? I spoke to my girlfriends about it and waited for them to tell me I was great as I was but they all said the same thing,

“If it makes you feel good about yourself, go for it.”

Would it make me feel good about myself? I don’t know. The problem I wrestle with is that I know what it’s like to feel pretty good about myself and I didn’t need to be thin to find that. I like who I am, I like the body I live in. I appreciate its rolls and curves, I like the way it feels under my hands. I wish it looked better in clothes but then I also know that my (now) 5’1 self is never going to be able to pull off a dress in the way someone with another six inches of height can, and I’m ok with that. When I sit quietly with my body and ask my heart, do I need to be thin?, a gentle answer comes back:

“No love, we’re good as we are.”

But when I step out into the world, things change.

People have opinions and they rarely keep them to themselves. If I appear on TV, something that is part of my job, I automatically expect to write-off 48 hours to abuse on social media around my weight. Dating is harder because not only do you have to find someone who finds you attractive but you have to find someone who finds you attractive AND is prepared to fall out with their mates (who will also have opinions on your size) in order to stand up for you. People are less likely to hire you (because we’ve inherently linked fatness with laziness in our minds). Life is just a little bit more difficult. And when everything else is in life is hard, wouldn’t it be nice for my weight to be easy? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to fight the world for a bit? To just blend in?

So I come back to the question, should I take Ozempic?

Maybe it wouldn’t make me feel better about myself but perhaps it would make life easier? Would that be enough to bring me peace?

---

I’ve never liked being short. When it was time to take the school photograph, I would line up hopefully towards the shorter end of the middle of the pack, stretching my neck as long as I could while the poor teacher assigned to placing 400 giggling children into height order, moved one child after another in front of me.

I have tall friends who think my height is a privilege. Surely I’d rather be my height than have hit 5’10 at 14 and spent the rest of my teenage years hunched over, hoping no-one trilled out the “gosh, aren’t you tall for your age!” line once again? But I used to look at those girls with awe - how fabulous to be able to glide through the world, at the very least eye-to-eye with everyone older (and therefore more powerful) than you and sometimes even able to look down on them. Imagine!

I’ve as rarely met a woman satisfied with her height as I have a woman satisfied with her weight - except for those who are dead on 5’6 and therefore will never know the pain of desiring a pair of trousers that are just the wrong length for them. Sometimes it feels as though the world is scared of women being satisfied. Because if we were satisfied then… what? We’d rest? We’d take time for ourselves rather than other people? We’d become hairy and soft and revolting to men? We’d revolt against men?

Because I’d lost a bit of weight before I walked into that doctor’s office, I was feeling pretty confident about the inevitable discussion around my BMI. It’s not that I expected it to be good but I was hopeful it would be a bit better than it had been. Except it wasn’t… because I’d shrunk. According to the mathematical calculation that the NHS lives by (weight in kg / height in metres squared), I might have lost weight but my BMI had gone up. I’d done what I was supposed to do and, it wasn’t enough.

Why does that sound so familiar?

---

I’m leaving comments on for now but I am really NOT asking for your opinions or advice on Ozempic / weightloss / body acceptance etc. I would, however, love to hear what this piece brings up for you and your experiences with your own body. Any comments on my body / offering me advice will be deleted.