What I learnt when I lost weight.

A few thoughts on being lighter

We all have one: a fantasy self who is snatched, sexy and scintillating. The version of oneself who never forgets the punchline, or who has to undo a few buttons after lunch. The snatched self never misses a deadline or an invitation. If only you were a few dress sizes smaller then all this would be a reality. I lived with this alternate reality for most of my life. I have always been in the words of my first BBC camera man, built for comfort not for speed, but it hasn't stopped me from doing anything I wanted - family , career, or friend wise, and yet…. there was always the chimera of that other thinner self effortlessly gliding through the very narrow doorways of life.

I have lost about 20 kg in the last eight months using a weight loss drug called Mounjaro. I started taking it partly for health reasons but mainly out of vanity. A great friend of mine had tried it and she was so positive about it and looked so great that I wondered what I had to lose except weight.

It’s a slow process, the weight graph goes down gradually but inexorably. The drug works by making you feel like you have just eaten, which means you end up eating half as much. After decades of trying to be carb free, or raw only, or eating only between 10 and 6, it turns out that the way to lose weight is to eat less. I still ate three meals a day, healthy ones, but they were much smaller. I also found myself never wanting more than one glass of wine. There were, inevitably, some side effect. Some nausea, some ( ahem) digestive disturbances… they lasted for a couple of days as my dosage increased, but they were manageable and short lived. Certainly none of my symptoms were as bad as the hangry short temperedness of being on a diet.

So now I am three stones lighter what is different? Well the most important thing is that I feel lighter. Not just physically but mentally. I have suffered from anxiety and depression for most of my life, and have spent years taking antidepressants. But in the last few months I have felt the gnawing anxiety that has been at my side all my adult life has pretty much dissolved. I don’t look into the future and expect catastrophe. I feel that whatever happens I will be able to cope. That may not sound remarkable to most people, but to me it feels miraculous. A weight has been lifted.

At first I thought the lightening of my mood might be just the relief of liking my reflection in shop windows, but it turns out that it is an actual thing. When my doctor compared my inflammation markers now to three years ago, they have vanished. Fat isn’t inert. It affects the hormonal balance in your body which in turn affects your mood. I feel lighter because I have less fat in my body. It turns out that Kate Moss may have been right when she said that ‘ nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. I hated the mean girl spirit of that remark, but it isn’t about being able to wear tiny clothes, it’s about being liberated from the heaviness of depression.

When I started on my ‘ weight loss journey’ I told no one. I was embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t happy with the way I looked. Eventually one of my daughters asked me outright if I was taking Ozempic and I had to admit that I was. I could tell that she disapproved, as do many of my slimmer friends, but they don’t walk in my shoes. As I got thinner I realised that it does change the ecosystem of your relationships, especially with other women. One friend looked me over , her eyes narrowing, and said, “ You do realise, don’t you, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Maybe, but as sixty three year old woman who has found a new buoyancy in life, I am ready to pay the bill. But you have to be prepared to accept that taking up less physical space upsets the equilibrium - things will happen that you won’t expect. One thin friend confided to me that she felt it was so much easier to talk me now that I had lost weight, “ I don’t have to be so careful about what I say.” My heavier self might brood about all the thin conversations I have been excluded from, but my uninflamed self couldn’t care less.

I wrote a piece in The Times about my weight loss, and lots of people congratulated me on my ‘bravery’. But really there is nothing brave about taking a drug that worked and then writing about it, except of course that being thin is a morally weighted issue. So taking a drug that works and writing about it is somehow admitting that you have cheated. Yet nobody thinks that people who take statins are cheating because they have artificially lowered their cholesterol levels.

Some random thoughts. I hope they are helpful for anyone who is thinking about taking a weight loss drug. Clearly my experience is an individual one but I hope there is more research done into the link between losing fat and feeling lighter. I love that my waist is the same now as it was when I was eighteen, but even better is feeling like nothing can weigh me down.