'I tried anti-obesity medication and these were the surprising side-effects'
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“My god you look good”, an old friend said to me at a big gay party last weekend, as I stood there in a Halloween costume that revealed a shy-making amount of skin. “What’s your secret? Did you get hold of the real Isabella Rossellini from Death Becomes Her”. No, instead I have discovered the transformative power of weight loss jabs. I am 5 weeks into Mounjaro, the weekly injectable medication that contains Tirzepatide, an active ingredient that supresses and regulates your appetite. Ozempic is perhaps the more famous, but Mounjaro seems to be the current favourite.
To look at me, you wouldn’t necessarily think I needed to start weight-loss injectables, but I really did. During the pandemic, I escaped to the Northumbrian countryside to live with my parents. I adored being home, but my waistline did not. Post a month of that insufferable banana bread, I went full Bake Off, and let the entire household eat cake. Thusly, having been a 32inch waist for all of my thirties, coming into my forties I shot up to a 34, then due to a series of indulgent cheese and schnitzel fuelled trips to Austria, I crept further to a 36. This summer my tailor thought I might even have to go further, as he fitted me with black tie trousers — I went ashen, and I asked him to re-measure me four times. Larger and larger handmade trousers are a very expensive slip into a middle-aged middle.
Self-indulgence comes hideously naturally — I see something and I want to eat it. Millefeuille appears in front of me, I’ll wolf it in seconds. Having dinner with a famous editor once in Mayfair, I hoovered down a Shepherd’s pie in record time and got a very judgy, “gosh Henry, I didn’t know you had such an appetite. That was for two”. Entertaining for a living means that most days involve some sort of food indulgence – three course meals, twice a week, is fabulous, but it does fatten one up like a dairy cow. A few months back, a famous society photographer exclaimed “now suck in, Hen”, and I knew I had to grip my dreaded expansion.
