Still, I hesitated, and would have done nothing were it not for the internet. Out of the desert of online websites, so populous yet so dreary, one suddenly stood up: a weight loss clinic in central London.
Acquiring a course of Ozempic injections was pricey (£229 - about NZ$480) but easy. I completed the bare bones of an online form, adding a stone and a half to my actual weight, and, without anything as tricky as an in-person consultation, my order was accepted. This should give all sensible people pause. There is no universal panacea for weight gain, but we in the West have come to believe every fairy tale peddled at us by the tinkers of the quick fix. We can no longer stand up against a formidable foe like an expanding waistline and lick it in a fair fight the way our parents and grandparents did.
I only knew that my belly was spilling over my bikini bottom and my flight to Spain was three weeks away. It was on the morning of the day after I had begun the course that I became so ill. I wish it had been a simple case of nausea. Instead, I had such hog-whimperingly bad stomach pains that I doubled up. These were accompanied by a spectacular bout of something approximating dysentery, and a continuous but unfulfilled desire to vomit. No one believes in any medication absolutely, but I never expected a licensed drug to make me feel so bad.
My travails were not even rare. Sharon Osborne, who has admitted to Ozempic use, says she threw up continuously, adding that you “get used to it”. My caveat is, why in heaven’s name should you? If a medicine makes you ill and isn’t saving your life, there is something wrong, though one could say that of the present Tory government. Why isn’t Ozempic properly regulated? If I could get it so easily on a purportedly respectable website, then so could a younger person with even less of a sagacious apprehension of its relatively feeble virtues. The so-called beauty of the human frame, save for a brief time in youth, is almost always an illusion. Good health is not.
I stopped Ozempic after the first injection, but I have not yet regained my former zest, as it remains in the bloodstream for up to three weeks. As for my body’s clumsily distributed masses, they are as clumsily distributed as they were before. I am just as defective in form and not so aesthetically deaf and blind not to notice that I have gained nothing in the way of muscle.
There is a conspiracy of silence around weight loss, just as there is around the delusion that Western democracy, being a self-limiting disease, doesn’t possess a suicidal smack. There are thumping paradoxes in drugs like Ozempic, and its semaglutide cousin, Wegovy, including a disingenuous attempt to rid us of human striving. These are indeed desolate reflections of our present plutocracy, lacking honesty, longevity and, above all, courage. Any drug holding out the promise of turning menopausal suckers like me into wood nymphs is transient and lacks a goal. It’s merely an attempt to pave weight loss, like politics, with gold and precious stones.
- Petronella Wyatt is a Telegraph columnist
