I was one of the first to take Ozempic. Seven years on, this is what it’s REALLY done to my body: SARAH VINE

I have just realised something: for the past seven years I’ve been in a relationship that has finally made me happy.

Seven years of not feeling a failure for not measuring up; seven years of not being trapped in a toxic co-dependency; seven years of emotional and physical stability; seven years of feeling – finally – comfortable in my skin.

Apart from my dogs, there’s nothing else that makes me feel that way.

It was summer 2018 when it first began, a chance encounter at the suggestion of a friend.

I had been struggling, and she could see I needed help. She put me in contact with her gastroenterologist, a man called Marcus Reddy. I made an appointment and it changed my life.

Marcus did more for me than any man has ever done: he freed me from a lifelong battle with food by putting me on a drug called liraglutide.

Back then, almost no one, save a few medical professionals, had heard of so-called fat jabs. Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro weren’t household names, like today.

Liraglutide (aka Saxenda) was a daily jab developed primarily to help pre-diabetic patients lower their insulin resistance. 

It worked by suppressing glucagon, a hormone that raises blood sugar. It also slowed gastric emptying, helping control appetite and post-meal glucose spikes.

A principal side-effect was, of course, weight loss. And the rest, as they say, is history.

My intention had been to ask for a gastric band. I was menopausal, my under-active thyroid was not responding to medication, my blood pressure was high, I was trapped in a vicious circle of losing weight on draconian diets and then putting it back on as soon as I started eating normally again.

I hated myself, my body. I felt tired, lethargic and depressed. I’d had enough.

Marcus was the first medical professional I saw who understood all this. He was neither judgmental nor dismissive, merely solutional. Instead of telling me to go away and eat soup, he offered a workable solution.

Liraglutide had been licensed in the US for several years, and the result with patients like me – essentially obese, middle-aged and pre-diabetic – had been excellent.

On the drug, I lost 15kg (about two-and-a-half stone in old money) and went from a solid size 18 to a much healthier and happier 14-16. 

After about a year, when the weekly jab (Ozempic) was licensed in the UK, I switched to a maintenance dose of that, and at the beginning of this year I changed again, to Mounjaro.

I remain very happy on a 10mg dose, injected every week to ten days, depending on how I feel.

I check in with Marcus every six months to ensure there are no adverse effects – but in seven years there have never been any.

I must be careful what I eat – it’s not good, for example, to eat super-rich or fatty foods or consume large quantities of alcohol. But isn’t that rather the point?

Provided I respect those rules, it’s been a very happy partnership. The benefits of being a healthy, stable weight are obvious – as are the mental ones. 

It’s done wonders for my self-esteem not to feel so ashamed of my body that I can’t bear to go swimming or shower at the gym. The other day I actually wore a sleeveless top – something I haven’t done since my 20s. It sounds silly, but it felt like a moment of triumph.

That’s in large part the reason I don’t understand the backlash against fat jabs. Sure, of course there’ll always be people who use them for the wrong reasons – but the same is true of aspirin.

For most patients, like me, under responsible medical supervision, they are life-changing – and very possibly also life-saving in the long run.

One trial involving over 17,000 overweight or obese patients found that Wegovy and Ozempic reduced the risk of heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death by 20 per cent.

There is also growing evidence that they lower dementia risk, most likely because of improved vascular health and anti-inflammatory effects, and the same is true of some cancers, again indirectly a side-effect of weight loss. 

And yet people carp about them. Not just the once-mighty diet industry, which for decades has grown fat from people’s desperation to be thin, but also those who see obesity as a moral issue, not a medical one, and who dislike the idea of fat people improving their lives without undue suffering. They believe jabs are ‘cheating’.

For my part, I reckon they’re simply annoyed that they can no longer lord it over others with their thigh-gaps and tiny wrists.

Regardless, I don’t care if they think I’m cheating.

The fact is that I can now climb the stairs without having an aneurysm, am able to wear jeans again and enjoy a day at the beach without hiding under a tent.

And that, crazy as it sounds, makes me very happy.

One final thought: Marcus recently told me that Mounjaro’s makers are working on a new jab.

It won’t be available for a couple of years, but when it is it’ll surely signal further progress in the battle against obesity.

Prepare for even sourer grapes.

Sydney racist? Blonde baloney! 

Such absurd nonsense over a jeans advert featuring Sydney Sweeney, left. Apparently,

the play on words, ‘I’ve got great genes/jeans’, is racist because she is blonde and blue-eyed. Really? As if there wasn’t anything more serious going on in the world right now…

Having suffered hair loss all my life, I’ve often been tempted by the idea of a transplant. But the death of a British man at a clinic in Turkey shows such operations are not as simple as they seem.

I think I’ll stick with my hairpiece. At least the only risk is that people may laugh at me.

That’s what bowing to Hamas gets you, Kier

Hamas refuses to disarm unless an independent Palestinian state has been established, with Jerusalem as its capital. We all know what that means. River to the sea, etc. 

Slow handclap to Sir Keir Starmer, who has turned his back on Israel by vowing to recognise a Palestinian state. 

This is the result of offering unconditional surrender to terrorists.

Not all plumbers are working class 

Comrade McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has made the asinine suggestion that only young people from ‘lower socio-economic backgrounds’ can take up civil service internships. 

Their credentials will be determined by the jobs their parents did when they were 14. Suitably humble occupations include receptionist, waiter, bricklayer and plumber. 

How patronising. 

Also, clearly Mr McFadden hasn’t engaged the services of a plumber recently. Just ask Charlie Mullins, founder of Pimlico Plumbers, who’s so rich he’s had to emigrate.