It’s the colossal relief I recognise, like being out on parole after a stretch in prison. So many girlfriends – some famous, some not – have expressed it. We meet for a coffee or lunch and they look amazing. No secret about why.
I don’t buy this idea that women, even those in the public eye, are trying to hide it; mostly they can’t wait to tell you. ‘I’m on Ozempic,’ they say. Or Wegovy. Or Mounjaro.
Whatever they are injecting into their (shrinking) thighs, it is working miracles, not just because they are suddenly – finally! – thin, but because they have been handed something more precious: Freedom. They have escaped that endless cycle of destructive thinking, no longer obsessing about what they ate yesterday or what they might eat tomorrow.
Finally, they can concentrate on love, friendship, careers, worrying about the universe, life itself – anything but being bogged down in that dreadful pit of self-loathing. They don’t have to feel guilty, or apologise, or agonise about how much cake they ate when they were just taking a sliver to ‘even it up’.
They have found the holy grail. I’m thrilled for them, genuinely, and only a tiny bit envious.
I got to the same place myself – the place where my size, or what I put in my mouth, was not the thing I thought about first in the morning – but only after decades of torment and two operations, the last one a gastric bypass which made it physically impossible for me to overeat.
The first operation in 2010 was to insert a gastric band, which later had to be carved out of me with more surgery when it became embedded in my liver. (Ironically the only food that slipped down easily with the band was chocolate mousse, which defeated the purpose.)
Since I had the bypass, a procedure where the stomach is stapled so food bypasses it, in 2019, I’ve been a size 12 to 14 and – more importantly – free of the guilt and self-recrimination that was such a huge part of my life before. The operation broke the food addiction cycle for me in a way that nothing else had been able to.
Imagine if Ozempic had been around at the time, though – a time at which I was on television every day. The years of hell I could have erased. Would I have taken it? Of course I bloody would.
I know this is the point where you might expect me to say that women shouldn’t have to obsess about reaching the perfect weight, that we should love ourselves whatever size we are. But when you are made to feel like a failure because you are not thin enough, that’s a hard thing to achieve.
Granted, I come into the Ozempic debate with my own ample baggage. I was just 20 when my mother thought she had found her own weight-loss holy grail, scoring amphetamines from her hairdresser and passing them on to me.
They were the Wegovy of that era, but addictive and much more dangerous. The pounds evaporated. Chunks of skeleton were visible beneath my skin. I wasn’t just thin but gaunt, and I loved it, as did my mother. She gave the hairdresser a tip and said: ‘Get us more, sweetheart.’ The side effects were horrific.
Everything speeds up on Speed, as amphetamines are known. During my finals at Cambridge the exam papers were a blur, and my breath smelled of nail varnish remover. The thought of food made me heave, I couldn’t sleep and my heart was beating out of my chest.
I didn’t take those little yellow pills for long. I will never know if they did me permanent harm, but I do believe that the dieting cycle they started me on messed up my metabolism for ever.
The tragedy is that I didn’t need them at the time. At most a size 12, I was a skinny little girl, a picky eater who wouldn’t touch cheese or sponge cake and whose mother poured tinned pears over lamb chops to ‘trick’ me into eating them.
I was slim until puberty struck at the age of eight, which was startling for my parents. My mother whisked me to the doctor to ask if the swelling in what she called my ‘chestal area’ could be cancer. She was horrified to discover I was simply an early developer.
I certainly developed an issue with weight. I feel it was Mother’s gift to me, wrapped in a big pink ribbon. Her own mother had thought her ‘well upholstered’ and likened her to a sofa, declaring ‘no apple pie for you tonight’ on the grounds that a fat girl would never find a husband.
My mother followed suit. When she put me on my first diet – aged nine – I genuinely don’t think she was being unkind. She wanted to protect me from stigma, and being fat was a stigma.
The thing is, I don’t think I was destined to have weight issues, not until she and my father – and they were united – started restricting what I ate.
Their dinner would be soup with kreplach, kneidlach and lokshen (wontons, dumplings and noodles), mine would be half a grapefruit.
Was I food obsessed then?
Of course, because I was hungry! When I was free to eat I would scoff everything as I never knew when my next meal was coming.
At the end of my first term at university, my mother said not ‘welcome home’ but ‘shall I bounce you in? You’re a great big pumped-up beach ball’. Career achievements never quite made up for the disappointment my parents expressed about my weight.
‘You could be so pretty. Why are you doing this to yourself?’ my mother would say. When I got my own TV show in 1994, there were official PR photos taken. My parents rang to say I looked huge in them. I went to the bakery for an emergency doughnut.
The feeling of being watched as I ate, and judged, was a constant. In my years in the public eye I have been as large as a size 22 and as small as a size 10 – with every step of the yo-yo cycle up for debate and comment.
Little wonder every ‘larger’ celebrity seems to have shrunk these days, given the intensity of that scrutiny. They are all on Ozempic – or seem to be. And I don’t blame them.
To have complete strangers shout from buses ‘don’t eat that, V’, even if I were only having an apple, was hurtful. A woman once came up to me in Waitrose and said: ‘No wonder your husband left you.’
Of course, I tried to lose weight. Sometimes I succeeded valiantly, such as in 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2009. See the pattern? I’d drop several stone, to the point where I’d be able to walk into a ‘normal’ clothes shop and buy jeans. Everyone would say, ‘You look amazing! Well done’, and I’d feel on top of the world.
But in time – and it felt like five minutes – my real self, the one who struggled with addiction, with an eating disorder (call it what you like) would rise again and I’d pile it all back on.
I never did manage to crack it on my own. I failed. I have been writing my autobiography recently, and so have been forced to do the maths. I reckon that between 1994 and 2019 I was constantly on some sort of diet. That’s 25 years.
All that effort, all that self-loathing, all those hurtful magazine articles where I was snapped on holiday or someone wrote: ‘Friends think that Vanessa is drinking custard again.’ All that humiliation, that utter shame.
What a bloody waste of my time, I think now. And if there had been something to help, to take away the pain, to remove the impossibleness of it all, would that not have been a blessing?
Everyone I meet who is on one of these drugs says exactly that. They are so jolly relieved and grateful, as we saw this week with Nadine Dorries, who has lost two stone thanks to Mounjaro jabs and looks sizzling.
What about the side effects, you may ask? The experts – and I’ve had lots of them on my radio show – seem, so far, to believe the benefits outweigh the risks as all the things that come with obesity (joint issues, diabetes, heart problems) are so serious.
And let’s not forget mental health, either. To feel lovely about yourself is fantastic. Some of us just need a bit of help getting there.
- Vanessa Bares All by Vanessa Feltz (Bantam £20) is out now.
