I thought I was past worrying about weight-loss – but Mounjaro has changed all that

Silencing the weight-loss noise has been a lifelong challenge for author Sam Baker, but, just as she thought she had it under control, it is back and louder than ever thanks to the hype around drugs like Mounjaro. Here, she describes the daily battle to drown it out and why so many other midlife women are struggling too

I know I am not alone when I say that, for me, silencing the weight-loss noise (or at least pushing it into the background) has been a lifelong challenge. But somehow, in the last couple of years, it seems to have grown even worse. Part of that, I’m well aware, is that I am in my midlife era and so is my midriff. But another part – a far larger one – is the media firestorm around Ozempic or Mounjaro or whatever shorthand we’re using for GLP-1s this week.

In just a few years, thanks to the advent of these drugs, the body image volume in my head has been turned up to 11. Everywhere we look – all over the TV, the internet, social media, the workplace, pretty much every time you leave the house, and when you don’t – there is evidence of unexplained(ish) rapid weight loss. Now, when I see an acquaintance looking gaunt, with her clothes hanging off her (not always her, but almost always), I no longer fear serious illness, I just assume they’re “on the pen”.

It’s not just that they’ve dropped a dress size (or two or three or four). Previously rounded faces become long and thin. Long-time foodies start pushing food around their plates, and the conversation often turns to the fact that they don’t have a thing to wear because nothing in their wardrobe fits any more. And not in the way the rest of us mean. And then there’s my friend who confessed that she had to tuck her stomach skin in with her shirt. She wasn’t exaggerating; she gave me a demonstration. She has since had a tummy tuck.

If, like me, you’ve battled your entire adult life and then some, to keep the body image chatter at bay, this all represents a major setback.

I have battled for decades against the internalised misogyny that has me judging myself on whether my jeans are a size 12 or a 14. I have learnt to (mainly) silence the voice in my head that insists losing 7lbs, or 14, would make all the difference. If you’d asked me, say, five years ago, I would have said it was a battle I had won.

Margaret Atwood famously wrote that “inside every woman is a man watching a woman”. Like so many women on the far side of menopause, I had finally managed to dial that internalised male gaze right down. Not that I could claim a healthy (or even unhealthy) disregard for my slightly larger waistline. But I was… at ease with it.

But now… Mounjaro is a permanent tinnitus ringing in my ears, a Jiminy critic Cricket on my shoulder, tweaking at my waistband, whispering in my ear. Just a little jab, it says, Gollum-like, and that seven, 14, OK, let’s round it up to 21 pounds, could be gone. Wouldn’t you like to get back in those size 28 jeans? Wouldn’t you? Just a little jab.

Or two. Or three. Or more. And how much? And for how long?

And that’s before we get started on the practical concerns like long-term side effects and what happens when you stop taking it. But I’m sure there’s an FAQ app for that. There’s definitely a Reddit thread.

Sam was once fat-shamed about not having the right body to wear jeans (Sam Baker/Instagram)

Let’s pause at this point to say that I know many women who have found these drugs transformative. I have a good friend who used Mounjaro very early on, before the surrounding publicity reached its crescendo. After a hysterectomy, and subsequent surgically induced premature menopause in her late thirties, she had piled on several stone, losing sight of herself amid the spiralling weight gain. After a couple of months on Mounjaro, she had lost weight. I have no idea how many stone, but several. And she looks fantastic. It gave her back not just her body but the confidence to live her life. And she is very far from the only one.

But it’s not the women who really need it that I’m talking about here. It’s the rest of us. The women trapped in the echo chamber, just trying to go about their daily lives. The women whose mental health is taking a hammering every time they pick up their phones.

I want to be honest with you. What else are we here for, after all? There have been many times, particularly in the past year, as the Mounjaro frenzy has reached crescendo, where if I could have got hold of it, I would have. Please don’t yell at me. I know, all right? Just as plenty of other women who feel the same do. But knowing and being able to do something sensible with that knowing are two completely different things, and I’m still working on it.

A few months ago, I read an article about an editor who had seen off the stubborn post-baby weight with a touch of micro-dosing (the jury is very much out on whether this works, and you can’t do it on the NHS). In a month, she’d lost a stone and several inches.

To Pen or not to Pen that is the question (Getty/iStock)

I don’t know if I was just having a down day or it hit me right in my susceptibility. I think it was the micro-dosing that spoke to me. After all, if I was microing my doses, then I wasn’t going the whole hog. It was in fence-sitter heaven.

Within minutes, even before my thinking brain had kicked in, I’d hit the internet. Within hours, I had applied to countless clinics. One after another. Sending the requisite pictures and telling the absolute truth about my weight. (I had to step on the scales in order to do that. I wish I hadn’t. It broke decades on the what-do-I-weigh-today wagon.) To cut a long story short, every last one of them rejected me. Because, while plenty of people in the public eye who don’t technically need Mounjaro have found a back door to legally accessing it, that door is closed to the rest of us. Much the same as it is with everything else.

It wasn’t just the promise of shifting that pesky stone that drew me. Truthfully. It was the plentiful claims about silencing the food noise that soundtracks my everyday life. (Along with all the other racket in my head.) The constant “what shall we eat tonight, tomorrow, etc” that kicks in, often before I’ve even put down my fork on the previous meal. That’s what gets me. I have never been an eat-to-live person, and I wanted to be. It was that promise that really lured me.

In the midst of food noise and Mounjaro noise, my own voice of reason was drowned right out.

Is it coincidence that just as body positivity was taking root with a generation of younger women and making some older ones reconsider, along come these drugs?

After my abortive attempt to procure a weight-loss drug, I marinated in shame for a few days: why wasn’t I a better, more well-adjusted person? Why couldn’t I, who has spent so many years and so much money, working on her mental health, suppress the chatter? And then I started to ask around. Tentatively at first, for fear of judgement (last time I wrote about my irrational longing to lose a stone, a subscriber messaged to scold me). And then with a sinking sense of predictability. I wasn’t alone. The sad truth is we (almost) all still want to lose 7 (or 10) lbs.

Most of the women I spoke to said they would, if they could; if they could get it, if they could afford it. These were not, on the whole, women who were massively overweight or with weight-induced health problems. They were, by and large, women aged 40ish to 60ish, who just wanted their clothes to fit like they used to. Women whose BMI (yes, that flawed system the NHS still uses) had strayed into the “overweight” zone. Overweight, according to medical law, but not overweight enough.

They were women, like me, who had wasted a good amount of time and money on menopause-marketed so-called natural GLP-1s and probiotics that claimed to burn off bloat, see off cortisol, and all the rest. They were, like me, women who, try as they might, could not banish the noise. Of food, of weight loss, of should. Women who knew better than to waste their brain power, and in my case my working hours, trying to source a magic bullet.

I thought I was meant to be free of that, by now, in my (gulp) 60th year. But no. Here it comes again, that noise. I have a history of disordered eating, as we call it now. (I’ve written before about my body dysmorphia and lifetime on a diet here.) It started in my teens in earnest, but has its roots much younger. I think I was about six or seven when I got it into my head that I had a “big bum” and therefore shouldn’t wear jeans. I know. It breaks my heart to even write that. I didn’t wear jeans or trousers of any kind for years. And the irony isn’t lost on me that I now wear little else.

I’ve been on a diet (almost) my whole life. There’s a reason (some) women with a history of disordered eating experience resurgence in midlife. Little recognised, like most things about middle-aged women, until recently. A recent study found that 3.5 per cent of women in their forties and fifties reported having an eating disorder in the last 12 months, more than one in 10 women over 50 experience symptoms of an eating disorder, while over 70 per cent of women in midlife are not satisfied with their weight. I’ll say that again. Over 70 per cent.

Pre-filled injection pens of 2.5mg, 5mg and 7.5mg doses of Mounjaro. More than a million people in the UK are estimated to be currently using weight loss medication (PA)

Even as we say we care far less what other people think – and we mean it. Even as we say that, like Nora Ephron, we wish we’d worn a bikini the entire year we were 26. Even as I look at all the photos of times when I thought I needed to lose weight and wish I could have seen then what I see now.

There’s the noise.

It’s about control. Of course. In perimenopause, our bodies are spiralling out of our control. It makes a perverse sort of sense that in the midst of hormonal and life upheaval, some of us might cope with it exactly the same way we did the last time our bodies spiralled out of our control, in puberty. This is not to say that weight-loss drugs are responsible for this, just that they are hitting midlife women where they are already wobbling and subtly, or not, turning up the volume.

There’s a lot more to say about GLP-1s, of course. And I’ll leave that to the actual experts who know what they’re talking about, but here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about: They are turning weight loss back into a wealth issue. It’s starting to feel like the 1930s again. Or the Sixties. Or the Nineties. Or…

And surely it’s not a coincidence that just as body positivity (and its perhaps more realistic cousin, body neutrality) was taking root with a generation of younger women and making some of us older ones reconsider, along come these drugs? Is it a coincidence that just as so many women are getting vocal, drawing attention to the way they are sidelined and overlooked, silencing the noise, along comes an amplifier with a billion-dollar budget? Maybe it is. Maybe I need to get out more.

But still.

The noise.

It’s there in the background. All day. Every day. On my Instagram feed and all over the internet, where, for better or worse, I spend too many of my days. And, I don’t know about you, but I’m yet to work out how to silence it. Or at least protect my mental health in the face of its onslaught. Have you?

Read more from Sam Baker on her Substack The Shift with Sam Baker