There is a curious new etiquette around sudden, dramatic weight loss. It arrives overnight, clothes hanging like surrender flags, cheeks hollowed, appetite apparently conquered by grit and virtue. When asked how, the answer is always the same. Smaller portions. More walking. A vague nod towards discipline. As if half the country simultaneously discovered self control last Tuesday.
Let us be grown ups. The drugs work. They suppress appetite, slow digestion, and for many people they are life saving. No shame there at all. Obesity kills quietly and expensively, and if a weekly jab does what decades of beige ready meals and moral flogging could not, good luck to you. Honesty would be refreshing, but denial seems to be part of the new dress code.
The real casualty will not be pride. It will be the entire slimming food industry. An industry currently worth a couple of billion pounds in the UK, built on low fat misery, calorie counted despair and the promise that you can eat cardboard forever if only you believe hard enough. All those glowing forecasts assumed people would still need willpower, guilt and powdered soups.
But appetite suppression does not “disrupt” that market. It kills it. If you are not hungry, you do not buy slimming lasagne. You do not subscribe to portion controlled punishment. You just… stop eating so much. The market does not grow, it shrinks - efficiently, relentlessly, and without sentimentality. Much like an Ozempic user.
So by all means take the medicine. Say thank you to modern pharmacology. Live longer. Move easier. Just spare us the sermon about discipline while your trousers flap like Reform voters’ flags in a stiff breeze. The miracle here is not moral superiority. It is chemistry.
My tactic has been to reduce my wine intake from 5 or 6 bottles of Malbec a week to 1. That's a reduction of between 2600 to 3500 kcals a week.
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