It was the third friend in as many days I’d noticed had lost weight.
Someone once told me you’re not meant to comment on a woman’s size – but I’m yet to meet the woman who doesn’t appreciate a compliment.
I told her she was looking great.
“Not that you had it to lose, but you’re looking really trim”, I said.
She looked around her – over one shoulder, then the other.
We were at the Ladies Lunch I mentioned last week, for Help For Kids.
“I’ve been takin the jabs,” she said.
“Oooh, the Ozempic ones?”
‘Pang of envy’
We’ve heard and seen plenty about celebrities taking the wonder slimming drug and clinically obese patients being prescribed it by their doctor.
But here in Dundee and my pal who was no more than a size 12?
It had a different name, she said, but it did the same thing.
I can relate to her story – many women of a certain age can.
She’d put on weight around the belly as her hormones changed.
At least a stone, maybe closer to two, struggling to shift even a few pounds and hating the way it made her feel.
I felt a pang of envy.
A pill or injection rather than months or years of slog, stomach crunches, no carbs – before coming off the wagon, devouring all the chocolate and putting it all back on again.
It’s amazing, she admitted.
“But there are side effects. I felt down for the first few weeks. Not depressed, but pretty low.”
She looked around the room at Malmaison.
“You’d be amazed at the amount of people on it.”
‘Feel like a new woman!’
Weeks earlier, another mum pal revealed – after I also told her she looked fabulous – she’d come down from a dress size between a 14 and 16 to the 10 she was before kids and peri menopause.
And, you guessed it, it was down to the wonder slimming drug.
She hadn’t needed a prescription but filled out forms through a high street chemist online.
It had given her a really sore stomach, so sore she had to leave work one day, as well as headaches and a feeling of intermittent sadness.
Interestingly, her a sister is a doctor and advised her only to do it short term to lose the weight and then stick to a healthy eating plan.
Then I noticed the new tiny waist of another friend, who lives in London and who I’ve not seen in the flesh for a few years, on Instagram.
“Thanks lovely,” she said: “Took the jabs…feel like a new woman!”
It sounds wonderful.
But there’s a dark side to it all.
‘Open to abuse’
Some celebrities, who appear to be using Ozempic, look dangerously gaunt.
Meanwhile, model Lottie Moss has told how she was hospitalised after taking a high dosage.
There can be no medical justification for a size-six woman taking the drug.
And if it doesn’t have to be prescribed by a professional, it will be open to abuse.
There are many size-six women – and let’s not forget, underweight men with mental health issues linked to eating disorders – who believe they need to lose weight and think this advancement in medicine is for them.
No longer is it a story of the celebrity world.
It’s real and it’s in bars, supermarkets, at the school gates in Dundee and beyond.
We now say “Do you remember when you could smoke in pubs and on trains?” and I wonder, if in a similar vein, we’ll look back and say: “What did we do before the weight-loss drugs?”
The placement of weight changes with age and is harder to shift. Who wouldn’t want an almost overnight fix to shortcut the hard graft it takes to get in shape?
But that old saying keeps coming to mind: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
I hope there are no long-term effects.
I’m not sure I’m ready for the risk of self-inflicted depression, even for the promise of being the pre-kids and menopause me.
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