How Mounjaro weight-loss jabs mean I’m wearing a bikini at 68, reveals NADINE DORRIES. I’ve covered up for 6 years but now I’ve lost 3st – here’s how I did it

Boomer that I am, I’ve always loved holidays, bikinis and a tan, and there was a time when I looked forward to this time of year more than any other.

My 20s were spent hopping on and off sunbeds. The smaller the bikini and the more I could tan of my body, the better – it made me feel confident, sexy and alive.

At least a month of hard work would be invested into building up my tan before I even departed these shores and, I confess, if today I’m staying in a hotel with a spa and it has a sunbed, I struggle to walk past. Old habits die hard.

However, the past ten years of holidays have been neither easy nor joyful… due to my weight.

Don’t get me wrong, the season always started well. Hotel booked. Flights paid for. Tents sorted. No, not tents to sleep in – it won’t surprise you to learn I’m not a happy camper.

I’m referring to my holiday wardrobe – an assortment of brightly coloured, shapeless sacks, within which I would hide the extra couple of stone I lugged around with me.

It was those tents that had a serious impact on my holiday mood. They just weren’t me.

As for lounging poolside, in the recent past I have only felt happy traversing the edge of the hotel swimming pool while covered in a pile of beach towels.

I mastered the art of disrobing like a marine on an undercover exercise, managing to lie flat on my back before anyone had time to blink and notice I was there.

Working on the basis that everyone looks thinner lying down, no one has actually seen me standing up in a bikini since I turned 62.

Until now. Thanks to weight-loss jabs, I’m back to a size that means I am happy in my body again. Today I weigh 25 per cent less than I did at my heaviest, and the prospect of this summer’s sun-worshipping fills me with joy.

That’s not to say I didn’t approach this bikini shoot with trepidation. ‘God no,’ was my first reaction when asked. ‘I wouldn’t inflict the sight of my body on any poor reader.’ The very idea made my blood run cold.

But then it occurred to me that this was how I used to feel. Now, considerably lighter, and after 18 months of Pilates classes, for the first time in my life – despite carrying three big babies – I have a toned stomach and a strong core, and I am proud of both. Why shouldn’t I be photographed wearing a bikini?

All the same, the shoot began with me insisting on a kaftan. But then I suddenly thought: ‘To hell with it! If we’re going to do this, let’s do it properly’ and, in the midst of a rush of blood to the brain, I abandoned the cover-up.

It helped that I’ve worked with the photographers Lezli + Rose in the past and that the shoot involved an entirely female team. As the camera clicked away, I relaxed and let myself imagine that shimmering blue pool.

I know some readers think I make too much of my weight. I was only 2st heavier than I should have been, after all – though sometimes I slipped up to three – but on someone my height (I’m not much over 5ft) the extra weight really has nowhere to hide.

Slowly, as I entered the menopause, I began to resemble the Michelin Man, with rolls gathering unhappily around my waist. This was dangerous visceral fat hugging my vital organs – a ticking time bomb in terms of my health. I was miserable, too. The joy had slowly ebbed from my life and taken my confidence with it.

I was permanently self-conscious. Even when I was driving the car, I’d feel the bulges sticking out over the top of my skirt or trousers.

To be brutally honest, I was spinning out of control, beginning each Monday with a new pledge to lose that 2st, but ending the week wondering where I’d gone wrong and feeling even more unhappy than before.

As I entered my 60s – arguably one of the most stressful decades of my life – it only got worse. My BMI sat stubbornly in the middle of the red zone, screaming ‘Danger, danger!’.

Irony of ironies, I then became a health minister working on the Government’s obesity strategy. Each day, the dangers of being overweight – the increased risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke and other serious illnesses – were made clear to me.

I always thought, ‘No, not me. Those things happen to other people. I’m too busy and active; I eat relatively healthily; I exercise when I walk the dogs… definitely not me’.

Then came the day of reckoning. Routine blood tests came back to tell me all was not well – and I couldn’t argue with the results.

My cholesterol was way too high, I had non-alcoholic fatty deposits in my liver and I was pre-diabetic. I was on the very edge. The red flags weren’t so much flying as slapping me in the face.

Each problem was a concern in itself, but having all three hot on the tail of each other – with each repeat set of blood tests returning a fresh warning – was a wake-up call.

On the third call from my GP to tell me, yet again, to pop into the surgery for a chat, I thought to myself: ‘What the hell are you doing? Why have you been pretending it happens to anyone but you? You have a three-year-old granddaughter who is the centre of your world. Don’t you want to see her grow up?’

I always said I would help my daughters as they navigated work, babies and life, and be a fully hands-on grandmother, but in reality I was doing the opposite.

To be fair, my body had been trying to warn me.

This didn’t happen overnight. I’d often feel unwell and crash with tiredness after eating. I put it down to my relentless work schedule, but that wasn’t all it was.

I’d already had one hip replacement on my right side, and the niggles in my left told me I was heading for another. On certain days it felt as though I had full-body arthritis, as every bone in my body ached.

A general all-over stiffness occasionally made walking uncomfortable, too. I would get out of the car after an hour-long drive and have to stand for a moment and wiggle my hips before I could walk normally.

Meanwhile, on holiday, all the dissatisfaction I felt about my appearance intensified.

Could I still wear a bikini? I asked this question as soon as I turned 60 and have asked it every year since (I’m now 68). And the answer, given my weight then, was: ‘Not with any degree of confidence – and frankly not without looking ridiculous’.

The top half pushed the rolls of fat down, and the bottom pushed them up into an enormous muffin top. It was like having a huge rubber ring around my middle.

The fact was, being overweight was robbing the joy from my life in general and my holidays in particular.

Despite my age, I still desperately wanted to wear a bikini. The thought of the sun burning my belly through a Lycra swimsuit as I sunbathed did not appeal.

It was time to take action, so last July I began my Mounjaro weight-loss journey.

However, I made a rookie mistake. Once I reached my goal weight of 8st 12lbs in January this year, I suddenly stopped the injections.

My advice to anyone on these jabs is don’t ever do that. Your body thinks you’ve been in famine mode and wants to put the weight straight back on.

The idea that we all have a certain weight range our bodies are predisposed to is called the set-point theory. Crucially, that ‘point’ can be adjusted if you’re very careful and disciplined – but the problem is, once the Mounjaro wears off, the hunger roars back.

I was permanently hungry. I went to sleep hungry and woke up hungry. The food noise returned with a vengeance, too – I thought constantly about what I could eat next.

Exercising to keep the weight off didn’t work because it made me even more ravenous.

I was once at a party and all I could think about was when the canapes would be heading my way.

I kept jumping onto the scales expecting to see the dial move up – and of course it did.

It took me three months – during which I regained 3lbs of lost weight – to realise I had come off the injections too soon and should have microdosed (where you take a very low dose of the drug) for six months or more while my body adjusted to my new weight.

I needed to get back on the Mounjaro to ensure I didn’t undo all my hard work.

Yet, to my utter horror, I was no longer eligible to order the jabs online.

My BMI wasn’t high enough and I’d been off them for more than three months. According to the prescribing guidelines used by online pharmacies such as Boots, I now didn’t qualify.

This seems to me a huge flaw in the prescribing guidelines, by the way. Someone who has successfully lost weight should be able to return to their supplier for help in maintaining that loss via microdosing.

I needed to silence the food noise and suppress my appetite just enough to give my body time to adjust to its new weight, and there should be a route open to people in that situation. Not allowing this will merely drive people into the arms of unscrupulous black-market suppliers.

Instead of using an online pharmacy, I was lucky enough to be able to visit a private doctor, who agreed to prescribe it.

The dose I started on this time was the lowest possible. I injected 1mg per week for three months. It was such a low dose – less than half of the starter dose of 2.5mg – that I didn’t have any side effects at all. I then went up to 1.9mg on month three.

And this time, when I finished taking the drug… nothing happened. No ravenous hunger, no food noise and no desire to consume more than I need.

I had completed my journey. My body knew I was no longer in famine mode and I finally settled into my new weight. What joy.

I am now 8st 11lbs – I checked on the scales this morning. However, I’d actually prefer to be 8st 7lbs and have introduced a schedule to help me lose the extra few pounds very slowly, without a weight-loss drug, over a further six-month period.

I’m going easy on myself. My BMI is in the green zone but still on the wrong end of it. However, my overall health is massively improved; my blood tests are all normal, the pain in my left hip has disappeared and the aches and niggles are now just what you would expect for a woman of my age.

So, am I beach ready? Am I looking forward to my first post-Mounjaro summer holiday? In short, yes!

This year, older but thinner, things will be different. I know there are so many women like me who have lost weight thanks to this new generation of drugs, women who will be looking forward to summer for the first time in years.

I’ve bought a new summer wardrobe. After a decade of feeling self-conscious, I’m finally excited to get dressed up for those balmy evenings on restaurant terraces, to throw on a fitted T-shirt and a pair of shorts to go to the beach.

The brightly coloured, oversized sacks are now on the rails of my local hospice charity shop. And I’ve bought new bikinis, too. There will be no more shuffling across the poolside. This time I’m going to walk slowly, head held high, with no towels to hide me. I might even go to the bar by the pool without covering up.

The knowledge that I’m going to lose a few more pounds in order to get that needle bang in the middle of the green BMI zone; that I am going to continue to exercise; and that next year I will be even thinner, fitter, more toned and more healthy than I am this year, fills me with joy and enthusiasm. What a lovely long summer it’s going to be.