The other week I was idling over a G&T at a drinks party when I felt a tap on my shoulder. Turning round, I was greeted effusively by a startlingly slim woman I didn’t recognise at all, although she clearly seemed to know me.
‘Hello stranger,’ she declared warmly. ‘How are you? I haven’t seen you for years!’
Not wishing to appear rude, I frantically combed her appearance for clues to her identity. Yet her pinched face and slack jawline failed to ring any bells.
Sensing my struggle, she announced her name with a flourish, opening out Twiglet-thin arms to crush me in a hug.
My mind was in freefall. Of course, I knew the name instantly – belonging as it did to a lovely lady I’d worked with 20 years before.
But the woman I remembered was about four dress sizes bigger and the soft roundness of her face had enhanced her natural prettiness. The person in front of me was a scarecrow.
Sensing my confusion, she immediately began rhapsodising about her ‘Ozempic journey’, explaining that the appetite-regulating drugs had enabled her to easily shed a monumental amount of weight.
My response? An equally fulsome volley of compliments.
After all, today’s etiquette demands nothing less than lavish praise for those newly liberated from the shackles of obesity by these drugs.
Angela Epstein says fat jabs have turned her into a big, fat liar – for rarely has she met anyone who looks better after undergoing the regime
We are taught to applaud any woman who triumphantly emerges, chrysalis-like, from her larger self. The problem is I didn’t mean any of it.
You see, fat jabs have turned me into a big, fat liar – for rarely have I met anyone who looks better after undergoing the regime.
If anything, half of them look simply awful: like someone has taken a blaster gun and sucked not only the nutrients but the life and soul right out of them.
Frankly, I’m not remotely surprised medical experts are now warning that up to 40 per cent of the weight lost from these jabs comes in the form of muscle and bone mass.
If the guinea pigs I meet are anything to go by, it’s plain to see – they look ‘less’ in all the wrong ways. So, frankly, I loathe having to simper with confected admiration, while swallowing my horror at faces bereft of elastin and collagen with their papery skin, concertina of wrinkles and slack jowls, now known as ‘Ozempic mouth’.
I can’t bear that cadaverous, hollowed-out look, the way their once soft – yes, plump – curves have collapsed into angular, bony coat-hanger frames.
But what unsettles me most is the aura of shrunken fragility, as if their very femininity has been cored out, leaving only the outline of a woman behind.
I’ll also admit it grates that this ultra skinny appearance has been achieved without enduring hunger pangs or spending hours at the gym (both of which I’ve had to navigate many times over the years to remain, not always successfully, a size 10).
How much easier it would be to use Ozempic instead of schlepping off to an exercise class in the early morning when it’s dark or cold, or after I’ve had a long day. But I do it.
Fear of potential side effects and the cost involved – as well as how it makes some people look – mean fat jabs hold absolutely no appeal.
Perhaps then that’s why I find it so annoying, gushing over those who use the likes of Ozempic and Mounjaro to such excess – not least because I’ve built a career on being painfully honest. So why do I keep up these lies?
Well, obviously I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings – given weight loss is a prickly subject. And, as I say, I realise that privately procured injections aren’t cheap and they can trigger potentially unpleasant side effects such as nausea and dehydration. So any victory will have come at a cost.
I also realise that because the jabs don’t address the psychological or will power issues which drive people to overeat, those who use them may feel unable to surrender their fix.
Indeed, recent research by Oxford University suggests many people regain all the weight they have lost – sometimes gaining even more –within a year of stopping the medication.
I understand that thanks to the toxic combination of fear and addiction, users don’t know how to stop.
But still, I wish I had the nerve to tell fat jab obsessives it makes my heart sick to see them so haggard and hollow. The men, in particular, seem to shrink.
One male friend, an Ozempic graduate, reminds me of singer David Byrne from the band Talking Heads, drowning in that famously oversized suit from the Once in a Lifetime video.
This particular chap was always broad and even rugged-looking – the fact that he was ever so slightly overweight adding to his boyish charm. He carried it well.
Now he looks wimpy and – dare I say it – rather feeble. Yet even though we have known each other for years and have always enjoyed candid chats, full of lively banter, I can’t bring myself to say what I think. So I short-changed the truth and the friendship, telling him he looks ‘well’ or ‘smart’.
How much easier it would be to use Ozempic instead of schlepping off to an exercise class in the early morning when it’s dark or cold, or after I’ve had a long day, writes Angela Epstein
What I want to tell him and others – sympathetically – is that I understand the constant hum of body obsession that surrounds us. That I’m not immune to this.
Certainly from peri-menopause, over the last eight years or so, I’ve found it much harder to shed those extra pounds.
Even when I’ve been really ‘good’, I’ve known the crushing disappointment of getting on the scales to find the dial hasn’t shifted. Not least in the run-up to my son’s wedding three years ago, when I just couldn’t shift that extra half a stone.
So I do get how seductive a quick fix, a kind of modern-day alchemy that promises control, must be. But at what cost? Sadly, I just can’t say it out loud.
But hang on, you might argue, aren’t such ego-stroking fibs a necessary part of all friendships? After all, most of us have to peddle the occasional white lie to pals, family or colleagues, telling them what they want to hear.
That the frock horror they’ve turned up to the office party in is gorgeous. Or that, yes, a fringe really does suit every woman in midlife. To me, lying about fat jabs springs from a much darker part of the universe.
Hair will grow back. Horrible outfits can be exiled to the back of the wardrobe – or perhaps the local charity shop.
But these appetite-regulating drugs are addictive. Expensive. Exhausting. Potentially harmful.
Yet, people cling to them with such triumph. So how could I be the curmudgeon who says the party’s over?
Instead, I live with a gnawing sense of dishonesty and resentment, telling people like the former colleague I met at the party that they are glowing and vibrant.
When in fact I’m really thinking: You look worn out. You look less like you. I’m worried about you. I wish you would stop.
I keep lying because it feels like the kind thing to do, knowing how badly and for how long they have wanted to feel like they’re winning in their own skin.
Maybe one day I will come clean. But until then, Ozempic – and the real truth about its harrowing effect on every friend and colleague I meet – will continue to make a big, fat liar of me.
