It’s the colossal relief I recognize, like being on parole after a stint in prison. Many brides (some famous, some not) have expressed this. We meet for coffee or lunch and they look amazing. There is no secret as to why.
I don’t believe in the idea that women, even those in the public eye, are trying to hide it; they mostly can’t wait to tell you. “I’m in Ozempic,” they say. Or Wegovy. Or Monjaro.
Whatever they are injecting into their (shrinking) thighs is working miracles, not just because suddenly – finally! – thin, but because they have been given something more precious: freedom. They have escaped that endless cycle of destructive thinking and no longer obsess over what they ate yesterday or what they might eat tomorrow.
Finally, they can focus on love, friendship, careers, caring about the universe, life itself… anything but getting stuck in that terrible pit of self-loathing. They don’t have to feel guilty, apologize, or agonize over how much cake they ate when they were only having a slice to “even out.”
Vanessa Feltz is happier with her body now, but it took decades of torment and two operations, the last of which was a gastric bypass that made it physically impossible for her to overeat.
They have found the holy grail. I’m really excited for them, and just a little bit envious.
I arrived at the same place – the place where my size, or what I put in my mouth, was not the first thing I thought about in the morning – but only after decades of torment and two operations, the last of them a bypass gastric. which made it physically impossible for me to overeat.
The first operation in 2010 was to insert a gastric band, which then had to be removed with more surgery when it became embedded in my liver. (Ironically, the only food that slid easily with the band was chocolate mousse, which defeated the purpose.)
Since undergoing bypass, a procedure in which the stomach is stapled so that food bypasses it, in 2019, I have been a size 12 to 14 and, more importantly, I am free of the guilt and the self-recrimination that were a big part of my life. my life before. The operation broke the cycle of food addiction like nothing else had been able to do.
Imagine if Ozempic had existed at that time, a time when I was on TV every day. The years of hell I could have erased. Would I have taken it? Of course I would.
I know this is the point where you might expect me to say that women shouldn’t obsess over reaching the perfect weight, that we should love ourselves whatever our size. But when you’re made to feel like a failure because you’re not thin enough, that’s a hard thing to do.
Of course, I enter the Ozempic debate with my extensive background. I was only 20 years old when my mother thought she had found her own holy grail for weight loss, asking her hairdresser for amphetamines and passing them on to me.
Ozempic has become a fad among Hollywood celebrities and those struggling with their weight as it helps people lose weight quickly and easily.
They were the Wegovy of that time, but addictive and much more dangerous. The kilos evaporated. Pieces of skeleton were visible under my skin. I was not only thin but emaciated, and I loved it, as did my mother. He tipped the barber and said, “Get us more, honey.” The side effects were horrible.
Everything accelerates in Speed, as amphetamines are known. During my final exams at Cambridge, the exams were blurry and my breath smelled like nail polish remover. The thought of food made me nauseous, I couldn’t sleep and my heart was pounding out of my chest.
I didn’t take those little yellow pills for a long time. I will never know if they caused permanent damage, but I do believe that the diet cycle they started me on ruined my metabolism forever.
The tragedy is that I didn’t need them at the time. At most a size 12, I was a skinny, picky eater who wouldn’t touch cheese or sponge cake and whose mother poured canned pears over lamb chops to ‘trick’ me into eating them.
I was thin until puberty hit at the age of eight, which surprised my parents. My mother rushed me to the doctor to ask if the swelling in what she called my “thoracic area” could be cancer. He was horrified to discover that I was simply one of the early developers.
I certainly developed a problem with weight. I feel like it was Mom’s gift to me, wrapped in a big pink ribbon. Her own mother had considered her “well upholstered” and compared her to a sofa, declaring that “you won’t have apple pie tonight” on the grounds that a fat girl would never find a husband.
My mother did the same. When he put me on my first diet (at age nine) I really don’t think he was being cruel. She wanted to protect me from stigma, and being fat was a stigma.
The thing is, I don’t think she was destined to have weight problems, not until she and my dad (and they were close) started restricting what she ate.
His dinner would be soup with kreplach, kneidlach and lokshen (wonton, dumplings and noodles), mine would be half a grapefruit.
Was he obsessed with food then?
Of course, because I was hungry! When I was free to eat, I scoffed at everything because I never knew when my next meal would come.
At the end of my first semester in college, my mother didn’t say “welcome home,” but rather “do you want me to let you in?” You’re a big inflated beach ball. Professional achievements never made up for the disappointment my parents expressed about my weight.
‘You could be so pretty. Why are you doing this to yourself? my mother would say. When I had my own TV show in 1994, official PR photos were taken. My parents called to say I looked huge in them. I went to the bakery to buy an emergency donut.
The feeling of being watched and judged while eating was a constant. In my years in the public eye I have been as big as a size 22 and as small as a size 10, with each step of the yo-yo cycle subject to debate and commentary.
It’s no surprise that all the “big” celebrities seem to have scaled back these days, given the intensity of that scrutiny. Everyone is in Ozempic, or seems to be. And I don’t blame them.
Having complete strangers shouting from the buses ‘don’t eat that, V’, even if I was just eating an apple, was painful. A woman once approached me in Waitrose and said: “No wonder your husband left you.”
“In my years in the public eye, I have been as big as a size 22 and as small as a size 10, and every step of the yo-yo cycle is the subject of debate and commentary,” Vanessa writes.
Of course, I tried to lose weight. Sometimes I did it bravely, like in 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2009. See the pattern? I would throw several stones, to the point of being able to go into a “normal” clothing store and buy jeans. Everyone would say, ‘You look amazing! Well done,’ and I would feel on top of the world.
But over time, and it seemed like five minutes, the real me, the one struggling with addiction, with an eating disorder (call it what you want), would resurface and pile it all up again.
I never managed to figure it out on my own. I failed. I’ve been writing my autobiography recently and so I’ve been forced to do the math. I estimate that between 1994 and 2019 I was constantly on some type of diet. That’s 25 years.
All that effort, all that self-hatred, all those hurtful articles in magazines where I was photographed on vacation or someone wrote, “Friends think Vanessa is drinking custard again.” All that humiliation, that absolute shame.
What a damn waste of time, I think now. And if there had been something to help, to ease the pain, to remove the impossibility of it all, wouldn’t it have been a blessing?
Everyone I know who takes one of these medications says exactly that. They are very relieved and grateful, as we saw this week with Nadine Dorries, who has lost two kilos thanks to Mounjaro’s blows and looks spectacular.
What about the side effects, you ask? Experts (and I’ve had many of them on my radio show) seem to believe, so far, that the benefits outweigh the risks, since all the things that come with obesity (joint problems, diabetes, heart problems) are very serious.
And let’s not forget mental health either. Feeling good about yourself is fantastic. Some of us just need a little help to get there.
- Vanessa Bares All by Vanessa Feltz (Bantam £20) is available now.