ozempic: a love story

‘my brain was so broken from obsessing about calories, i wanted to relax and have it back again.’

Photo by Graphic Node on Unsplash

My old friend Xanthe, who lives America, recently texted me to say she’d lost a third of her body weight after being injected with the appetite-suppressant Ozempic. Since then we’ve spent hours talking about her life-changing transformation, both her experience of getting fat in the first place and what her life is like now that she’s lost weight and been shrunk down to size.

Her story is unlike anything else I’ve read on the subject, and god knows there’s a hell of a lot out there. Xanthe’s take is different though. Like her it is honest, refreshing, revealing, inspiring, funny and wise by turns. With her permission, I’m going to share it with you now.

A few years ago, Xanthe decided to let herself get fat. It didn’t just happen. She knew it would happen and she let it happen. It was a conscious decision. I cannot stress this enough.

Because we are separated by an ocean, I wasn’t aware of her fatness until she arrived on my doorstep for a visit while in London on a work trip last year. Before I could register any change in her appearance she threw her arms around me and shrieked, ‘OH MY GOD BABE CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW FAT I AM NOW? IT’S INSANE!’

This instantly diffused any tension around the subject and also caused us both crack up. Xanthe’s the kind of person who says the thing everyone else is thinking but afraid to say, even if it’s at her own expense. And if she thinks it might make you laugh, she’ll shout it in your face. She was funny long before she got fat, I should add.

In truth she wasn’t that fat, but she was quite a lot fatter than she had been the last time I saw her. By her own admission, she was fatter than she would have preferred to be in a perfect world because being fat is a bit of a drag. I asked her how she felt about her new look and she said she didn’t really mind, because her decision was to some degree a conscious one. What I mean is that it was trade off. I’ll get to the terms of that bargain in a minute, but first, some more background on Xanthe.

Prior to gaining a shed load of weight in her forties, Xanthe experienced most of her life as what you might call, a ‘pretty person.’ What I mean is that her looks fell within the collectively-accepted bandwidth of ‘attractive.’ Because she was female this meant that in most of the rooms she had entered in her life since hitting puberty, she knew that given the choice (minus consequences), almost all of the men present would have chosen to have sex with her. And some of the women too.