Weight loss jabs

Wednesday

Arabella Byrne

How to cater for the dreaded Ozempic Christmas guest

A close relation of mine is taking Ozempic. I shan’t name them or give anything else away other than to say this: they are set to ruin our Christmas lunch. They know it, and we know it. Welcome to British Yuletide 2025 – a country where more than 1.5 million people are estimated to be using GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy, with the vast majority (90 per cent) obtaining the drugs privately. NHS analysis of Ozempic hotspots reveals Leicester, Thurrock in Essex and the Wirral to be where users congregate. Clearly, they haven’t done an analysis of private users in Oxfordshire where I live.  This being so, we are locked in a curiously modern etiquette conundrum. Should we serve them up the full plate of bird, spuds, bread sauce, pigs in blankets and sprouts?

Thursday

Henrietta Harding

The wild world of the ‘Ozempic safari’

Safari log: 3.56 p.m. and the Land Rover is parked up on the savannah. Inside, we wear dark glasses and muted clothes. Minutes pass and we still can’t spot the animal we have come to see. We are told that she only comes out at certain times of day, that she is shy. No, we’re not actually in Africa; we’re in a prep school car park in the Home Counties, on what is known as an Ozempic safari. We have gathered to spot the ‘Mounjaro Mummies’ prowling around after the summer holidays. It’s wild, in all senses. It’s also socially and morally dubious. Word on the street is that the

Thursday

Toby Young

Confessions of a yo-yo fat-jabber

I’m feeling quite smug at the moment. Every year I vow to get in shape in the summer, which means losing weight, drinking less and going to the gym. The summer bit is because there’s a risk I’ll be seen in a swimming costume – I want a ‘beach-ready body’ – and there’s also the exposure that comes from wearing fewer clothes when the sun’s out and the weather’s warm. Anyway, this summer I managed it. I’ve lost about a stone, am down to about half a bottle of wine a day, and have started working out again after an eight-year hiatus. I might hesitate to strut about at the

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

In defence of fat cats’ growing pay packets

News from the High Pay Centre – the revolutionary guard of left-wing thinktanks – that average FTSE100 chief executive pay rose 16 per cent to a record £5.9 million for 2024-25 comes as a double blessing for Rachel Reeves. On the one hand, she can cite executive greed as a pretext for her forthcoming autumn tax raid, while at the same time claiming that if rewards are soaring, then business conditions under Labour can’t be as bad as boardroom whingers say. On the other, she can rejoice that each UK-domiciled boss is contributing to the Exchequer a sum roughly equal to the tax take from 440 average earners. Meanwhile, is

Thursday

Toby Young

My sober assessment of the fat jabs

It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year and to my astonishment he’d lost about two stone and was nursing a glass of fizzy water. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, draining a goblet of red wine. ‘You’re usually about three sheets to the wind by now.’ He explained he was on Mounjaro, the slimming drug, and one of its side effects was to suppress his desire for alcohol. He’d had a couple of glasses earlier in the evening, but had then lost interest. ‘You should try it,’ he said, eyeing my unsteady gait. After a particularly heavy