close
close

The tell-tale sign that means I ALWAYS know if a famous friend is on Ozempic, reveals VANESSA FELTZ

It's the immense relief I recognize, like being released on parole after a long time in prison. So many friends – some famous, some not – have expressed it. We meet for coffee or lunch and they look amazing. No mystery as to why.

I don't think women, even when they're in the public eye, try to hide it; Most of the time they can't wait to tell you. “I’m on Ozempic,” they say. Or Wegovy. Or Mounjaro.

Whatever they inject into their (shrinking) thighs works wonders, and not just because they suddenly – finally! – thin, but because they were given something more precious: freedom. They have escaped this endless cycle of destructive thinking and no longer worry about what they ate yesterday or what they might eat tomorrow.

Finally, they can focus on love, friendship, career, concerns about the universe, and life itself – anything but being stuck in this terrible pit of self-hatred. They don't have to feel guilty, apologize, or stress about how much cake they ate, even though they only ate one piece of cake to make up for it.

Vanessa Feltz is happier with her body now, but it took decades of pain and two surgeries, the last of which was a gastric bypass, which made it physically impossible for her to eat too much

You have found the Holy Grail. I'm really happy for her and just a little bit jealous.

I got to the same point myself – the place where my size or what I put in my mouth wasn't the first thing I thought about in the morning – but only after decades of torment and two surgeries, the most recent was a gastric bypass which made it physically impossible for me to eat too much.

The first operation in 2010 was to insert a gastric band, which I later had to undergo further surgery to remove as it lodged in my liver. (Ironically, chocolate mousse was the only food that easily slipped with the band, defeating the purpose.)

Since I had the bypass, a surgery that fixes the stomach so that food passes through it, I've been a size 12 to 14 in 2019 and, more importantly, free of the guilt and self-blame that comes with having such a large Part of it made up my life before. The surgery broke the cycle of food addiction for me in a way that no one else had.

But imagine if Ozempic had existed back then – 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 do that.

I know at this point you might expect me to say that women shouldn't obsess about achieving the perfect weight, but that we should love ourselves no matter what size we are. But when you're made to feel like a failure because you're not skinny enough, that's hard to achieve.

Admittedly, I come into the Ozempic debate with my own heavy baggage. I was just 20 when my mother thought she had found her own holy grail of weight loss by buying amphetamines from the hairdresser and passing them on to me.

Ozempic has become a craze among Hollywood celebrities and people struggling with their weight - it helps people shed the pounds quickly and easily

Ozempic has become a craze among Hollywood celebrities and people struggling with their weight – it helps people shed the pounds quickly and easily

They were the Wegovys of that era, but addictive and much more dangerous. The pounds disappeared. Chunks of skeleton could be seen beneath my skin. Not only was I thin, I was gaunt, and I loved it, just like my mother. She tipped the hairdresser and said, “Get us more, darling.” The side effects were terrible.

With speed, as amphetamines are called, everything goes faster. During my final exams at Cambridge, the exam papers were blurry and my breath smelled of nail polish remover. The thought of food made me reel, I couldn't sleep and my heart was racing.

I didn't take those little yellow pills for long. I'll never know if they caused me permanent damage, but I believe the diet cycle they started me on messed up my metabolism forever.

The tragedy is that I didn't need it then. I was a size 10 at most and was a skinny little girl, a picky eater who wouldn't touch cheese or sponge cake and whose mother would pour canned pears over lamb chops to get me to eat them.

I was slim until puberty at the age of eight, which was a surprise to my parents. My mother rushed me to the doctor to ask if the swelling in my “chest area,” as she called it, could be cancer. She was horrified to discover that I was simply an early developer.

I have definitely developed a problem with weight. I think it was my mother's gift to me, wrapped in a big pink ribbon. Her own mother had thought she was “well-upholstered” and compared her to a sofa and declared, “There's no apple pie for you tonight,” on the grounds that a fat girl would never find a husband.

My mother followed suit. When she first put me on a diet at age nine, I really don't think she was unkind. She wanted to protect me from stigma, and being fat was a stigma.

The thing is: I don't think I was destined to have weight problems, not until she and my dad – and they agreed – started restricting my eating habits.

Her dinner would be soup with kreplach, kneidlach and lokshen (wontons, dumplings and noodles), mine would be half a grapefruit.

Was I obsessed with food back then?

Of course because I was hungry! When I had time to eat, I scoffed at everything because I never knew when my next meal would come.

At the end of my first semester of college, my mother didn't say, “Welcome home,” she said, “Shall I take you in?” .

“You could be so pretty. 'Why are you doing this to yourself?' my mother would say. When I got my own TV show in 1994, official PR photos were taken. My parents called and said I looked great in it. I went to the bakery to get an emergency donut.

The feeling of being watched and judged while eating was a constant. In the years I've been in the public eye, I've been a size 22 and as small as a size 10 – and every step of the yo-yo cycle has been the subject of debate and commentary.

It's no wonder that every “bigger” celebrity seems to have become smaller these days, given the intensity of this scrutiny. They're all on Ozempic – or seem to be. And I don't blame them.

It was hurtful when complete strangers on buses shouted, “Don’t eat that, V,” even when I was just eating an apple. A woman once came up to me in Waitrose and said: “No wonder your husband left you.”

“In the years I've been in the public eye, I've been a size 22 and as small as a size 10 – and every step of the yo-yo cycle has been the subject of debate and commentary,” Vanessa writes

Of course I tried to lose weight. Sometimes I bravely succeeded, like in 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2009. Do you see the pattern? I would drop several stones until I was able to walk into a “normal” clothing store and buy jeans. Everyone would say, “You look great!” “Good job,” and I would feel on top.

But over time – and it felt like five minutes – the real me, the one who struggled with addiction, with an eating disorder (call it what you will), would rise again and I would pile it all up again.

I never managed to crack it on my own. I failed. I recently wrote my autobiography, so I was forced to do the math. I estimate that between 1994 and 2019 I was constantly on some kind of diet. That's 25 years.

All this effort, all this self-loathing, all these hurtful magazine articles where I was snapped on vacation or someone wrote: “Friends think Vanessa is drinking custard again.” All this humiliation, this utter shame.

What a damn waste of time, I think now. And if there had been something that could help, ease the pain and remove the impossibility of it all, wouldn't that have been a blessing?

Everyone I meet who takes one of these medications says exactly that. They are so relieved and grateful, as we saw this week with Nadine Dorries, who has lost two kilos and looks radiant thanks to Mounjaro's vaccinations.

What about the side effects, you may ask? The experts – and I've had many of them on my radio show – seem to believe so far that the benefits outweigh the risks because all of the problems associated with obesity (joint problems, diabetes, heart problems) are so serious.

And let’s not forget mental health either. Feeling beautiful about yourself is amazing. Some of us just need a little help to get there.

  • Vanessa Bares All by Vanessa Feltz (Bantam £20) is out now.