FLORENCE GREEN: I’m naturally chubby so I’m taking weight-loss drugs — but I’m lying about it for the praise

At dinner with my closest friend, ­conversation turns to weight-loss jabs, and quickly it becomes clear how strongly she disapproves of them.

Ozempic and Mounjaro are “cheating”, she says, tucking into her lasagne.

The Jabs and The Jab Nots are more divided than ever, with the latter strongly resenting the former for letting the side down and “stealing slim privilege”.

Maybe people are just sick of struggling with their weight, I ­murmur — and she literally thumps the table in response. “What’s wrong with diet and exercise? What’s wrong with willpower? It’s what I do, and it’s disgusting that people take the easy way out!”

I am amazed at her fury, but I don’t call her out. Instead, I pick at my food and then push the plate away. She knows I’ve had a nasty stomach upset and still feel delicate.

Except I haven’t and I don’t. The real reason I’m not hungry is because every week I inject myself with a dose of tirzepatide, otherwise known as Mounjaro — the “King Kong of weight-loss injectables”.

This instantly crushes my appetite so that I can barely bring myself to consume a salad. In the past month, I’ve lost a fraction under 10lb without a single hunger pang.

And, at the age of 59, I have also discovered something rather interesting about myself. Lying, it turns out, comes shockingly easy to me.

The point is, I’m overjoyed to have lost so much weight — I have reversed my middle-aged spread and look trimmer than most of my friends — but I know others will not share that delight.

Especially when they hear how I’ve done it.

My BFF thinks I’ve lost all this weight because of that nasty bug. While I think anyone who can afford the jabs but makes themselves ­miserable with a hunger to shed the flab — like I used to — is insane.

Why torture yourself when Ozempic or Mounjaro makes it easy?

I don’t want to fall out with my friends —so I lie to them. All the time. I am adept at cutting my food into tiny pieces, moving it around my plate or tucking it under lettuce leaves to give the illusion of eating.

‘I had a big breakfast,’ I’ll say. Or explain that I am saving myself for the ‘huge steak’ or ‘shepherd’s pie’ my husband is making for supper. But even if he was, I’d lie to him that I’d had a ­massive lunch with the girls. No, I haven’t told him either.

I lie so much now it’s become ­second nature. At my yoga class recently, a fellow regular, who I’ve seen struggling with her weight for years, looked me up and down.

“You look so slim,” she said enviously. “How have you done it?”

“Oh, you know,” I replied, gesturing at my new Lululemon leggings. “The usual. Lots of Pilates, going low carb and small portions. Boring old self-discipline basically.”

But it wasn’t a complete fabrication. I do go to the gym, and I am eating smaller portions. But my weight loss has involved no effort whatsoever.

Morally, I know I’m on thin ice, and never more so than when I’m revelling in the respect and jealousy engendered by my apparent iron willpower. I swear my yoga buddy makes more of an effort to talk to me now she knows how well I look after myself.

Alas, it’s very far from the only deception involved in my love affair with weight-loss injectables.

From Ozempic to my beloved Mounjaro, they are my secret weapon and if that means lying to pharmacies, my colleagues, friends, family and even my husband, I’m more than happy to do it.

Obviously, I was shocked and ­saddened to read about the death of Susan McGowan after just two doses of Mounjaro. And of course, it made me think. But I reason that this drug is being used by lots of people and, while tragic, this death is extremely rare. However, it’s just another reason why I won’t tell my husband I am on it myself.

I’ve always struggled with my weight. Maintaining a size 10 to 12 was my holy grail, and frankly, this often involved miserable deprivation. I work in fashion marketing, love clothes and think you must be slim to be chic. Which means that ever since my teens I’ve been on every diet going: Rosemary Conley, WeightWatchers, Slimming World, the South Beach Diet, food combining, Atkins, water fasting, intermittent fasting and many others.

I’ve paid for expensive, low-calorie food deliveries, disgusting meal-­replacement shakes, bars and ready meals. I have even stayed at spas on starvation rations. But mostly I gritted my teeth, skipped meals, and ate cottage cheese until I couldn’t bear to look at the ghastly stuff.

The fact is I’m one of nature’s chubsters — a ­hungry person who only has to glance at a piece of toast to develop a muffin top.

In my younger days, of course, the diets worked — sort of. On my wedding day 30 years ago, I was a size ten. However, I still hate looking at photographs of the day because I wasn’t as slender as I wanted to be.

I piled on the pounds with each of my three pregnancies, and while I never quite lost all the weight, a few miserable months on a liquid diet saw most of them off.

Then menopause happened. During my 50s, my weight rose inexorably until, by 2020, I was size 16 and — horror — weighed the same 14st as my 6ft 2in, rugby-loving husband. I was utterly mortified.

Yet another strict diet helped me shift just over a stone, but no matter how much I starved myself, I couldn’t lose any more. I felt enormous and repulsive, with a huge spare tyre, flabby thighs and wobbly arms. I wouldn’t let my husband see me naked, or even in my underwear. Sex was completely off the table.

That year, in desperation, I made my first foray into online pharmaceuticals and ordered Orlistat, a weight-loss drug that absorbs fat. I will draw a veil over the details of my brief experience, but ‘oily, ­malodorous, orange leakage’ is one of the side-effects.

Fortunately, by 2021, science had moved on. For those of us always on the lookout for the next diet, there was a huge buzz around a new class of injectable weight-loss drugs — and rather dodgy-sounding online pharmacies were springing up to supply them.

I found a beauty clinic in the ­Midlands that would prescribe me Saxenda, a similar drug to Ozempic, which required daily injections. It was supposed to be for people with a BMI of 30 plus, but infuriatingly, I had managed to diet myself a ­couple of BMI points out of obesity. So, naturally, I lied.

I worked out what weight and height would make me obese and put that down on the online form you had to fill in. The company took my word for it and prescribed me the medication. It cost about £250 a month, and I ordered two months’ supply.

My first thought was how to hide it from my husband.

I knew he’d disapprove of the idea of a new drug, not to mention the money I was spending, even though it was from my own, separate account. Plus I felt embarrassed about being so ­desperate to lose weight.

I vowed to keep the whole thing from him, but when the package arrived, to my horror he reached the door first, and I heard him calling up the stairs: ‘Darling, there’s a strange parcel here, and you need to sign for it.’ I raced downstairs to whisk it away from him.

“What was it?” he asked later, and without missing a beat, I lied.

“Just some beauty products.”

Then I realised the pen dispensers needed to be refrigerated. Panic! At first, I wrapped the box in foil, popped it into a plastic freezer bag and tucked it at the bottom of the vegetable drawer. But I still fretted he’d discover it.

I thought about taking it into my office and using the fridge there but realised my colleagues would find it. Then I had the ­brilliant idea of ordering a mini fridge to keep in my home office. The lies tripped off my tongue. I told my husband I’d bought it for our youngest son to take to university, but then “discovered” he wasn’t allowed a fridge in the halls.

No point sending it back, darling, I’ll have it here. The fridge is now tucked in a cupboard in my office, far from prying eyes.

To my joy, Saxenda almost instantly reduced my appetite. With minimal effort and no side-effects, I lost 12lb in the first month. I felt liberated. After I’d shed a further stone, I stopped ordering, convinced I could now lose weight under my own steam. I wasn’t skinny, but I was a size 12.

But I soon realised I’d wildly overestimated both my willpower and my middle-aged metabolism.

Without the jabs, and despite regular visits to the gym, my weight crept up again. So, in mid-2022, having regained 10lb, I decided to try Ozempic. This was a weekly jab, so even easier to keep secret. I was overweight again, but not obese. This time, the pharmacy I’d read about online wanted a selfie to check my reported weight.

So I adjusted my mirror to create an unflattering angle, dressed in baggy clothes, tucked in my chin to create rolls, and stuck my belly out. I was aware that ­Ozempic was supposed to be for type 2 diabetes, and there were worries that people with the ­condition wouldn’t be able to get their drugs because of people like me. But I reasoned that, with a family history of diabetes and heart attacks, I nearly needed it for medical reasons. Yet really, I just wanted to be thin.

Once again, I had no side-­effects. It felt like a miracle. Suddenly I had become one of those natural skinnies who “forget to eat” and whom everyone admires for their dainty appetite.

After two months, and a stone shed, my fat jeans fell off me again. My husband was especially appreciative, not just of my new body and our renewed sex life, but because I was cheerful and uninterested in food.

He told me that I was “looking trim” and if he showed any curiosity about why I was eating only mini-meals, I told him I was ‘drinking lots of water to fill me up’ or that I’d had a big lunch at work.

Then towards the end of last year, things went wrong. The demand for Ozempic soared and suddenly I couldn’t get any. I decided that surely now I could maintain my slim figure.

And for a while, I did, with the help of yomps with our cocker spaniel and a personal trainer. But the pounds started to creep back on. Which is why this year, I returned to the jabs again — this time the easily sourced Mounjaro.

Yet again, a bit of fudging of my height and weight, a carefully posed photo and playing up my mildly high blood pressure as an ‘obesity-­related complication’ on top of my BMI of (nearly) 27 meant the new clinic accepted me.

Almost instantly, my appetite vanished. Food still tastes fine, but I can take it or leave it. And that’s where I am now — happily jabbing once a week, my stash in my secret fridge, and nobody any the wiser.

Over lunch with family recently, my twentysomething niece announced that “loads” of her friends are using weight-loss injections and she thought they were ridiculous. I arranged my expression into one of shock and disapproval.

“How awful,” I lied. “What a shame they won’t be able to enjoy a lovely meal like this one.” Then, when no one was looking, I offloaded my roast potatoes to my husband’s plate.

The lies are practised and plentiful.

Yes, the cost of Mounjaro makes me wince — I’m starting to worry about how I will be able to fund next summer’s holiday - but I don’t really care. Being slimmer, and the praise I get for it, is worth it.

And as for those who don’t want to take it because they’re “happy as they are”, I say saddle-up chubster! Just because you want to keep overeating doesn’t mean you should — especially now there really is no excuse.

One day, I hope we’ll all be ­sensible and instead of waiting for people to become obese, we’ll give these magic medications to anyone who wants them. Though clearly, people should talk to their doctors first.

In the meantime, I hope to stay on the jabs, on and off, for the rest of my life. As long as I can keep fooling everyone.

* Name has been changed.

© Daily Mail