Byrony Gordon: How weight-loss drug Ozempic has sparked the return of body-shaming

There is usually a towelling robe.

Sometimes fluffy, occasionally waffled, but always presented to me, in an attempt to protect some “modesty” that no longer exists within me, and hasn’t for quite a long time.

“Would you like this?” a red-faced human will ask, noting that I am not wearing any clothes.

At first, I received these gifts gratefully.

The thought of walking almost naked through a TV studio or a vast events centre leaving me uncharacteristically bashful, not to mention a little cold.

But now I am so thoroughly used to standing in public in my pants and bra that I always turn down the robe.

Politely, of course.

After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was rude.

Here is a list of places I have walked around in my underwear: London’s Olympia exhibition centre (no laughing at the back); the set of Good Morning Britain, while being interviewed live on TV by Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway; a vast swathe of our capital city, having run the London Marathon in only my bra and pants, my name emblazoned across my bum and my race number pinned to my underwired sports brassiere.

And now, to add to this list: the ­window of John Lewis on Oxford Street, one of the busiest ­thoroughfares in the country, where I find myself standing as part of an ­inspiring ITV campaign called the Wow Project.

I was offered the customary dressing gown as I de-robed in a changing room a few minutes ago.

“Would you like this to walk through the store?” a young woman asked tentatively, trying not to stare at my stomach, covered as it is in HRT patches (this morning I had taken care to remove the telltale black fluff that seems to accumulate from them on my skin, no matter how clean I keep myself, and, yesterday, I even treated my bikini line to its first wax in almost a year, in an attempt to look vaguely ­presentable for the camera).

I smile politely at the woman, and the dressing gown in her arms, and tell her not to worry.

“May as well get used to being barely dressed in public given I’m about to spend an hour in my undies in the shop window!”

As I leave the changing room in only a bra and a pair of fetching bright pink pants, I am aware that for a lot of people, this is literally their worst nightmare.

But for me, being semi-dressed in front of strangers has become pretty normal, something of an accidental career, even.

It all started in 2017, when I ran my first London Marathon.

I was a size 18 to 20, and thought I would hate it, but found that I actually loved every moment of it: it was the first time in my life that I exercised for the way it made me feel, rather than the way it made me look, and it was something of a ­revelation in terms of my own mental health, which had been dogged by depression, OCD, addiction and ­eating disorders since I was a child.

The following year, I decided to run it again with my friend, the plus-size model Jada Sezer, in just our underwear, to show that exercise is for everyone regardless of size.

The response was incredible and I became known for posting unfiltered pictures of myself in my pants on social media.

Women would write me emotional messages, telling me that they wished they had my confidence – and I would reply with the truth: that I don’t have confidence (I have felt awkward about my body since I can remember), just a desire not to waste a moment more of my precious life hating the body I have been given, or looking for its value in some ­numbers on a set of bathroom scales.

By 2019, when we ran a 10k through London with 1,000 other women in their underwear (including the late Dame Deborah James) I felt like I had done my bit to contribute to the body confidence movement.

We were finally beginning to accept women in all their glory, not just the edited, Photoshopped versions of it.

There were conversations about ­filters, about the pernicious effect of diet culture on women’s mental health, and maybe it was time for me to hang up the running bra and pants – or at least put some clothes over them – and move on with my life.

But just as it felt safe to finally feel comfortable in our bodies, along came Ozempic.

Originally created for type 2 diabetics, to help them keep their blood sugar down, it quickly became clear that semaglutide was also a pretty nifty solution to obesity because it made patients feel fuller for longer and took away hunger.

Semaglutide was swiftly licensed for weight loss as Wegovy, and joined by a whole host of other appetite-­busting drugs, including Mounjaro.

Though these are supposed to be taken only by those with a BMI that classifies them as obese, it was soon being used by celebrities to stay skinny, and anyone who regarded themselves as even slightly overweight.

At the last count, one in eight adults in the US had used Ozempic, or a drug similar, and in the UK, the demand is so high that diabetics struggled to get hold of the drug for much of last year.

Prior to the Ozempic boom, diet culture was being very publicly decried. Now, I’ve seen first-hand how the obese still serve as a handy group for people to wag their fingers at and blame for all of society’s ills.

I’ve started to receive even more messages from trolls about my weight, frequent jibes about the drain I would be on the NHS (despite still regularly running long distances and strength-training).

Fat-shaming, it seems, is deeply ingrained in most of us, even if we ­happened to be fat ourselves, and is not going to be undone by a couple of years of people dancing in their pants on their ­Instagram feeds.

It’s very clear to me that diet ­culture hasn’t gone away.

Instead, it has merely done a wee bit of shape-shifting into the form of injection pens that are easily obtainable online.

In the New York Times, in the ­Washington Post, in the Wall Street Journal and in Time magazine, acres of space has been given over to think pieces about the drug and how it has derailed the body-positivity ­movement, making a mockery of it.

Plus-size influencers have begun to shrink and disappear from the ad campaigns they’d briefly been front and centre of.

As the plus-size blogger Natalie Craig wrote in Cosmopolitan earlier this year: “It’s starting to become increasingly apparent how many ­people and brands were simply using body positivity as zeitgeist-y marketing ploys . . . on the heels of this shift, I’ve noticed more hate comments on my own content than ever before.”

Now, there is a new pressure on those of us classed as obese – with Ozempic and Mounjaro, we have no excuse to have anything other than “healthy” BMIs. The idea of thin as an answer to all of life’s problems has been renewed, with the dangerous “heroin chic” of the 1990s a trend on TikTok once more.

When I told a work acquaintance that I had started doing CrossFit, she looked at me with confusion.

“Why don’t you just get a ­prescription for Ozempic?” she asked, ­spectacularly missing the point.

It felt like I had time-travelled back to the bad old days of the Noughties, when magazines were filled with tips on how to get a bikini body, and celebrities were fat-shamed if they displayed so much as a pinch of excess skin.

And when larger women do cave to the immense pressure and lose weight with these new drugs, they are inevitably shamed for doing so the wrong way, and not through ­willpower alone.

It feels like yet another way for women, in particular, to be appraised and valued for the way they look.

Once more, my social media – ­previously a haven for those seeking reassurance about their bodies – has been filled with people judging prominent women for shrinking, the policing of their size and shape worse than ever.

To be clear, I don’t give a stuff what weight anyone is, or whether or not they use Ozempic.

The point is that women should feel able to do what they want with their bodies without having to explain ­themselves at every turn.

Last month, I made a video for ­Instagram featuring myself having fun on holiday in a bikini, which stated a simple truth: that the ­average human only got 80 summers (if they were lucky), and not a single person was going to remember us for how we looked in a bikini, so we may as well go out there and embrace life fully.

The response blew me away, with hundreds of thousands of views, and endless messages from women ­telling me about their insecurities.

I was stunned at how little things had changed since 2018.

In fact, it felt like things were going backwards, not forwards.

So when Lorraine Kelly asked me to stand in the shop window as part of her Wow Project, which aims to make females feel better about themselves and see how amazing their bodies are, I knew I had to say yes – and that I had to do it in nothing more than my bra and pants, in all my ­unvarnished, 16 st glory.

Outside, it is pouring, but inside the shop window I am feeling comfortable, free even, despite the large crowd who have gathered to watch what on earth is going on.

To my right is Lorraine, as well as Ellie Simmonds, the ­Paralympian, and Adele Roberts, the Radio 1 DJ who last year became the quickest woman in the world to run a marathon with a stoma (she is in recovery from bowel cancer).

Though the others are wearing clothes, we are all here to show that we are more than the ­supposed limits of our bodies: Ellie as a Paralympian, Adele as a survivor of bowel cancer, and me as a size 20 marathon runner.

What a privilege it is to be among them.

And as I stand there for the allotted hour, and see the delighted response from other women outside – none of them used to seeing people who look anything other than perfect on billboards, let alone in shop ­windows – I realise how much joy I get from taking my clothes off in public.

It’s not a perverse thrill, more a ­pleasure from seeing how it gives other women permission to be themselves.

As ladies whoop and clap on the pavement, I am reminded how sad it is that it is still such a momentous thing to see a big woman be fearlessly, unapologetically herself.

And I am reminded how important it is to spread this message: that if I, as a 16 st woman, can stand in a shop window in my pants, my ­cellulite and rolls on display, then maybe you can spend a bit of time accepting your body today.

Not necessarily by standing in a mirror and telling it how much you love it – just by refusing, for once, to declare how much you hate it.

When I get undressed in public, while smiling, laughing even, I subvert expectations.

I show people I am more than just my body, that we are all more than our bodies, that we don’t have to look a particular way or weigh a certain amount to do all the things we have always dreamed of doing.

Because here’s another truth: ten years ago, I thought I had to be a size 8 to run, but last weekend I did my fifth half-marathon of the year.

And if I can do that, as a recovering alcoholic and depressive with a history of eating disorders, then anyone can.

So as I watched the joyous ­reaction to our shop window stunt, I realised that my underwear-flashing days are far from over.

That I will be casting off the towelling robes, and walking around in my pants in public until I’m 90, if that’s what it takes to help women feel good.