Everyone has a dirty secret. Mine is that I tried Mounjaro. I know, don’t. Maybe I should have written this under a pseudonym. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not fat.
But as a fully paid-up member of the Y.C.N.B.T.R.T.T.O.T.T. (You Can Never Be Too Rich, Too Thin, or Too Tanned) generation with a doctorate in dieting, I was too curious to resist. What would it be like to rid myself of the low-level hunger and guilt that was, previously, my permanent state? What would it be like to be content with the way I looked in a bikini? And so for six weeks this past summer, without telling my partner, I went on the shot.
Scroll forward to today, and I am empirically, incontrovertibly, even by my own antediluvian standards, “thin.” From any angle in any changing room, however badly lit, my butt looks absolutely fine. No item of clothing in my wardrobe is remotely tight. My underwear doesn’t mysteriously shrink and get all “friendly” in the wash.
I have changed my constitution, and though the physical difference is quite subtle, because I carried most of my weight around my middle, the psychological effect has been huge. Mostly in a good way, but not 100 percent. Now that I’m not a professional dieter anymore, I can’t help feeling unemployed.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve become evangelical about this drug. It’s a revelation not to be such a Labrador around food. (I continue to use it, taking half the lowest dose—2.5 mg.—every other week to remain, well, more of a cat.)
What a joy it is to have become one of those people who can eat just one M&M and leave food on my plate. For me, after all these years, the bread basket is finally neutral territory.
Given how fraught the issue of weight is for so many people, it wouldn’t surprise me if the public-health authorities eventually put Mounjaro in the water. (Well, maybe not if R.F.K. Jr. is in charge of Health and Human Services.)
Just wait until Eli Lilly brings out retatrutide, a new triple-action drug that is said to shed fat, lower blood sugar, improve one’s lipid profile, and even decrease cardiovascular risk. It’s supposedly even more effective, and comes with fewer side effects, than Mounjaro, which can cause nausea and gastrointestinal issues. By the end of the century, obesity and alcoholism may all but cease to exist.
And yet.
I can’t shake off this vague air of meh-ness. As we know, nature abhors a vacuum, and all this energy I devoted over the decades to the pursuit of “thinness” needs a new place to roost.
Longing, wanting, working toward something is part of the human condition. I liken the sensation to the flatness I felt as a kid after tearing open all my Christmas presents at dawn. (The Swedes got it right, making it all about Christmas Eve.)
To paraphrase Marc Lewis, the cognitive neuroscientist, addiction expert, and author of the best-seller The Biology of Desire, we are wired less for pleasure than for desire. “Once the food is in your mouth, there’s really nothing more you have to do to improve your odds of survival and procreation,” he writes.
There have not been many conclusive clinical studies of the effect of GLP-1 drugs like Mounjaro on sex drive, but if you scroll through Reddit—guilty—you’ll see that there are swathes of users who not only abstain from food and drink but also the pursuit of pleasure. (My personal experience? I don’t know you well enough yet.) Draw your own conclusions, but maybe we need to fear Mounjaro more than artificial intelligence in terms of the end of the line for humanity.
So where do we go from here? I have no plans to end my drug use right before the holiday season. What joy it will be to wake up on New Year’s Day without feeling like a giant, guilty tick.
On the other hand, since food no longer has the power to arouse me as it once did, Christmas (which has always been about the eating for me) has kind of lost its allure. Stollen? So what. Mince pies slathered in homemade brandy butter? Same. Thanks to Mounjaro, it seems that I may have already opened most of my presents.
Christa D’Souza is a London-based writer who contributes to the Daily Mail and The Sunday Times
