It was my ‘sort of’ wedding anniversary the other day. I say ‘sort of’ because we got married during Covid, which meant we had two ceremonies that were sandwiched between lockdowns.

The first was in December 2020 and consisted of us, a couple of registrars and my best friend and her husband as witnesses. It turned out to be unbelievably romantic in a way neither of us had anticipated (I think, partly as a result of these low expectations, we placed no pressure on the occasion and that meant we could concentrate on the thing that most mattered – a celebration of love and intimacy).

The second was a slightly bigger affair, in April the following year. By then, pandemic guidelines allowed us to invite a dozen guests as long as we sat outside on tables of six.

Unlike this year, the spring of 2021 was utterly freezing, which means that in many of the photographs Justin is wearing a fleece and his children are in puffer jackets.

We tend to celebrate the first occasion rather than the second, which was why, when my iPhone served up a memory of me in a cream, satiny dress holding a spray of pink orchids, I had momentarily forgotten the date.

The reason I mention it here is actually nothing to do with the wedding itself (although I did type out a hasty anniversary text to my husband) but with the photo.

Despite the occasion and the objectively beautiful dress I was wearing, the only thing I could focus on was that the way the sunlight hit the fabric emphasised my protruding stomach.

It’s still the first thing I see when I look at that image four years later. I had gone through fertility treatment and my third miscarriage some months previously, and there were probably still hormones coursing through my body I didn’t quite acknowledge. Plus, I’ve always had a bit of a stomach. In fact, most of us do – what with being, you know, human beings with internal organs and stuff.

But the stomach still bothers me. As does the fact that the numbers on the scales when I go for a routine health check-up are bigger than I think I want them to be.

As does the moment in a high street fitting room when I have picked my normal size in a pair of trousers and yet can’t seem to pull the waistband up over my hips.

It’s just a number, I tell myself – a number dreamed up by some anonymous committee that decreed all women must be given a score in dress size that will vary according to which store you’re in and which label you’re wearing and in which country you might be shopping, while men are allowed to be told measurements in centimetres and inches.

And yet.

I know, of course I do, that I am blessed with a healthy, functioning body that moves and does amazing things every single day.

I know, of course I do, that I am not unhealthily obese and that it’s what’s inside that counts, and that capitulating to the internal monologue that tells me I need, constantly, to be different in some way in order to be perfect, is simply giving into the toxicity of a patriarchal and capitalist culture that thrives on making us feel ‘less than’.

I know that it’s important to convey a sense of body positivity – or, at least, neutrality – to other women and particularly to young girls so they understand their worth comes from what they have to offer the world and not from whether or not they have a thigh gap.

I know that I have made a concerted and rewarding effort to be healthier, fitter and physically stronger in my 40s than ever before.

And yet.

I feel the need to share all this because I also believe it’s important that other women know the drip‑drip-drip of self-loathing is not their burden alone to carry.

That, if you came of age in a decade which circled women’s cellulite in magazines and called it shame; if you grew up in a society which encouraged us all to scrutinise and judge the thinness of others as if tracking share prices on a stock market of bodily value; if you were taught to value hip bones and supermodel skinniness over almost any other characteristic, then this constant, exhausting, debilitating internal battle between your higher-minded self and your relentlessly persistent inner critic is not of your making.

We can think we are getting older and wiser and making more peace with our bodies – and we are – but still we have the capacity to be temporarily undone by a single iPhone photo memory.

And then we feel like failures all over again: not just because we have stomachs but because we haven’t been able to rise above what we know to be a pernicious lie about how women shouldn’t have stomachs. Or hips. Or upper arms. Or any seemingly extraneous bit of flab.

We know it isn’t true that we need to be thinner to be accepted. We know that beauty comes in many forms. We know, too, that many of the people we find most stunning weigh more than Kate Moss in her grunge heyday.

And yet.

The reason this has come up for me again is the growing popularity of weight-loss injections.

I’ve seen celebrities I looked up to (and felt reassured by) for not subscribing to oppressive red carpet body norms shrink, Mrs Pepperpot-style, into sample size dresses.

A growing number of people I know are on the jabs. Something that started out as a drug a person would take when their health necessitated it has become normalised as an optional lifestyle choice to shift a few extra pounds before summer.

I say this with zero judgment, by the way. It is up to each individual what they want to do with their body, and how they want to look and present themselves to the world.

I also have several friends who take Mounjaro and Ozempic because they feel overweight and would like to reset their relationship with food. So far, the injections have really helped these individuals make healthy and long-term changes, which I think is hugely positive.

But I worry about women and men who, for years, have been living with the reality of disordered eating, who are – by any metric – slender and who now fill out forms using Googled images of bigger people in order to get online doctors to prescribe powerful drugs that arrive in the post days later.

This, in spite of the fact the long-term risks of taking such drugs remain uncertain.

I know all of this. I do.

And yet.

As I watched more and more people take the drugs and lose the weight and as I read more and more pieces by journalists who raved about the impressive effects of microdosing GLP-1s, that ferocious inner critic started piping up again.

‘But it looks so easy,’ the critic said. ‘Everyone else seems to be doing it. Wouldn’t you be significantly happier if you were just a little bit thinner and could fit into that ever-elusive smaller size?’ So the insistent whisper went on.

I started over-analysing my body composition. How much of it was muscle? How much of it was fat? Which photo of myself should I trust – the one that I snapped from a flattering angle or the one someone else took of me where all my imperfections were on prominent display?

I started looking into Ozempic and Mounjaro and Wegovy online.

With startling rapidity, TikTok began serving me videos of younger women sharing their tips for staying thin and eating calorie-controlled diets, and which gym exercises to do in order to get ‘the lean look’.

It was horrible. I thought we’d got over this. I thought we’d left this kind of body fascism in the 1990s. I thought Gen Z had a far healthier relationship with their physical selves than we did.

I thought so.

And yet.

In the midst of all this noise, I knew I had to challenge my inner critic by seeking out other voices. So I started talking about how I was feeling to a few trusted individuals, some of whom work in medical professions and others who have jobs involving physical fitness and wellness.

What they told me was so helpful that I wanted to share it with you, in case you find yourself in the same position I was: namely, the mental contortion that left me objectively knowing my desire to lose weight was as a result of self-loathing and social conditioning and nothing at all to do with health or necessity while at the same time still feeling I wanted to be thinner.

It’s an embarrassing and shameful thing to admit because I also want to project strength, power and confidence to the outside world.

I want to be a woman who prioritises inner resilience over outward manifestations of what others have categorised as ‘beauty’.

And it’s true that, these days, I am more that woman than I am my inner critic. But I want to be honest that the inner critic still resides within me and rears up in moments of weakness or stress or anxiety.

And just to be clear: I am not for one minute suggesting that anyone is wrong for taking these injections. I support everyone in their own decision-making, as long as the decision is grounded in self-love and self-worth and is supported by medical professionals.

So this list is a personal one. It’s the list I’ve devised for myself, for any time I feel that creeping tide of self-criticism.

I’m putting it here not as a judgment on anyone else’s choices, but as a reminder that, despite what society tells us, we don’t have to weigh a certain number to belong.

FAT JABS MAKE YOU LOSE MUSCLE

Studies have shown that those who take the jabs see muscle loss ranging from 25 per cent to 39 per cent of the total weight lost over several months. By comparison, muscle mass usually decreases approximately 3-8 per cent per decade after the age of 30.

I personally love having muscle. It makes me feel strong. It has a whole range of health benefits including improved metabolism and enhanced bone density – especially important for 40-plus women like me.

I’ve worked hard for my muscle in the gym. I don’t want to lose it.

MUSCLE WEIGHS MORE THAN FAT

If you look lean, feel good and your clothes are comfortable, that’s a truer metric than your BMI or the number on the scales.

When GLP-1s do start breaking down fat, you lose fat from everywhere – including your face.

Sometimes, if the dosage is too high or sustained over too long a time, your face acquires the sunken, gaunt look we’ve seen on a few celebrities.

The reality of this was brought home to me the other day when I saw an advert for a new skin injectable specifically designed to plump out facial features sunken by weight-loss jabs.

This seems crazy – to invent one drug to counteract the effects of another – and makes me wonder whether it’s all just a huge conspiracy to encourage us to spend more money because we feel trapped in a perpetual state of never being ‘perfect’.

I NEED TO KNOW FULL EFFECTS TO FEEL SAFE

As Gary Taubes, an investigative science and health journalist and author of Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin And Successful Treatments, explains in an article in The Atlantic: ‘The many clinical trials of the new obesity treatments do not and cannot look at what might happen over a decade or more of steady use, or what might happen if the injections must be discontinued after that long.

‘We take for granted that if serious problems do emerge, far down that distant road, or if the drugs have to be discontinued because of side-effects, newer treatments will be available to solve the problems or take over the job of weight maintenance.’

GLP-1s are available on the NHS but only for those facing significant health risks from their weight.

Most of the people I know pay privately for theirs and aren’t clinically obese. Instead, they are making a lifestyle choice to shift a few pounds.

It’s the same reason a lot of celebrities use the jabs – to look ‘red carpet-ready’.

All of this opens up a darker question: will we end up living in a society where only the wealthiest have access to being the thinnest? And do we want to be part of letting that happen? I don’t.

So many of us have been conditioned – for whatever reason, be it upbringing or sociological context – to believe that looking thinner makes you look better.

I don’t think this is true.

I’ve never looked at a woman and thought: ‘You’re beautiful because you’re so thin.’

I might have thought: ‘You’re so thin,’ and ‘You’re beautiful,’ but actually, those are two entirely separate concepts.

More often than not, I simply think: ‘You’re beautiful’. End of sentence.

And the beauty I am most struck by is never purely physical, it’s to do with energy and soul and interest and inner radiance.

We are so much more generous to others than we are to ourselves. If the most likely marker of other human behaviour is our own, then the chances are people are being more generous to us than we could ever imagine.

And even if that isn’t true, isn’t choosing to believe it a better, more joyous way to move around the world?

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