NADINE DORRIES: Mounjaro is a medical miracle. But for this reason I have never jabbed myself in 9 months… and the brand new principle about placing weight again on that ALL customers should know

It’s around nine months since I stopped taking Mounjaro, sometimes described as the King Kong of fat-busting injections for its effectiveness.

I wrote about my weight-loss journey in this column and there is certainly no denying that GLP-1 jabs work, which is why an estimated 1.5million Britons have used them to tackle obesity.

In my opinion, they are nothing short of a medical miracle. They will undoubtedly enable those who lose weight to live longer and save the NHS big money in the process. GLP-1 injections such as Mounjaro and Ozempic are a huge step forward from the standard calorie-controlled diet which once dominated the weight-loss industry.

I dare say that most of the women on fat jabs today have already tried a range of calorie-­based diets and, like generations of women before them, have failed again and again – because counting calories demands a completely unrealistic level of mental strength.

As you begin to lose weight, the ‘food noise’ screams in your head. All you can think about is food as you battle your body on a daily basis. The hunger is intense and distracting. I don’t have the willpower for a calorie-controlled diet such as, for example, the increasingly popular Jane Plan. I’ve been there and done that. I know I’d be setting myself up to fail.

This is why the fat jabs work so well: they remove the hunger pangs, suppress the appetite and silence that ‘food noise’.

But I have a word of warning to anyone who thinks that fat jabs are a quick and easy ‘fix’. My recent worrying experience suggests that, once you have lost the weight, keeping it off for the long term is a very real battle.

I started my own course of Mounjaro after taking standard blood tests, then, soon afterwards, receiving a series of phone calls from my GP. My cholesterol was way too high.

I had non-alcoholic fatty ­deposits on my liver and I was pre-diabetic. I stand at only 5ft 1in, my body mass index (BMI) was too high and, to cut a long story short, I was obese. My GP told me in no uncertain terms that I had to lose weight. So, I took the jabs, lost 2st in six months and have loved life ever since.

But that was not the end of it, of course. Keeping the weight off is a very different matter. It’s ­estimated that a troublingly high 80 per cent of people who lose weight through taking fat jabs eventually regain it.

When I first shed the pounds, I spoke to several doctors about how I could stay slim after ­finishing the injections.

The answer was mostly this: if you manage to avoid regaining weight for around a year, your body and your ­appetite will re-programme themselves and adjust to your new size. This is known by scientists as the ‘set point theory’.

So, when I got to Christmas, I was patting myself on the back. I’d gained just 3lb since coming off the jabs and that, I said to myself, was fine.

In the past few months, ­however, I’ve noticed the scales creeping back up at a steady rate and have asked myself the question faced by thousands of others like me: ‘What now?’

My BMI is still within the ­normal range. I’m certainly not obese and no doctor would put me on a course of Mounjaro today, but I know the extra pounds are a worrying sign.

But I’ve also come to the ­conclusion that your body – ­certainly my body – might need much longer than a year to adjust and accept the new weight.

Perhaps this is why so many women, once they reach their ­target weight, start buying GLP-1 pens from a private prescriber and choose to continue injecting at a low dosage in the hope of keeping the weight off permanently.

Part of this must be driven by fear: no one wants to go through the whole gruelling process for a second time. But it’s also because most women have an innate understanding of their bodies – plus the intelligence to know what’s required to manage their own weight.

In my case, I love my new healthy body. I loved wearing a bikini with pride on a recent ­holiday and I never want to go back to the old me.

But while I’ll try a few more weeks of ‘going it alone’ – attempting to keep the weight off without extra help – I can also tell you this: if the scales keep moving upwards I, too, will be heading to a private doctor and making my case to go back on the jab.

Then, rather than stopping the injections when I get back down to my target weight once more, I might well explore the idea of ­taking low doses of Mounjaro for the foreseeable future – under ­medical supervision, of course.

So many do this in secret.

But why not continue injecting openly, in a way that encourages other women to manage and maintain their own weight successfully – and with medical oversight – for the longer term instead of feeling they have failed?

Perhaps one day we might see that 80 per cent figure drop – which can only be a good thing for everyone.

Jessie’s been let down by her stylist

I am a huge fan of Jessie Buckley, the star of the blockbuster Hamnet and the first Irish woman to win a Best Actress Oscar.

She has made everyone of Irish heritage proud.

Yet when it comes to style and dressing for the red carpet, I wish someone who loved Jessie as much as her fans had been in charge of dressing her.

I didn’t love the pink and red Chanel dress she wore for Sunday’s Oscars. Frankly, I haven’t loved any dress I’ve seen her wear at an awards ceremony. Thank goodness that the natural beauty of her smile carries her through.

Yes, Sunday’s frock had a beautiful, long, pink train which caught the eye as she left the stage. But true style and imagination have been in short supply for some little while.

It’s as if whatever fashionista dressed Jessie had made a mental note: ‘She’s not a size zero, I give up. I’ll just wrap her up in a length of fabric. Next!’

Poor show, stylists! You can do better than this for one of the finest female actors of our times.

Our three mothers day

Mother’s Day was very precious to me because I understand how lucky we are to have four generations in our own family.

As my mother passed her 90th birthday last week – looking not a day over 75 and adored by her great granddaughter with whom she has a very special bond – I wondered aloud how many more years we would have together? A child through the war years, whose home was bombed during the May Blitz in Liverpool, she was of a generation that experienced hardship for a large part of her life.

And there was zero equivocation as – using her best schoolmarm voice – she put me straight: ‘I’ve got ten more years left in me yet, so stop worrying.’

That was me told!