Delicious cassoulets, potato dauphinoise, creme brulee, lashings of wine followed by lots of cheese and biscuits. Or risotto full of Parmesan and butter, home-made sausages, big steaming steak pies, curries, bread and butter pudding . . .
I have always loved food. If something is delicious, I will go on eating more of it long after I’m full – extra helpings of crackling, lots of cream on my apple pie.
Some of the best times of my life have involved eating. I used to be the editor of a food magazine and one of the finest moments from that job was going on a trip to Italy and sitting down for an 11-course meal that was so delicious I still dream about it.
There’s something sexy about the enjoyment of food: I’ve always liked men who like to eat. Skinny men who go to the gym are not for me – they’re too controlled.
As for women, at a recent dinner party it pained me that every single woman banged on about how guilty they felt for eating a tiny mouthful of chocolate mousse for dessert.
I like people who live on the edge, who live in the moment – who say: ‘Yes, I’m going to eat that massive portion of roast potatoes because they’re delicious.’
I secretly feel people who don’t enjoy eating, don’t really enjoy life. And yet, recently, I have become one of these dreadful picky eaters.
For the past month, I have been taking Mounjaro, a close relation of Ozempic, a weight-loss drug that works by stimulating insulin release, controlling blood sugar, while also reducing appetite and increasing feelings of fullness.
Lucy Cavendish has already lost weight on Mounjaro, but says: ‘Mentally, I am missing the way I used to relish food. I just don’t feel like myself.’
You just don’t want to eat – but when you do, you feel full more quickly and for longer.
Aged 57, and 5ft 7in tall, I weigh 14 st, which makes me clinically obese. The doctor who told me I needed to lose three stone said, frankly, that, post-menopause, I’d struggle to do it through diet and exercise alone.
After a month of Mounjaro, I have lost half a stone. But part of me worries that I am losing something else as well.
In becoming this new abstemious person at the flick of a chemical switch, will I lose a fundamental part of myself – the gregarious, fun, slightly rebellious part that once smoked heavily, parked on double yellow lines and didn’t like being told what to do?
I know plenty of people taking weight-loss drugs are jumping with delight to be able finally to tune out the so-called ‘food noise’ – the constant stream of thoughts and images about food that many overweight people experience.
But without it, what joy is left in life?
The matter is further complicated for me because it’s not even as if I don’t like my body and desperately long to be thin.
My weight has yo-yoed over the years – along, I admit, with my levels of self-acceptance – but berating myself for a body that’s never really been seriously ill and that has managed to give birth to four healthy children seems a waste of a life.
It’s fair to say that I don’t often look in mirrors. Neither do I make a habit of standing on the scales. But, at a size 14 to 16, I like what I wear and my friends never tell me I look fat, so I just assume I’m not.
Weight-loss drug Mounjaro works by stimulating insulin release and controlling blood sugar, while also reducing appetite and increasing feelings of fullness
Perhaps I have some form of reverse body dysmorphia? Rather than believing I’m bigger than I actually am, I seem to be suffering from the idea that I’m actually a perfectly slim person when I’m clearly not.
I just think I’m fit and relatively agile because I do yoga and dance classes, five and three times a week, respectively. However, not only did an older woman offer me a seat on a bus recently but, when I said I was perfectly happy standing, she made the sign of a pregnant belly with her hand.
I was astounded, not least because I’m obviously too old to have a baby, but also because I didn’t think I looked that big.
Still, I never considered doing anything more about my weight until two months ago, when I accompanied my 17-year-old daughter to a private GP for a routine appointment.
I started idly reading a poster about weight-loss injections and, as I stood there, a doctor made a beeline for me.
Like most people, I had heard of the new weight-loss medication. I had read stories about Oprah Winfrey, Rebel Wilson and other stars espousing the brilliance of these new drugs. I had never imagined using them myself.
But the doctor said he had an available appointment and invited me in to talk about it. He weighed me, entered my details into the computer and the word ‘obese’ flashed up.
I was genuinely shocked.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I think you need to lose some weight.’
Three stone to be precise – or I’d be at increased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and certain cancers.
‘Exercise is good,’ said the doctor, ‘but it won’t help you lose weight. The thing that will help is weight-loss drugs coupled with exercise and a balanced, healthy diet.’ That’s when he suggested Mounjaro.
For it to be effective, he told me, I’d need to keep up my exercise and make healthy choices about food. I was warned of potential side-effects, including nausea, diarrhoea and vomiting.
I had already heard people refer to the ages of 40 to 60 as ‘sniper’s alley’ – the time of life when seemingly healthy people start to suffer from heart attacks and other potentially life-threatening, often lifestyle-related, problems. I didn’t want to be struck down just yet, so I agreed to think about it.
On the way home, I mentioned it to my daughter. She said she didn’t think of me as overweight but she wants me to be healthy – and on the planet for as long as possible – so concluded it was a good idea.
Back home, I looked at my body in the mirror and wondered how it would feel to be thin.
I was always a chubby child. In photographs, I look like a bouncy ball, round and chubby.
My father used to call me ‘Thunder Thighs’ when I was a little girl of eight. . . I know he meant it fondly but it made me feel embarrassed and upset.
My mother was reassuring, telling me I had ‘puppy fat’ and that it was completely normal.
We were not a foodie family. We ate tins of alphabetti spaghetti, baked potatoes, cod in parsley sauce that came in a bag. But I did learn that I had to finish everything on my plate.
When I got a bit older, we would go to buy jeans and the shop assistant would look at me and say: ‘We’re going to need a larger size for her.’ It was so embarrassing, I dreaded going shopping.
By the age of 11, I hated everything about my body.
I slimmed down to a size 10 as a teenager, without consciously trying, through playing lots of netball. But then, at 16, I had a boyfriend and secretly went on the Pill.
Doctors are now prescribing drugs, not just exercising and eating sensibly, to stem the rise in obesity
Within months my body had changed, with growing breasts and expanding hips and a bottom that just got larger and larger.
I hated it. I hated my body back then. I hated the lascivious way men looked at me. I found it threatening and deeply disturbing. Not wanting to give up the Pill, I stopped eating. I started taking my dinner upstairs and throwing the food out of the window.
The phase didn’t last for ever, but I didn’t really get into food until I was 18 and hitch-hiked around France with a friend. Discovering French food and wine was mind-blowing. I loved how people sat down for hours, eating and drinking and talking – I wanted to live like that.
In my house, growing up, you just bolted down lunch, then left the table.
After gaining more weight due to an unhealthy diet at university, I tried to lose weight again. I’d be thin for a bit, then I’d get fat again, then thin again.
I’ve tried all the diets: the paleo, the Montignac diet, F-plan diet, Atkins, juicing, WeightWatchers, 5:2. They all ‘worked’, in that I lost weight, but I always piled it back on again.
When I was pregnant at 28, I ate everything I wanted and ballooned. Then I dieted to get back to a decent weight. Then I got pregnant again and the cycle started over. Four pregnancies meant a lot of yo-yoing. Over the years, however, I realised that being thin didn’t make me feel any happier. Almost without realising it, I slowly came to respect my body, my rounded tummy, rather than resent it.
I learned to eat the foods I actually wanted to eat, and to accept myself as I was – until that doctor told me living that way was putting me in serious danger of an early death.
I talked to a friend who lives in the US. At 63, he’s lost more than two stone in ten weeks on Ozempic. He said everyone in the States is on it and no one thinks it’s weird or that you are lazy or somehow incapable of willpower.
It costs more than $1,000 (£790) a month there. He was amazed at how much cheaper it is in the UK. ‘You’d be crazy not to do it,’ he said.
So the next day I called the doctor back and told him to sign me up, agreeing to the £350-a-month fee. This includes all health monitoring, weighing, measuring, taking of bloods and the drugs.
The plan is for me to see him once a month and be given an exercise and nutrition plan.
So far there have been no side-effects – not physical ones anyway. Mentally, though, I admit I am missing the way I used to relish food.
I just don’t feel hungry. I make a normal-sized plate of food and can manage only half of it.
Before I started taking Mounjaro, I found this idea literally unbelievable. The woman who could do that, well, she simply wouldn’t be me.
But when I met a friend for lunch the other day I had just a tiny little quiche and salad.
That’s not to say my brain has been totally rewired, though. I used to make silly deals with myself that if I skipped lunch I could have a packet of biscuits (rich tea, mind you, which are basically sawdust).
Despite the drug, my mind still goes: ‘God, I don’t feel like eating anything much but I should eat something . . . maybe I’ll have some biscuits.’
This is why the doctor has said I have got to make sensible choices, rather than assuming Mounjaro will do all the work. Pick an apple instead.
The other day it struck me that, if I want to stay healthy, I am never going to be able to go back to the person I was.
No cream, no cheese, no Christmas pudding even.
For ever more, I will be the person nibbling a few florets of broccoli as others tuck in around her.
Yes, there is a psychological reward for having lost half a stone already – for all my body acceptance, it does make me feel good to see a slightly svelter me in the mirrors at my yoga class.
Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, Kate Moss famously said. But what if I just don’t feel like myself?