Becoming Me, Myself and Mine

Depending on when I’m driving my car somewhere, I get to listen to some very interesting radio programmes – I have only just discovered BBC Sounds, which allows you to listen to any programme at any time. Anyway, as I was driving home last Thursday I tuned into the wonderful Sideways, hosted by Mathew Syed. Last week’s episode was called Me, Myself and Mine – you can hear it here on BBC Sounds - and it posed the question what does it mean to own your body?

The programme provided a fascinating insight into what people think about how they look and the impact this might have on their inner sense of who they are. Importantly, the person you feel you are, can impact upon your self-confidence, motivation, resilience and of course how you perceive your place in the world. Whilst the body modification discussed in the programme sounded extreme to me, since the introduction of weight loss jabs, many people may have been adopting something similar.

We have a couple of friends who started using these jabs earlier this year. One friend was obese, but the other could best be described as plump. And before those folk who regularly troll me start complaining, both terms are used clinically, the former to describe a medical condition, the latter, to describe a fuller body shape. For the individual however, how they perceive their body shape is going to be the overriding concern.

In our friend’s case, it was for these reasons, and not primarily health reasons, that they first started using the fat loss jabs. At first the results were stunning. As the continued weight loss became visible, and their body shapes changed, I thought they began to look gaunt, and unhealthily so. They have continued to take the jabs. Now they aren’t taking these through an NHS prescription, but through a private supplier, in my mind never a good thing to be doing. It costs them around £125 a month to purchase the jabs, around £1500 a year.

To put that into perspective, if you were to smoke 20 tobacco cigarettes a day, it would cost you over £6000 a year, E-cigarettes just over £500 a year. If, like me, you are a nonsmoker but like a glass (or two) of wine in an evening, it’s likely to cost you just under £4000 a year (if you are content with supermarket plonk). So, each to their own.

It will be interesting to see what the impact of the proposed price rise of Mounjaro in September has on those who use this brand. Potentially the cost will rise from £220 to £330 for a month’s supply. Expect other brands to also raise their prices. The [Gilded] Eli Lilly, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and maker of Mounjaro say the price they charge the NHS will not change. Private suppliers will have to negotiate a new deal.

Having just spent a week enjoying some great Portuguese red wines, I’m on an alcohol-free regime. Now I’m not obese, and would never use a weight loss jab even if I were, but I do know that a month’s detox will help me shed a few surplus pounds, as well as save some of the other type of pounds! Latest estimates from the NHS reveal that obesity will cost the NHS over £11.4 billion every year. Wider costs to society are estimated to be around £74.3 billion each year. These are big sums of money. £1 billion would pay the salary of 8,200 consultants for a year, or the salary of 24,800 a year. It would run the NHS in England for just 2.1 days.

So, anything each of us might be able to do in taking better care of ourselves and reducing the need to access health care services has got to be good for us, our families, the communities we live in and wider society. That said, I personally think there are better ways to lose or control our weight than using fat loss jabs.

Finally, I will end this blog post by mentioning another Radio 4 programme also heard last Thursday. It was the Today programme. There was a feature on the forthcoming Women’s Rugby World Cup. The discussion touched upon the ‘body shaming’ that some of the players had experienced. It quoted Zoe Aldcroft, the new team captain, who had said we want different things from different team members, different skills and abilities, and that comes from having players of all shapes and sizes. It may be rugby, but it made sense to me.