While shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has become the British political poster boy for weight-loss jabs, one of his former colleagues has been less impressed.
Tory peer Lord Ed Vaizey has been left frustrated in his bid to trim his weight after taking Mounjaro to try to get down to a lower number on his scales.
The ex-culture minister told The Independent that despite hundreds of thousands of people taking weight-loss jabs, in his experience it was “certainly not a miracle drug” – but admitted he could have taken other measures to help him shed the pounds.
“My suspicion is that, I am a typical man in the sense that I think ‘I buy this drug, I inject it, it should do all the work’. But I suspect that if I stop drinking and had a reasonably sensible diet, it would probably have helped me lose weight quicker than if I was just doing it as a diet.” he said.
The intervention comes after the NHS started rolling out weight loss jabs to tackle the obesity crisis in the UK.
Lord Vaizey, who has lost around a stone in total, says his healthy weight is about 13 stone and admitted he was “about two stone overweight” when he first decided to take action.
Having lost that excess weight during Covid, which he says was the result of no longer being wined and dined on the Westminster lunch circuit, he put it back on once lockdown ended. Ultimately his desire to get back in shape led him to the weight-loss jabs.
He said: “I went on to Wegovy first and then Mounjaro. Wegovy definitely did the trick.”
But his experience with Mounjaro was not such a success, which he started using after a break of about nine months “when my weight started creeping up again”.
“It helped get it down but I’m stuck at about 14st 10lb now, which I regard as for me being about stone overweight.
“It definitely does reduce your appetite a bit; I definitely feel fuller at meal times that way that I didn’t before. But I’m stuck on 14st 10lb – it’s not going to take me any lower.
“It doesn’t seem right and I was, at one point, on the maximum dose. I still use it, partly because I think my weight will creep up again if I stop using it.”
While he eats less, he says the jabs have not put him off his love for desserts or “sinking a bottle of wine”.
“I have zero side effects, and as I think it kind of maintains me in a stable weight, I’m happy to carry on using it, but it’s certain that I’ve got to be slightly more disciplined, I think, if I really want to lose weight now.
“I’m quite happy to go out to dinner and sink a bottle of wine. I’m quite happy to have a dessert at dinner. It’s not rewired my brain to not like fatty foods or anything.”
However, friends have told Lord Vaizey he is looking more trim.
“People definitely comment. I had dinner with a friend last night who I haven’t seen for a while, and he commented, ‘You look like you’ve lost weight. You look really healthy.’ People keep telling me, I look very healthy. And well, that’s certainly true.
“But I read those stories about people who took Wegovy and shed four stone, but that’s not happened to me.”
