Weight loss drugs are changing the way we eat – but at what cost?

A size 16 drops to a 12, a 10 to a six, but when does it all stop? And with these Ozempic-style drugs – as the hangry food noise in our heads diminishes – is the loss of the pleasure of eating worth it?

The new eating-out means tinier portions, food sharing and entrées eaten as mains. Picture: istock

All around me, changing eating habits. In restaurants, at dinner parties, among friends and with acquaintances barely known as I pass them in the street. First the friend: “If I hear ‘What’s for dinner?’ one more time,” she recently announced, “I’m going to stab something.” She’s just been released from the relentlessness of the nightly meal prep. After decades. Her kids have left home, she’s divorced, her house is magazine-spotless and the fridge almost bare. She cooked for her family for thousands of monotonous nights – and now wants to live how she really wants to live. Which means snacking and grazing at unorthodox times and only when hungry. She’ll bring food in when kids are around but it’s no longer a day-to-day haul of grocery abundance. Servant to spouse and children no longer – and her body shape reflects it.

Other ways the eating conversation has changed: acquaintances I run into who are suddenly, fascinatingly, thin. The immediate thought, cancer. The concerned enquiry … “You OK?” But it’s not that. The awkward pause. Oh, it’s that. Even though they never admit it. Yet they didn’t seem that large in the first place. Are they never satisfied? A size 16 drops to a 12, a 10 to a six, but when does it all stop? And with these Ozempic-style drugs – as the hangry food noise in our heads diminishes – is this all, somehow … cheating? It seems too easy. A doctor mate takes weight-loss medication, on a casual basis, whenever he needs to trim a bit of weight. Like at the start of summer. For a month or so. He’s all for micro-dosing and purely for vanity’s sake.

A size 16 drops to a 12, a 10 to a six, but when does it all stop? Picture: istock

But it’s not cheating if it’s health related. Bring on the self-described “big unit” that is Hunter MP Dan Repacholi, who’s refreshingly open about his weight-loss medication. This was the man who could sink up to 20 schooners in a single sitting. “We’d smash them down like there was nothing left in the world,” he recently explained. “I ate and ate and ate.” The result: a mighty 152 kilograms of bulk. Then his doctors suggested Mounjaro, an injectable similar to Ozempic. “It’s a wonder drug; I have no issue talking about it.” Ah, such refreshing honesty. Repacholi believes more Aussie men should be open about their health, because for him, this drug has been transformative. “They said to give it a go and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

For MP Dan Repacholi, Mounjaro has been transformative. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Cheating this is not. It’s life-saving. And I love how these new medications are changing the restaurant landscape. Because after all, who wants to feel like chef Anthony Bourdain once did after a meal: “I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas – fat, drugged, and completely out of it.” The new eating-out means tinier portions, food sharing and entrées eaten as mains. A full-sized order over several courses can suddenly seem obscene. Shovelling that much food in? Please. Hollywood is leading the way, seeing less orders for big steaks and pasta but more for caviar and oysters. Because when people can’t fit in so much, they want it to be a luxury experience.

The human stick figure, Karl Lagerfeld, embodied the loss of pleasure in eating: “I never touch sugar, cheese, bread...” he once explained. “I only like what I’m allowed to like. I’m beyond temptation. There is no weakness. When I see tons of food in the studio… for me it’s as if this stuff was made of plastic.”

Bring on the pleasure. Not the bulimic’s shame but those luscious, lovely combinations of food embodied in Sophia Loren’s joyous declaration, “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.” Give me her attitude over Lagerfeld’s any day, but can the Ozempic-style drugs give us the singular pleasure that eating brings us? Is the pleasure sacrifice worth it?

[e-mail]