Mounjaro offending close "friends"

[Hope78]

I have bitten the bullet and started using Mounjaro. I pay for it privately through a reputable private clinic , and in a nutshell its been incredible.

Long story as short as poss.... I'm a well built 5ft7 woman who has been anything from 10st to 13.7st over years , ideal weight 11st happy and feel good, have gone into perimenopause , started HRT and basically CANNOT shift stubborn 2st. I told my GP my plans and he agreed as BMI verging on obese (13st4) .....decision was 6 months in making with a LOT of research before starting it ....anyway ....

I have lost my first half stone ( in 10 days ) and with close friends at the weekend told them i was on the injection and how great i feel ( not just food noise but ADHD symptoms better too ) my friends were so happy for me bar one who could not hide her disgust. This person has a stunning figure, always been a petite size 8, always attracted a lot of male attention, and has been known to be quite fattest over the years to anyone chubby. She basically said it was cheating, said i would be fatter long term and i know that behind my back is slagging me off ..
I've always been confident despite my different weights but i did get a lot of compliments especially from other husbands of how well i looked , and it seemed to REALLY annoy her she has stopped messaging me as much and has declined Xmas invites for drinks at mine.
Its got me thinking that this injection is a real shift long term for men and women , but psychologically its maybe pissing off people that don't struggle????
Another friend was shocked i even told people but im not that sort of person , I'm an open book and chatty and don't see the point ? maybe i should have just kept my mouth shut ? AIBU to feel shocked and disappointed by this ?

She's scared of you not being a fat friend anymore. These people are not true friends. Good people want you to be happy and healthy

On a tangent though, it's mad how differently shaped we all are.. I'm your height and look slim at that weight.

I didn't mention women. I mean all of them . I have seen men be just as vile about people on WLM.

It’s not prescribed - they hardly go around with sashes/labels, do they? These are subconscious roles assigned/taken up, just as first born children assume the mantle of responsibility for younger siblings even if they are not expressly told to do so. Enculturated roles are absorbed and performed without conscious effort.

And I’m pleased for you that you never encountered female rivalry in your lifetime, but you are either very lucky or simply oblivious - I don’t know a single female who HASN’T encountered it and, yes, it often manifests over weight/appearance. My DH works in a FTSE100 company and he sees it all the time, to the extent that he calls one of his former female bosses ‘Queen Bee’. He has seen very attractive women excluded by female peers/bosses because they are deemed to be extremely attractive. Professional, degree educated women, excluding another educated/skilled woman because they feel threatened by her looks when going into client facing situations! Men don’t do this.

It's not really anyone's business what you take to lose weight

This is a very interesting post and I agree the narrative has changed. In the 90s Kate Moss and the supermodels were all claiming to stuff themselves with burgers whilst looking like waifs which was patently untrue.

I think it has shifted to an emphasis on working hard to maintain your body and that being a badge of honour rather than something that is denied with all the social media gym influencers. My teen daughter and her friends hang out at the gym not the pub which is quite different to my youth.

It is at least more honest although still (as again a poster pointed out upthread) the underlying attitude of thinness being lauded is still there and is influenced by patriarchy

I struggle with it all as the antidote to that thinking is the fat acceptance movement which has the problem that this is encouraging something that definitely is objectively unhealthy and shortens your life (why no smoking acceptance movement)

I think that people who are slim DO have to work at it but also that it becomes a bit second nature after a while so then it doesn't feel like constant effort which is why you get people saying it's easy because it is for them once they have ingrained certain habits and a certain lifestyle. When you are changing ingrained habits all the way from childhood that is very very hard work and if there is a way to pharmacologically help people to do that I am all for it.

But this is bollocks. How was the OP nasty about her friend? The only thing she’s said about the friend is that she’s been quite disparaging of overweight people in the past. Unless OP marched into the venue shouting, “HA! Check me out, you skinny bitch - don’t feel so smug now, do you?”, I can’t see how she’s been nasty or how the friend could be “nasty back”. Back to what?

Course it's bollocks but that's mumsnet for you, they change the narrative🤣

@MiamiWindMachine well she's being a cow about her friend having this amazing figure that she flaunts and the male gaze.. clearly jealous comments that I'd consider be bloody rude and I doubt she's ever said to her face. Not sure why she's even friends in the first place.

And then this particular lady voices her concerns and the OP leaps to the conclusion of jealousy and not just concern.

So yep in my opinion the OP isn't such a great friend herself.

I agree, I'm on saxenda, had some really bad side effects, quite tired a lot of the time, hate injecting, hate forking out the money each month but I've gone from 15.7 to 14.1 in 6 weeks, hoping to be 13.7 by Christmas, I did it because was tired being overweight, feeling crap about myself and also have high blood pressure. I am hoping that when I stop the injections I won't put the weight back on because at the moment there isn't little research to show the outcomes but I know now I can never eat the way I used to, I feel I will always battle with weight but this has given me a good start.

This person has a stunning figure, always been a petite size 8, always attracted a lot of male attention, and has been known to be quite fattest over the years to anyone chubby.

This is what op said. Since when has saying someone has a ‘stunning figure’ and has ‘always attracted a lot of male attention’, been unkind?

What is unkind, is telling your ‘friend’ that they’re cheating in their weightless and that they’ll put at all back on and more when they stop using it. Oh, and generally being ‘fattist’.

Yep, I was always known as the one despite having a lot of education (2 degrees) that had issues with my career when I retrained in my late 20s and tried to enter a new industry.

After a string of awful jobs, I found a great role (that interestingly enough a friend had told me not to bother applying for as I wasn’t qualified) . This long time friend didn’t seem bothered when I interviewed for it, was slightly surprised when I got the job then expressed outright anger and contempt when I started the job and said how much I loved it! She needed me to be constantly texting about how bad my day had been and when she wasn’t getting that it clearly upset her.

She actually rolled her eyes at me over lunch when she asked me if I was still enjoying my new job and I said yes😂 needless to say our friendship ended a few months later. I was clearly just the unfortunate friend who made her feel better that someone was worse off than her . And how dare I move from that role of hapless unfortunate unlucky friend!

Haha me too!!!! She loved being the slim one. She's feeling threatened. Not a good friend

Oh no doubt these people exist. Sorry that happened to you. I guess we should think ourselves lucky when they ‘out’ themselves and we can cut our losses and move on!

The only reason GPs aren’t prescribing it yet is because they haven’t (yet) been funded to do so. It’s nothing to do with whether they think it will be a safe and effective treatment.

It will be hard for the "virtuous" when they have nobody to look down on.

Yes I was bemused by that also, the op was complimentary and also factual. Struggling to see how it’s unkind myself

Who are you so angry with? Everyone slimmer than you are? Why?

I was a size 8 and never struggled with my weight and ate what I wanted although liked to eat healthy as well. I hit 40, put on a stone and a half and can't lose it. So your "friend" might end up struggling in the future herself. Nothing is guaranteed.

Anyway a friend of mine who was classed as obese is on the injections and she has lost 4 stone. She is so happy and we (her friends) are all so happy for her.

So your friends should be happy for you. Fine if they say I hope you are ok with the side effects etc but the cheating comments are ridiculous. Would I be cheating if I finally managed to lose weight by not eating lunch or having special diet milkshakes or whatever. It doesn't matter how you do it.

I have contempt for people who think those who are trying to improve their health are "cheating" like they don't deserve it. Am I wrong?

Why do you think I'm angry with people who are slimmer than me? I don't form my opinion on others based on their weight. Do you?

This thread has shown many slim people are utterly miserable. Their one joy the fact they are slim. Their advantage. And they feel superior to those who don’t suffer as they do, who aren’t slim. Women over other women.

hence why they are incensed we can all now be slim and will be. No longer anyone to feel smug over. As they still live miserable and struggling. Some likely with eating disorders developed to maintain it.

before these jabs these threads were full of evangelical slim folks telling people how they managed it. Not a one giving it its a fucking miserable way to live. But now that we will all be slim they are all crawling out of the woodwork bleating about how hard it is for them. How unfair it is. That we can do it and not be miserable.not struggle like them.

This genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Time to adjust to the new reality of the fact we have cured obesity. The slim advantage is gone. If your friends aren’t on it now, they soon will be.

Thanks - yeah I’m SO glad she showed her true colours when she did, so she wasn’t around to try put a dampener on my later achievements.

Absolutely we can only be grateful when people show us who they are - as painful as it may be at the time - and then move on.

Do the jabs accelerate ageing/muscle loss in menopausal/post menopausal? Does this really only happen if weight loss to rapid & how come that doesn’t generally happen on crash diets too if so?

It does happen on crash diets. Any diet where weight is rapidly lost includes muscle loss. It's why exercise is important: not because it helps you lose weight, it really doesn't make much difference there, but because it helps to build and maintain muscle mass. Ditto protein. But anyone losing several stone of weight rapidly (and jabs and bariatric surgery are the fastest ways to lose weight) will be losing muscle mass. And for some people who have been very overweight, the lack of tone is also down to loose skin, not just loss of muscle.

And crash diets generally don't involve the same kind of big losses in a short space of time because people can't/don't stick to them and they are very short-term measures. They'll lose half a stone in a week or two and then they're done. Longer-term crash diets like the regime for preparing for bariatric surgery will involve a fair bit of muscle loss too.

When you get into menopausal years you lose muscle mass naturally every year too generally, which doesn't help.

Strength training is important instead of cardio too. I do a lot of cardio generally but I've had to make a real effort to work on strength training. I've lost more than 40lbs now and don't have any noticeable muscle or shape loss, but if you're going from say 40+ BMI down to normal it's likely you'll be left with some sagging skin etc.

Of course not. All diets can lead to muscle loss if they don’t contain enough protein and you don’t exercise/weight train. I happened to have a weight assessment on one of those scanning machines before I started this as I was considering a different path. I paid to check it recently and there is virtually no change in my muscle mass that isn’t explained by the fact that I am lugging 85lbs less weight around and dragging it up and down the stairs. And I’ve not weight trained, just taken the dogs on longer walks.

I think some of the effects of weight loss are shaped by factors such as age, ethnicity, underlying health, how long you were overweight for, and genetics? Some people have genetically better thicker/more elastic skin, and menopausal skin is less forgiving than it is in your 20s. For example, despite having been 6st overweight, I have no stretch marks. That has to be genetic? Unless taking 15m to lose it (ie slowly) is a factor.

I also definitely look much younger than my years. I look 45-47, not nearly 56, since losing weight. Again, it has to be genetics (olive skin, virtually no grey yet). Not bragging, as I do have a bit of skin sag on my thighs and my belly is a bit wrinkly - so no shorts and bikinis for me! I am very relieved I have largely got away with it this time, but even more committed to never to regain.