I thought I was destined to stay overweight. But I went £2,500 into debt to lose weight, and I don’t regret it

Five stone has left me in little more than five months. My energy supply has shot up, and I use plenty of it through swimming daily.

I feel renewed and confident. Meanwhile I have been mercifully free of the reported side effects, such as nausea and constipation. My main concerns are as to whether I’m stuck with Mounjaro indefinitely - would stopping the injections invite the weight back? - and of course the cost.As a 50-something woman with a sit-down, work-from-home job and a sedentary lifestyle outside of work, I’d resigned myself to staying overweight forever. I’d been slim until my thirties, but then something changed; what it was is still a mystery to me. A fundamental change in metabolism, perhaps? Or something deeper and perhaps psychological. Whatever the cause, I expected and accepted that my bulky frame would be mine for life.

Weight loss drugs, including injections, are nothing new, and my friend and I used what we called “the diet pill” in the 1990s to help us stay slim while we enjoyed our partying with the spirit of the time. The diet pill or occasional periods of food rejection somehow kept us going while keeping us slim.

So why did I unquestioningly bear the obesity which came to me in my thirties, and why did I wait until my mid-fifties to do something about it?

I had accepted that my body shape had changed during the years, and I had taken on a mindset of being a permanently overweight person.

I even appeared in newspaper and magazine articles, celebrating the presumed benefits of my curvy figure. I was a big lady with a personality to match, and it suited me, so I thought.

Then, as the first weight loss preparation of the 21st Century to stand out and seem attractive to me: Mounjaro. Through its strong media profile and its apparent simplicity of use, Mounjaro appealed to me not only as a means of slimming but also as a potential aid to a new way of thinking.

To stop seeing myself as an overweight woman but just as a woman. Finally to shed that self-consciousness about my size, from my engineered slimness of the 1990s to my subsequent unchosen obesity.

Somehow the privacy of a self-applied injection from a non-threatening pen-like contraption seemed to bring all these prospects near to me.

I spent £129 on my initial supply, and a further £368 to stock up when I learned that the price would be rising sharply. My overall spend has been £1778, bringing me debt and a little anxiety along the way.

I feel far better able to bear anxiety and other hazards of life than I did pre-Mounjaro, though, so perhaps it has transformed my attitude to life as well as my body.

To those who conceived Mounjaro and brought it to market, I am grateful indeed. It has been transformational.

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Emma Donaldson has racked up a £2,500 debt after injecting herself with Mounjaro over the past nine months, she is a self-taught artist and you can find her work here

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