Have you seen PM Keir Starmer’s latest musings from the disaster area that is number 10?
To put the jobless obese on the new magic fat-busting jabs, so they can lose weight and start earning again.
It could even be extended to overweight workers whose health problems apparently cost the NHS a small fortune every year, as well as taking time off and claiming sickness pay.
And get this – it would all be free, millions of pounds presumably courtesy of the dosh saved by snatching winter fuel payments back from pensioners. This man’s all heart. Must be as big as his brain.
Well, if all these younger fatties are going to get Ozempic, then I’m thinking I’ll have some of that as well, thanks very much. I’ve got to do something.
To my ongoing surprise, I don’t have diabetes, but after my recent regular blood tests, the sugar one has to be done again. So that’s me in a blind panic, poring ower every food label to detect the merest soupscon of sucrose.
I’d a spell during the summer trying to kick biscuits when I consumed huge quantities of my favourite cherries and black grapes, only later to discover they’re positively heavin’ in ‘bad’ sugar.
I can pin-point exactly when I went from spindly leggies to thunder-thighs. At secondary school when – was it galloping hormones? – my appetite went ballistic.
For my playtime-piece, instead of a biscuit or two, I’d devour two corn beef and beetroot sandwiches – every day.
After school dinners, we’d oot and gorge a Mars Bar, a Crunchie on the wye hame.
Chip and choc-heavy diet at uni, but I walked to King’s College every day from Watson Street so that probably saved me from super-sizing.
I could always lose a few pounds if necessary. And it was very necessary when the loon I loved broke my heart and finished with me.
In a desperate bid to woo him back, I went on a banana-and-toffee-yoghurt diet for about three months. Shrunk right doon from nearly 11 stone to a slim-line eight.
Suddenly discovered I had cheek bones. Guess fit? It worked.
Reader, I married him, although never to be that skinny again.
Sadly, he was a lucky cove who could eat as much as he liked and never put on an ounce, while I gained just looking at a new potato. He’d hae big main courses and puddings every tea-time, hot buttered bread rolls and marmalade every night at 10pm.
All prepared by my fair hand. Man, it was torture trying to resist joining him, as I nibbled on a naked Ryvita.
However, as you wrinklies oot there will know, fin the years roll on, the pounds dinna roll aff. About a year ago, my GP instructed me to lose at least two stone.
Up to now, zilch lost. Maybe even a wee gain, sod it.
About a month ago she suggested I try intermittent fasting. She does it for 18 hours out of 24, but thought I might start at 12 hours.
In my enthusiasm, I’ve upped it to a whopping 17 – nothing to eat between 8pm and 1pm the next day.
This from the glutton who could eat almost half her weight in snacks between 8pm and 1am every night.
So foo much have a lost so far? I seesaw between a piddly three and six pounds. Total. Big deal.
Little wonder the so-called King Kong of fat-busting drugs, Mounjaro, sounds like a treat to me. Apart from the side-effects of vomiting and too often or never in the bowel department. And fit’s this? I’ve to inject it into my belly? Nae wonder I’d lose weight. I’d be Spewy-Lewy every time I tried that.
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press and Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
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