How school run Mounjaro Mums are risking their lives. They’re in denial and it’s so worrying: LOUISE ATKINSON

There’s a woman at my gym who seems to be fading away before my eyes.

Kelly, 53, has always been an avid gym-bunny. But in the past few months she’s started to look really quite scrawny. Her once generous bust is flat and the strong thigh muscles she was so proud of have become spindly.

The gossip among my mid-life post-workout gang is that Kelly is ‘on the jabs’.

If it’s ever mentioned, she vehemently denies any medical involvement, insisting that she’s just been eating less and exercising more. But I know the signs so well by now – the speed of weight loss, the slightly sunken look around the eyes – that I don’t buy her denials.

After a bit of covert asking around, I now know that Kelly most definitely is one of a fast-growing band of middle-class mums who don’t qualify for a legitimate GLP-1 prescription but are, nevertheless, taking Mounjaro.

Their source? Other mums, often at the gym or the school gate.

The much-anticipated Wegovy pill has just been released, and many of the original jabbers who did meet the criteria to have the drug prescribed by a private pharmacy, are able to swap their syringes for the convenience of a much cheaper pack of tablets.

That makes a friend who can’t get the drug anywhere else a great way to recoup some of your eye-wateringly high jab expenditure.

Many had stockpiled extra pens in a panic during temporary shortages last year, and now the 12-month ‘best before’ dates on those bought in September – before Mounjaro prices tripled – are looming.

Why not help out a fellow mum looking to lose that last half stone before a holiday and profit from your excess pens too?

You don’t have to look very far before you find someone at the tennis club or end-of-term class drinks keen to offload their costly cargo of skinny jabs. It is ill-advised and illegal, so it’s not surprising that women like Kelly feel the need to hide their new weight-loss habit.

But these strong and potentially harmful prescription medications are being traded like outgrown uniforms or bakesale recipes. It’s a dangerous precedent with serious implications for your health and finances, as I have found.

I’ve been taking Mounjaro since January 2025, losing two stone (dropping from 13st to 11st) in six months and then sticking with a very low-maintenance dose of 2.5mg because it seems to be doing a great job of keeping my blood pressure in check and stopping me from overeating.

When I started (legitimately) buying weight-loss jabs from an online pharmacy, it was considered a bit edgy and brave. But this magic elixir has become so endemic – 2.5million people in the UK are believed to be taking GLP-1s – that many of us have become blasé about it.

This is a prescription-only medication in a syringe, and yet it’s being traded in playgrounds as though it were no more dangerous than a matcha smoothie.

Part of the ‘normalisation’ of Mounjaro and Wegovy lies in the fact that much-publicised risks like pancreatitis and gall bladder problems, which deterred the faint-hearted at the beginning, don’t appear to have materialised in big numbers.

Even in my relatively small social circle in the Cotswolds, I know mums who have offered their teenage daughters the occasional jab boost to help them slim into a prom dress, or handed the dregs of an old pen to their husband as a springboard to a pre-holiday diet.

Compared with the murky world of buying imported Chinese pens off TikTok, there’s no doubt this relaxed approach to GLP-1s is something of a ‘cosy crime’. You know you are getting the real stuff, whereas the online merchants could be selling you anything.

But it is illegal and there are significant risks attached – especially if no one knows you’re taking it.

When GLP-1s first came to the UK market, many online pharmacies were so keen to jump on this lucrative bandwagon they weren’t particularly rigorous in their selection criteria. If you shopped around (and followed recommendations on online forums), it wasn’t hard to find one that would accept your request for a prescription on the basis of someone else’s photo, or fake height and weight details. You could also tick a box saying if you were happy for your GP to be notified or not.

Now the MHRA (Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) has clamped down on pharmacies, forcing them to tighten up their selection process.

This means that new clients looking for jabs and the Wegovy pill are very likely to be asked to sign up for a video consultation to check they fit the weight criteria. And nowadays your GP will automatically be notified.

If you don’t have a body mass index of 30 or over, or a BMI of 27 with health concerns (as I did), you will now struggle to persuade an online pharmacy to supply Mounjaro or Wegovy in syringe or pill form.

But why bother, when you can get your GLP-1s from a friend?

I recall, months ago, Kelly asking me for details of the online pharmacy I used. She even joked about putting her photo through a ‘fat filter’ on her phone to increase her chance of being accepted as a patient. She later told me she’d ‘lost interest’.

But then I was chatting with a neighbour, Helen, who had lost five stone on Mounjaro, and I mentioned my fast-disappearing gym buddy. It turns out she knows Kelly. They’d been at university together.

‘Kelly?’ she said blithely. ‘She was badgering me about weight loss so I gave her one of my spare syringe pens as a birthday present earlier this year.’ Mystery solved.

There’s also a younger, naturally slim woman in my spinning class who is open about the fact that she’s on a second Mounjaro pen she bought from her sister-in-law.

‘It looked so easy compared with the hardship of going on a massive diet,’ she said, telling me she just wanted to shift half a stone to get back into her size 10 clothes.

‘I knew I’d never meet the criteria to get GLP-1s legitimately,’ she added, ‘and I wouldn’t dream of buying the fake stuff my hairdresser is peddling – I’m not that crazy. But I can trust my sister-in-law. She always kept her spare pens in the fridge so I knew they’d be safe.’

Now that her sister-in-law has run out of ‘spares’, she is skulking around like a drug addict, desperately trying to sniff out where she might possibly source her next pen ‘fix’.

A desire for secrecy is understandable – people can be very judgmental. When I started jabbing, I told only my sister (she was three months ahead of me on her Mounjaro journey and already first down) and my husband (in case I keeled over).

At least I had some kind of safety net, unlike one of my friends who refused to tell her husband and hides her pen in a bag of kale in the fridge, safe in the knowledge that he’ll never go there.

Back at the beginning, when my chosen online pharmacy asked, I ticked the box marked ‘don’t tell my GP’ because I felt sure she would disapprove.

But as my weight dropped so did my blood pressure and I had to bite the bullet and talk to my GP about reducing or coming off blood pressure medication.

She was surprisingly supportive, and after that I decided to open up and talk about the jabs in this newspaper. I felt evangelical about the health benefits and keen to bang home the message about using them in conjunction with a healthy diet and exercise. I also felt a sense of reassurance that my medical records would now contain a note of my GLP-1 use.

If I was involved in an accident or prescribed some medication with an as-yet unknown complex interaction, all health professionals would, in theory, be informed.

My fears on this were confirmed when my cousin’s urgent hysterectomy was delayed by two weeks when she told the surgical team she was on Wegovy. Since GLP-1s suppress appetite by delaying gastric emptying, you’re more likely to have food in your gut long after eating – and that means you won’t have a reliably empty stomach prior to an operation. A two-week break would allow the GLP-1 to leave the system.

‘There are some medical procedures that can be impacted by GLP-1 use, and therefore it is incredibly important to inform medical providers, and your loved ones, of your medication history,’ warns Dr Crystal Wyllie, medical lead at online pharmacy Zava.

‘Anaesthetists always try to ensure a patient has an empty stomach before surgery to avoid the risk of vomiting and food particles travelling into the lungs.

‘If someone on GLP-1s is in an accident and rushed into surgery, they are at greater risk of this pulmonary aspiration, which can lead to severe pneumonia or respiratory failure.’

Recent data (from Simple Online Pharmacy, published in the European Medical Journal) shows that nearly two-thirds of GLP-1 users conceal their treatment from family and friends.

An additional concern is that buying your jabs at the school gate bypasses the important health screening process that pharmacies are obliged to undertake, such as getting you to declare any previous medical problems and medications.

It’s there to filter out the sort of people for whom GLP-1s might be especially risky – particularly those prone to disordered eating or health problems such as thyroid, gallbladder, kidney or pancreatic issues which could be made worse by GLP-1 use.

Not only would Kelly have failed the BMI criteria but, looking at her now, I fear her dramatic weight loss has revealed disordered eating patterns which legitimate screening might have picked up.

There are other concerns with the school gate trade in pens.

When I went on holiday last summer, it didn’t occur to me to declare my GLP-1 use on travel insurance forms – but I’ve since learned this could have landed me in a lot of financial trouble.

Research by insurance company Staysure has found that weight-loss injections were only declared in 0.03 per cent of travel insurance quotes over the past two years.

If you end up at a foreign clinic making a claim which could be connected to obesity, diabetes or any of the potential GLP-1 side-effects (which might include nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, pancreatitis or gall bladder problems), the insurance company might not pay out if you haven’t mentioned you are using weight-loss medication.

The repercussions are far worse if you didn’t get your pen or pills from legitimate sources.

‘If a traveller experiences a medical complication directly or indirectly linked to medication that has not been legally prescribed or appropriately disclosed, this could affect the validity of a claim,’ warns Staysure spokesman Simon McCulloch.

Meanwhile, Kelly continues to shrink. The worry is that the pen she got from my neighbour was 15mg – the maximum Mounjaro dose which you’re supposed to build up to slowly.

And by maintaining her subterfuge she’s missing out on the advice and support we might have given her.

This also explains the weeks Kelly was away from the gym with ‘food poisoning’. She must have given herself a massive initial dose. It’s worrying. But she maintains her denial.

I can only watch in concern and hope that she sees the error of her ways. Or the pen runs out soon.

Some names and identifying information have been changed