I dieted for years to be the ‘thin friend’. Now my friends are all on Mounjaro and I hate not being the skinniest so much that I’m thinking of taking it too: ELIZABETH LINEHAN

For too many years, I was the ‘fat friend’. From the age of 14 when puberty hit, there was simply too much of me.

At school, I was the carthorse among thoroughbred fillies. My university years were spent drowned in my version of a burka – a vast duffle coat from Army & Navy Stores. (So desperate was I to cover up my thunder thighs and enormous bottom that I even once wore it – on the dance floor – at Foubert’s Nightclub in Carnaby Street on a Freshers’ night out!)

Voluminous became my signature style as I embarked on my career – though I quickly learned that it came with the inherent risk of a colleague sidling up to whisper: ‘When’s it due?’

I dabbled in diets endlessly as I fought the never-ending battle to stay within range of a dress size 14.

WeightWatchers (worked for a bit); the Atkins Diet (ditto but all that protein was expensive); the Cambridge Diet (800 calories a day in tasteless soups and vomit-inducing shakes was not sustainable); the Montignac, the Maple Syrup and the blood sugar diets, fasting, intermittent fasting. You name it, I tried it, with varying degrees of success.

Eventually, in my early 40s, I had a breakthrough of my own devising. It involved a rigid regime of grapefruit, boiled eggs, a ton of watercress and one strong G&T each day (don’t try this at home).

Over several months, I shed kilo after kilo, shrinking to what, for decades, had seemed an impossible goal – a size 10. I loved it and how it made me feel.

Then I got sensible. I adopted a low carb, low sugar, high protein mode of eating with regular workouts involving weights, running, swimming and walking everywhere. It has kept me at a reasonable size 10/12 for some years now.

It is hard. It demands constant vigilance and ruthless self-discipline, but it is so worth it. No longer the fat friend, I’m the thin one at last!

As my peers emerged from the childbearing and child rearing years and we headed towards the perimenopause and menopause, they were the ones donning the drapes and elasticated waists while I flaunted my new physique in form-hugging designer wear.

And God, how I revelled in it. I tried to look caring and sympathetic when they whinged about their thickening waistlines, matronly bosoms and fat calves – but inside I was crowing.

Yes, I admit it, when it comes to weight, I am a truly horrible person – the sisterhood be damned. I put it down to having been brutalised by decades of skirmishes on the weight-loss frontline and being on the losing side too often.

But here’s the thing – my comeuppance is nigh.

Last month, I joined four university friends for one of our twice-yearly lunches in central London. We have kept in close touch although our lives and careers have gone in wildly different directions.

To be blunt, two of them have a BMI that would put them in the category of obese.

Another is a bit of chubster but nothing that a few skipped meals and 10,000 steps a day wouldn’t shift if she was so minded.

The fourth I have always admired for seeming entirely comfortable in her size 16 skin, never passing a weight-related comment and always being the one who was up for dessert.

I walked into our favourite Covent Garden restaurant and headed for our regular table… but no, wait, some mistake. Who were these women sitting there with sculptured profiles and eyes beaming out at me from hollowed faces?

OMG! These were not the same women I had shared pre-Christmas drinks with just a few months ago. They had been replaced by vastly smaller versions, as if each of them had shed a fat suit or three.

Of course, it turned out they were all ‘on the pen’ – injecting themselves with Mounjaro each week – and were now reborn.

Not only were they lighter physically but lighter in their being, too. Laughing and giggling, preening themselves even, and talking over each other in a rush to share their experiences of the ‘miracle fat-loss jab’. They had been liberated.

I expressed my amazement, admiration and congratulations. But my mind was buzzing.

Two thoughts. The first was that the body positivity movement is a sham, a philosophy (and very successful marketing ploy) concocted to make fat women feel better about their ‘curves’ or ‘real bodies’ – euphemisms for excess adipose tissue and greed.

In their pre-jab days, I know that each of my friends would have lauded body positivity and railed against the tyranny of the ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ mindset.

Yet here they were considerably thinner and quite evidently happier despite diminished appetites and a newly acquired inability to quaff more than one glass of champagne! (No more four-bottle lunches for us.)

It was proof to me that most sensible women – my friends certainly tick that box – really want to be thinner, to look better in their clothes, whatever they might claim otherwise.

The second thought I had – and far more alarming – was that I’m the thin friend no longer. They are all thin. Two of them, horror of horrors, possibly thinner than me. I had lost my hard-won physical pre-eminence.

It was a personal disaster.

I know this reaction is illogical, self-indulgent and frankly pathetic. I’m ashamed (almost) to be committing it to paper. We are not super-competitive teenagers now but adult women with great jobs and lives. We have hinterland and history. We are so much more than our dress size.

But I can’t help the way I feel about this and, with growing access to fat jabs, I reckon there will be many more (former) thin friends reacting similarly as their peers shrink and the hierarchy of who weighs the least shifts.

I am grudgingly pleased for my friends and managed somehow to restrain myself from launching into a tirade about the most gruesome, long-term side effects of GLP-1 drugs I’ve read about. Too bitter while they are revelling in feeling healthier.

Two have erased their pre-diabetic status and one claims to have salvaged her rocky marriage because her husband now ‘fancies’ her again.

They are loving their new shapes, loving fashion again and taking up exercise. (‘I’m not afraid to wear Lycra anymore,’ Lissy told me as she outlined her morning routine now, a 5km run to and from her Hot Yoga class.)

But enough about Lissy, what about me? What do I do now? My current strict eating regime and all the self-discipline in the world will not be enough to whittle me down any further unless I start doing a lot more cardio that I just don’t have time for.

Should I be considering ‘the pen’ as a way of re-establishing my ‘thin friend’ status?

I know it’s frowned on by medics for people with a healthy BMI to use GLP-1 drugs to drive off a few pounds. And I certainly don’t want to go down the Sharon Osbourne route – unable to eat properly ever again and looking positively cadaverous. But it’s an option I am considering.

Like I said, pathetic!

Elizabeth Linehan is a pseudonym. Names have been changed.