Throughout her life, Annie’s emotional weakness has been food. She would attempt to alleviate dark times with compulsive and unhealthy bingeing.
Periods of frustration and self‑loathing were marked by restrictive eating; even purging.
She cannot remember ever liking her body when she was a young woman. Eating was her comfort – and her shame.
As a therapist, I first met Annie when she was in her 50s. She explained her dysfunctional relationship with food went back to when her father died when she was four, and her mother became the sole earner with three young children.
Short on time and energy, she fed Annie and her siblings endless fast food, while simultaneously starving herself to lose weight. Unsurprisingly, Annie gained weight, while absorbing her mother’s attitude to dieting.
As a teen, she became isolated, hating her physical appearance. A bulimic eating disorder followed for more than a decade, as she desperately sought to be slim, like the supermodels she idolised, yet crept up to a dress size 24.
She could never resist the lure of one more portion, the temptation of another sugary treat. She didn’t remember being able to recognise feeling hungry or full.
Until now. Today, Annie injects herself with Ozempic. She is, at long last, slim.
Jo Pitkin specialises in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and hypnotherapy – which helps people to recognise and change unhealthy thoughts, feelings and behaviours
But even though she has reached her coveted size 10, no one is more surprised than her to find she’s never been more unhappy.
And Annie certainly isn’t the only woman I’ve met struggling with her feelings after using weight-loss jabs like Ozempic, Mounjaro or Wegovy.
I specialise in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and hypnotherapy – which helps people to recognise and change unhealthy thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
I have several clients who, like Annie, were emotional or compulsive eaters and have found themselves adrift – even distraught – after using weight-loss jabs. I now worry that the increasing prevalence of such drugs could spark its own unique mental health crisis, and I want to warn people of the risks.
Of course, Ozempic and other semaglutide injections are a godsend for many – especially those who have spent decades with their mood determined by what exercise guru Joe Wicks calls the ‘sad step’ on to the scales.
Ozempic promises to finally help these women achieve portion control by making constant ‘food noise’ go away. But what exactly does that mean?
Essentially, food noise is the voice in your head telling you you’ll feel better, happier, if you treat yourself to that chocolate biscuit or slice of buttery toast.
It comes down to dopamine – the feel-good chemical released when we eat sugary and carbohydrate-laden food. Such a dopamine release has the bonus effect of giving relief from stress, sadness, anxiety, or even boredom, to emotional eaters.
Food noise is the voice in your head telling you you’ll feel better, happier, if you treat yourself to that chocolate biscuit or slice of buttery toast – and it all comes down to dopamine, Jo writes
Ozempic dulls the dopamine response so that your excitement around food shrinks, and so does your waistline. Ergo, no food noise.
For many people, this is fantastic news; but for others, a disaster. When food is your emotional coping strategy, Ozempic can rob you of your ability to self-soothe. All that is left is the raw emotions you have been blocking for years or decades.
In Annie’s case, Ozempic may have given her the figure she’s always dreamed of by alleviating her cravings and reducing her appetite – but it hasn’t tackled the issues that created such impulses.
Instead, it’s destroyed the one consistent emotional crutch and companion she’s ever had.
No longer able to be soothed by food, all her sadness, irritability, anxiety and stress have been amplified. She feels acutely scared and vulnerable in a way she’s never experienced, as she has always masked her insecurity and frustration with food.
She’s also experiencing grief for the girl she should have been if food hadn’t controlled her every waking hour; all that time comparing herself to others and assuming men would find her as disgusting as she found herself. But also grief she wasn’t a ‘strong enough’ person to kick the food habit without Ozempic. She had imagined being her dream size 10 would be like emerging into society like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Instead she feels uglier than ever and still just wants to hide.
Together, we have begun working in our sessions to unpick a lifetime of unhelpful and critical self-talk. If she can understand why she resorted to food as an emotional crutch, she can learn new ways to cope without it.
But there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of other women who are exposing themselves to a similar emotional timebomb in the name of a quick fix.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of women are exposing themselves to a similar emotional timebomb in the name of a quick fix – Ozempic
Christine, 55, is another woman I work with who is now on Ozempic, after reaching her heaviest at nearly 19st. A driven and intelligent woman, Christine was, sadly, belittled her whole life by a controlling mother whose harsh judgment has been like a broken record, reminding her that she’ll never be good enough. ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ is her central belief that runs through her like a stick of rock.
Yet despite now having achieved her ideal weight, happiness continues to elude her. Her reflection in the mirror may be more palatable – thin at last – but she still does not like the woman who looks back at her.
This realisation has shaken Christine to her core. For years, she believed her weight was the only thing standing between her and happiness. That becoming thin would finally quiet her late mother’s voice ringing in her ears.
But her self-loathing has settled on other areas of dissatisfaction. Today, instead of being at peace, she feels horrified by her loose skin, laughter lines and crow’s feet . . . and is furious about it.
Now she is snappy, impatient and as intolerant as her mother was, something she despises herself for. Even her partner of 27 years – who had always loved her irrespective of her weight – says he no longer likes the person she has become. Their relationship is under threat because of the emotional hole exposed by Ozempic.
So can these comfort eaters ever find peace?
For the past five years, I have dedicated my therapeutic skills to working with people who want a healthy relationship with food. CBT has taught me that genuine contentment only comes when you are kind to yourself, and are able to recognise the thoughts and habits which are helpful to creating the kind of life you want.
Certainly the women I’ve treated no longer view Ozempic as a magic bullet.
Genuine contentment only comes when you are kind to yourself, and are able to recognise the thoughts and habits which are helpful to creating the kind of life you want – not a magic bullet such as Ozempic, says Jo
My most recent client, Sophie, 36, has worked hard to build her inner self-esteem, exploring where her core belief that she was ‘not good enough’ came from, trying behavioural experiments to see if they are helpful in challenging that belief, and using guided hypnotherapy to soothe her nervous system along the way.
She now sees that true happiness requires more than a drug. The breakthrough came when she told me: ‘I am still me, but at last I can feel proud when looking in the mirror’.
In that moment, she wept for the years she had lost in self-loathing. Yes, her weight and health have been transformed because of the injections, but lasting confidence only came when she addressed why she felt she needed Ozempic.
She had hoped it would solve all her problems but it transpired that only she could do that.
By stopping the unhelpful thoughts and behaviours, she could finally inject herself not with quick-fix drugs, but with a little kindness.
I only hope thousands more women find their way to similar peace and acceptance when Ozempic strips them of their comfort blanket.
See jopitkin-hypnotherapy.com
