LUCY CAVENDISH: I'm one of the first women in Britain to take the new weight-loss pill. It's early days, but it's already VERY different to the jabs…

The little white box with its turquoise-coloured design doesn’t look like much, but I whooped when it was finally delivered last week. For I am one of the few to get their hands on the new Wegovy weight-loss pill, a medication I hope to take for the rest of my life. Like the other 75,000 people who joined waiting lists for the pill when its use in the UK was approved last month, I’ve spent weeks anxiously checking my inbox for news of its arrival. Pharmacies have bombarded me with excited emails – from CheqUp to Cloud Pharmacy, Boots to Asda and Superdrug, the anticipation has reached fever pitch. I couldn’t wait to start taking it. Was this little white pill – the tablet form of Ozempic’s semaglutide injections that Danish company Novo Nordisk has spent 16 years developing – going to free me from the rather grisly injections I’ve been self- administering every week for two years? Or would all the ‘food noise’ that used to dominate my life – and saw me balloon to a weight that with hindsight was horribly unhealthy – come rushing back in? I’ve been jabbing myself with Mounjaro since October 2024, and in that time it’s utterly changed my life. I’ve dropped an astonishing 4st, from 14st 3lb to 10st 3lb. At 5ft 7in, I’ve also dropped from a size 16 to a ten, and now wear the kind of figure-hugging clothes I automatically swerved two-and-a-half years ago. My lifestyle has altered for the better in almost every way. I have more confidence socially, and I work out regularly because I feel so much lighter and more flexible. Psychologically, I struggled at first with the idea of taking a drug to change my body. Did I dislike my wobbly tummy and tree-trunk thighs so much I would inject myself with a substance I knew little about? Lucy Cavendish is one of the few to get their hands on the new Wegovy weight-loss pill, a medication which she hopes to take for the rest of her life GLP-1s work by making you feel full, so your body stops flipping the hunger switch. Sometimes, on a 5mg weekly Mounjaro injection pen, I feel so numb to hunger I have to force myself to eat. But I also admit that, once the pounds started evaporating, any doubts disappeared too. It felt gloriously liberating to be free of the food cravings and in a body suddenly so much slimmer and, yes, more acceptable to the world than it had been. Still, there’s something about injections that makes you feel as though you’re ‘ill’. There’s a lot of messing around with sterile swabs, too, and you have to keep the actual pens in the fridge. Needles feel serious, dangerous. But pills? Pills we are used to. A packet of pills in the bathroom cabinet feels entirely familiar, alongside paracetamol and anti-histamines. And then there’s the cost. When I first started on weight-loss drugs I signed up with a private doctor at more than £300 a month because I wanted to be carefully monitored for side-effects. After eight months, once I knew I could tolerate Mounjaro well, I switched to an online pharmacy at £189 a month. The Wegovy pills – at my 1.5mg maintenance dose – will cost me just £99; at some pharmacies they start at as little as £69 per month. One survey found that 33 per cent of the UK public who are currently hesitant about weight-loss treatments would immediately consider taking a medication if it were offered as a standard pill rather than a jab. Fast on the heels on the new Wegovy pill is Eli Lilly’s daily weight-loss pill Foundayo (orforglipron). It’s already available in the US and slated to come to the UK market later this year. The Wegovy pills – at Lucy's 1.5mg maintenance dose – will cost her just £99; at some pharmacies they start at as little as £69 per month No wonder the whole weight-loss drug industry is expected to be worth up to £150billion by 2030. The reason GLP-1s started in jab form is that it’s hard to absorb peptides like semaglutide (Ozempic) or tirzepatide (Mounjaro) through the stomach. What the big pharmaceutical companies have spent so long working out is how to use an ‘absorption enhancer’ to stop acid breaking it down before it can enter the bloodstream. Even so, the injections still have the edge on weight loss. Mounjaro promises an average drop of about 21 per cent of body weight compared to the Wegovy pill’s 15 per cent. But that wouldn’t matter if I was taking it just for maintenance, would it? I don’t want to lose more weight; I just don’t want to put it back on. The first thing to say is that taking the pill isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. You have to take it on a stomach that’s been empty for at least eight hours, which means first thing in the morning. And then you can’t eat or drink after that for 30 minutes or, better still for absorption and weight loss, an hour. I’ve been taking it for five days and this timing issue is undoubtedly inconvenient. I have the packet on my bedside table so I reach over and pop a pill in my mouth with some water as soon as I wake up – but it’s a very small pill and I keep dropping it. Then I lie there wanting the coffee or tea I’m not allowed for another half an hour. Interestingly, this problem will end with the Foundayo pill, which manufacturer Eli Lilly says you can take at any time of the day or night and even with food. In trials, however, it is slightly less effective than the Wegovy pill. Worse, on the third day of taking it, I started to feel quite ill. Side-effects are the same with both injection and pill – digestive issues, fatigue – but I felt nothing at all on Mounjaro, not even at the start. This past weekend, however, I’ve been struggling with stomach pain and nausea. But most terrifying for me is that the food noise has started to come back. This has always been my downfall: the insistent, relentless voice in my head craving something to eat. Mounjaro drowns it out completely. But when it comes back – as it has when I’ve been travelling or forgot to re-order or felt I really couldn’t afford the pens for a month – I am sunk. On the Wegovy pill for the past five days, I have been hungry. In fact, this weekend, for the first time since 2024, I craved and polished off a hamburger and chips. You might say: ‘Enjoy it – once in a while will do you no harm.’ Or take the opposite view and ask: ‘Where on earth is your willpower?’ But that’s to misunderstand the relationship people like me have with food. Denying ourselves takes great mental effort, and I have become so used to not thinking about a hamburger and chips while on Mounjaro injections that I find it even harder to combat the food noise now. And if the pills don’t stop that noise, then I know I will pile the weight back on. For me, then, the jury is still very firmly out. Five days is not long, and perhaps I just need to give the pills more time. Or I might need to increase my dosage from 1.5mg to the next step up of 4mg (the dosages are different to the pens). But so far it feels like a disappointing anti-climax and possibly, alas, an option that won’t work for me. I have made my peace entirely with GLP-1s as a lifelong commitment, and if this tablet did work, of course I would get used to taking it daily. But I can’t afford to go backwards in terms of the role food plays in my life. It used to dominate my thoughts. It’s no hyperbole to say I was a slave to the noise it created and the effort it took to push down. If I can’t manage that with a pill, I won’t hesitate at all to go back to the jabs.