Good news, everybody: Wes Streeting is going to defeat obesity. He said so this week at the Labour Party Conference, so it must be true.
How is our fearless Health Secretary going to do this? Will he take on the villainous companies pumping our supermarket shelves full of cheap, highly addictive, ultra-processed food?
Will he scrap the BMI system the NHS still relies on despite scientists describing it as ‘inaccurate’ and ‘misleading’?
Will he attempt to work out why so many of us have ended up so stressed and disconnected from food that we now use it as a drug?
No, our fat-fighting Health Secretary has a far better idea: he’s just going to make it easier to get weight-loss drugs on the NHS. He is Mounjaro Man, The Super Semaglutide Slayer, and he will defeat obesity by shoving people on medication for the rest of their lives.
Now look, I need to say here that I am not anti-GLP-1s. For people with type 2 diabetes, and those experiencing health complications due to obesity, they can be life-changing.
I know of people who’ve become morbidly obese due to food addiction, and whose lives have been transformed by the jabs. They speak not of going off food entirely, but of being able to eat three meals a day like a normal human being. What a relief, and what a gift. These are the people for whom GLP-1s are intended.
I spoke to numerous people who had managed to get hold of GLP-1s by lying about their weight to online pharmacies, despite stricter regulations being brought in earlier this year
But let’s be honest here, more often than not, these drugs are ending up in the arms, stomachs and thighs of people they’re absolutely not meant for: women with perfectly healthy bodies who have been conditioned by society to think that any weight gain whatsoever – even a few extra pounds from natural processes such as pregnancy or menopause – is a fate worse than death.
As I researched the topic for my podcast The Life Of Bryony, I spoke to numerous people who had managed to get hold of GLP-1s by lying about their weight to online pharmacies, despite stricter regulations being brought in earlier this year.
These were women who, when asked for pictures to support their fabricated measurements, had sent years-old photographs of themselves postpartum. One woman described herself as an ‘active anorexic’, and yet a few weeks ago she had managed to get hold of Mounjaro, despite the fact she only weighed 6st 4lb.
Then there were all the women who weren’t taking GLP-1s, but were nonetheless feeling the effects of it. They told me that seeing everyone shrink had awakened the slumbering beast of an old eating disorder – one they thought they’d finally put to bed after years of work to liberate themselves from the diet culture of the Nineties and Noughties.
Indeed, a sort of mass body dysmorphia seems to have gripped the nation, so that, at times, it feels like we’ve regressed to the year 2003, when anything above a size zero was considered fat.
Bryony speaks with body-image psychologist Dr Charlotte Ord on podcast The Life Of Bryony
Take the rise of the term ‘food noise’. It’s used to describe a horrific all-encompassing, obsessive brain chatter, similar to that experienced by a drug addict or an alcoholic, and it is absolutely a thing for some people.
But we’ve been so conditioned by diet culture that there is now a danger we are sometimes using the term to make a problem of plain old-fashioned hunger.
Diet culture has taught us to shame ourselves for perfectly normal bodily responses.
Back when I was growing up, it was pretty normal for my mum and her friends to exist on nothing more than a bowl of cabbage soup and a can of Diet Coke. This was the nutritional bedrock on which most of our lives were built. It took me until the age of about 43 to learn how to eat normally, and intuitively – by which I mean three times a day, using food as nourishment not punishment.
It was while in treatment for binge eating disorder that I was taught about the science of hunger, and how restricting calories actually sends signals to the brain telling us to eat and eat, in an evolutionary attempt to keep us alive.
My therapist explained to me that decades of diet culture had messed with our basic biology, which is why so many of us find ourselves trapped in a cycle of restricting and then bingeing food. I learnt that, more often than not, the way to silence so-called ‘food noise’ is to eat properly.
But eating properly is hardly straightforward when you’ve grown up hearing phrases such as ‘a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips’.
And often, it’s not food noise that is the problem, but a culture that tells us chocolate is naughty, and that our value is to be found in the number on the bathroom scales.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight. But there is something very wrong with a society where physically healthy people are lying about their bodies in an attempt to inject themselves with drugs that aren’t actually meant for them.
So before Wes Streeting tries to ‘defeat obesity’, perhaps he could attempt to properly regulate the private healthcare firms doling out these drugs he’s so keen on. Then he might actually stand a chance of getting GLP-1s to the people they’re truly intended for.
Redhead Pammie? She just gets better with age
First Pamela Anderson took a stand for women the world over by refusing to wear make-up on the red carpet, and now the 58-year-old has ditched her trademark peroxide blonde hair for a light red bob. I love how unapologetic Pammie is nowadays. Like a fine wine, she just keeps on getting better with age.
Pamela Anderson attends the Tom Ford Womenswear Spring/Summer 2026 show as part of Paris Fashion Week
Please don’t kill off our Adidas, Keir
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that while women in politics can influence people to buy items from a fashion brand, the same cannot be said for male MPs. If anything, they seem to have a unique ability to tank a label. Step forward Keir Starmer in a pair of blue Adidas during this week’s Labour conference, ruining the trainers for everyone when we’d only just got over Rishi Sunak spoiling our Sambas. Spare a thought for the Adidas marketing team this week.
Sir Keir Starmer, with his wife Lady Victoria Starmer, rehearsing his Labour Party conference keynote speech in a pair of blue Adidas trainers
A poll of 2,000 young women has found that almost half consider a red lip the ultimate fashion statement. One in five say it makes them feel sexier, while the same number claim it makes them feel empowered. Me? It just seems to make my teeth look yellow! I think I’ll stick to lip balm and leave the rouge to the young folk.
I’m not surprised a third of people in the UK now live ‘largely cashless lives’ with notes and coins making up just 9 per cent of all payments in Britain, compared to 50 per cent a decade ago. The only time I use cash is when I’m abroad, or scrabbling around under the car armrest for a pound coin to put in the Sainsbury’s trolley. Having oodles of cash in my wallet used to make me feel filthy rich. Now it just makes me feel filthy, due to the thought of all the germs. Yuk.
I can’t think of anything worse than the British Museum’s inaugural ball later this month, where tickets cost £2,000 a head and the ‘committee’ are busy discussing the ‘right shade’ of pink for the evening’s decor – it can’t be too garish or too Barbie-ish, apparently. The museum is said to be keen to play down any comparisons to the Met Gala, but the organisers include Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love and former Vogue editor Edward Enninful. Haven’t they got anything better to do with their time?