The tell-tale sign that means I ALWAYS know if a famous friend is on Ozempic, reveals VANESSA FELTZ

It is the enormous relief that I recognize, as if you are on parole after being in prison for a while. So many friends – some famous, some not – have expressed it. We meet for coffee or lunch and they look great. No secret as to why.

I don’t buy the idea that women, even those in the public eye, try to hide this; Usually they can’t wait to tell you. “I’m on Ozempic,” they say. Or Wegovy. Or Mounjaro.

Whatever they inject into their (shrinking) thighs works wonders, not just because they suddenly – finally! – thin, but because they have been given something more precious: freedom. They have escaped that endless cycle of destructive thinking and are no longer obsessed with what they ate yesterday or what they might eat tomorrow.

Finally, they can focus on love, friendship, careers, worrying about the universe, life itself – anything but getting bogged down in that horrible pit of self-loathing. They don’t have to feel guilty, apologize, or worry about how much cake they ate when they only took a small piece to “make up for it.”

They have found the holy grail. I’m really happy for them, and only a little jealous.

I ended up in the same place myself – the place where my size, or what I put in my mouth, wasn’t what I thought about first thing in the morning – but only after decades of torment and two surgeries, the last a gastric bypass that made it it was physically impossible for me to eat too much.

The first operation in 2010 was to insert a gastric band, which later had to be cut out of me with another operation when it became stuck in my liver. (Ironically, chocolate mousse was the only food that slid down easily with the belt, which defeated the purpose.)

Since undergoing the bypass, a procedure in which the stomach is stapled so that food does not pass through, I have been a size 12 to 14 in 2019 and, more importantly, free of the guilt and self-blame that is so much of it. mattered. my life before. The surgery broke the cycle of food addiction for me in a way that nothing else could have done.

But imagine if Ozempic had been around at that time, a time when I was on television every day. The years of hell I could have erased. Would I have taken it? Of course I fucking would.

I know this is the point where you would expect me to say that women don’t have to be obsessed with achieving the perfect weight, that we should love ourselves no matter what size we are. But if you’re made to feel like a failure because you’re not thin enough, that’s hard to achieve.

Admittedly, I come into the Ozempic debate with my own ample baggage. I was only twenty when my mother thought she had found her own holy grail of weight loss by purchasing amphetamines from her hairdresser and passing them on to me.

They were the Wegovy of the time, but addictive and much more dangerous. The pounds evaporated. Pieces of skeleton were visible under my skin. Not only was I skinny, but I was skinny, and I loved it, as did my mother. She tipped the hairdresser and said, “Give us more, honey.” The side effects were terrible.

Everything goes faster on Speed, as amphetamines are known. During my final exams at Cambridge, the exam papers were blurry and my breath smelled of nail polish remover. The thought of food made me shudder, I couldn’t sleep and my heart was beating out of my chest.

I didn’t take those little yellow pills for long. I will never know if they caused me any lasting damage, but I do believe that the diet cycle they started me on messed up my metabolism forever.

The tragedy is that I didn’t need them at the time. I was a size 12 at most and was a skinny girl, a picky eater who wouldn’t touch cheese or biscuits and whose mother poured tinned pears over lamb chops to ‘entice’ me to eat them.

I was slim until puberty hit at age eight, which was startling for my parents. My mother took me to the doctor to ask if the swelling in what she called my “chest area” could be cancer. She was shocked to find out I was just an early developer.

I have definitely developed a problem with weight. I feel like it was a mother’s gift to me, wrapped in a big pink ribbon. Her own mother found her “well upholstered” and compared her to a couch, declaring “no apple pie for you tonight” on the grounds that a fat girl would never find a husband.

My mother followed suit. When she first put me on a diet at the age of nine, I really don’t think she was unkind. She wanted to protect me from stigma, and being fat was a stigma.

The thing is, I don’t think I was destined to have weight problems, not until she and my dad – and they were united – started restricting what I ate.

Their dinner would be soup with kreplach, kneidlach and lokshen (wontons, dumplings and noodles), mine would be half a grapefruit.

Was I obsessed with food then?

Of course, because I was hungry! When I was free to eat, I scoffed at everything because I never knew when my next meal would come.

At the end of my first semester in college, my mom didn’t say “welcome home,” she said “shall I let you hop in?” You’re a really big inflated beach ball.” Career achievements have never quite compensated for the disappointment my parents expressed about my weight.

‘You could be so beautiful. Why are you doing this to yourself?’ my mother would say. When I got my own TV show in 1994, official PR photos were taken. My parents called to say I looked big. I went to the bakery for an emergency donut.

The feeling of being watched while I ate and being judged was a constant. In my years in the public eye, I have been as big as a size 22 and as small as a size 10 – with every step of the yo-yo cycle up for debate and comment.

No wonder every ‘bigger’ celebrity seems to have shrunk these days, given the intensity of that scrutiny. They are all on Ozempic – or appear to be. And I don’t blame them.

It was hurtful to hear complete strangers yell from buses, “Don’t eat that, V,” even when all I was eating was an apple. A woman once came up to me in Waitrose and said, ‘No wonder your husband has left you.’

Of course I tried to lose weight. Sometimes I succeeded bravely, like in 2002, 2004, 2007 and 2009. Do you see the pattern? I dropped a few stones, to the point where I could walk into a ‘normal’ clothing store and buy jeans. Everyone would say, ‘You look great! Well done’, and I would feel on top of the world.

But over time – and it felt like five minutes – my real self, the one who struggled with addiction, with an eating disorder (call it what you want) would rise again and I would pile it all back on.

I’ve never been able to crack it myself. I failed. I recently wrote my autobiography so I’m forced to do the math. I think I was on one diet or another all the time between 1994 and 2019. That’s 25 years.

All that effort, all that self-loathing, all those hurtful magazine articles where I was caught on holiday or someone wrote: ‘Friends think Vanessa is drinking custard again.’ All that humiliation, that total shame.

What a damn waste of time, I think now. And if there had been something to help, to take away the pain, to take away the impossibility of it all, wouldn’t that have been a blessing?

Everyone I meet who is on one of these medications says exactly that. They are so incredibly relieved and grateful, as we saw this week with Nadine Dorries, who has lost two stone thanks to Mounjaro’s injections and looks sizzling.

What about the side effects, you may ask? The experts – and I’ve had a lot of them on my radio show – so far seem to believe that the benefits outweigh the risks because all the things that come with obesity (joint problems, diabetes, heart problems) are so serious.

And let’s not forget mental health. It’s fantastic to feel beautiful about yourself. Some of us just need a little help to get there.

• Vanessa Bares All by Vanessa Feltz (Bantam £20) is available now.