Fat jabs are all over boarding schools. Girls as young as 11 are taking it

Telegraph

3 days ago

If you suspect someone has been taking Ozempic, or Mounjaro, or Wegovy, or yet another fat jab, is it impolite to ask them?
A friend went to a dinner party recently and saw a woman she hadn't seen for some time. She was very thin, this other woman. Not that she'd been large to begin with (I know the woman in question too). Maybe a size 10, but now more like a size six. She was clearly very proud of this new slimness, my friend said, so quietly, over dinner, she leant across the table and asked, 'Can I just check, it's Mounjaro, right?'
The slim woman looked horrified and embarrassed. 'Yes,' she mumbled back, 'but I'm not really talking about it, because I don't want everyone to know.'
This incident provoked an intense debate at another dinner with a gaggle of girlfriends a week later. Should people be more open if they're shooting themselves up with one of these jabs? The majority of my friends are around 40 – some post-children, some peri-menopause, some doing endless weights in the gym because they know this is the age when muscle loss starts kicking in, some of us walking endless miles after our disobedient terriers as they go after yet another duck in the park. Bodies in all sorts of shape, in other words, so the fat jabs have replaced Botox as the topic du jour.
I strongly believe people should be honest if they're taking them, because these jabs are – to my mind – creating another eating disorder. To be clear, if you're obese, if you're diabetic, great. But they're increasingly being used by people who aren't remotely obese, and the subterfuge, the lack of honesty and the renewed desperation to be thinner at any cost feels alarmingly similar to being at a girls-only school rife with anorexia in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Particularly because they're now reaching schools. I talked to a friend who works at one of the top girls' boarding schools in the country this week, who told me the jabs are 'scarily prevalent' among her pupils. 'Girls have ready access to money and they're getting hold of these pens or, ironically, I've overheard conversations where girls talk about going to their parents' fridge and just helping themselves to Mum's pens. One of them made a joke about her parents saying: 'Help yourself to anything in the fridge', so she did.'
If these teenagers can't get them from home, this teacher told me, they have Apple Pay on their phones, linked to their parents' credit cards, and they're ordering them online. They use AI to manipulate photos of themselves – 'Here's a photo of me, can you make me look 25 kilos heavier?' – to override safeguarding checks on certain websites. 'They arrive in discreet packages, so the school doesn't notice they're coming in,' says my friend, adding that the sixth-form girls have fridges in their boarding houses, so it's easy enough to store them in there. Although, she's also overheard girls as young as 14 discussing using them.
Or even younger. This year, a half-Russian, half-English 11-year-old arrived at her school with a prescription for Mounjaro, procured for her by her parents. She was overweight, but because this was a private prescription, my friend says the school had to allow the prescription, instead of – for example – gently encouraging this girl in sports lessons. Just 11, pre-pubescent, but being put on medication which influences her brain chemistry. If this 11-year-old girl turned around to her parents and said she felt like a boy and wanted to take puberty blockers, I wonder whether they'd be so encouraging?
This teacher blames social media for encouraging their obsession with physical appearance. 'I heard the 14-year-olds talking about Ariana Grande in Wicked, saying she looks 'really good' in this or that video,' she says, referring to the American singer and actress, whose very slender frame has been much pored over online. Naturally, she says, they then want to be as thin as Grande.
But she also points towards 'yummy mummies' with daughters at her school, and their obsession with losing 'half a kilo', thereby raising daughters who are similarly plagued. If you want to feel any more depressed, she says girls are now bringing pens from their parents' fridges and selling them to other girls. One of my brothers, an enterprising if mischievous sort, used to sell cigarettes for £1 a pop during his time at Stowe. This feels quite different.
Are the staff at the school having any sort of conversation about what to do regarding this situation, I ask. Not really, she says, because a number of teachers are using the jabs too.
I increasingly feel like an outlier writing about this subject, because these jabs are becoming the norm. A weird kind of norm, if you ask me, but a norm all the same. One isn't supposed to criticise anything that anyone does to their body these days, whether they're big, small, tattooed, pierced or whatever. It's not feminist to be unsupportive, many argue.
But these drugs are allowing women who've always been unhappily obsessed with their weight to become alarmingly thin. Women who aren't large to begin with. Are we supposed to look the other way and pretend this is healthy? Plenty of men are using these injection pens, too, I should add, but they seem to be particularly dissected and examined and analysed among the women in my friendship group.
Isn't it the same as Botox, a friend challenged last week while we discussed this subject (yet again) over dinner. Women don't have to 'confess' if they've had that, she argued, so why should a fat jab be any different? Why should women be continually harangued and criticised for their personal choices? I'm not sure cosmetic treatments are quite the same as injecting oneself with a synthetic hormone, though. I think the jabs are more insidious, because putting on weight is still deemed even more of a 'crime' than ageing.
In the past decade or so, we'd supposedly all become so much more accepting of different body shapes than back in the Nineties, when my friends were busy starving themselves or sticking their fingers down their throats at school. Except we haven't. The fat jabs have blown that idea to shreds, and girls are doing it all over again. It's deeply, deeply disturbing.