I Tried Exercise Regimes, Celebrity Personal Trainers, A Bean Diet And Every Fat Jab That Big Pharma Could Squeeze Into A Pen Now JACK BARHAM Reveals What Worked… And Didnt

It was my mother who launched me on my weight-loss journey shortly after Christmas several years ago by buying me a blue gym top. When I tried it on, it was at least two sizes too small.

At the time I was a food-obsessed, slightly chubby 27-year-old and my darling mother was too polite to say: ‘Isn’t it time you spent time at the gym, tubby?’

Her idea was that I might be motivated to lose enough surplus flesh to fit into the gym top within a few short months.

At the time, I was on the hunt for a girlfriend and so was up for the challenge, but if I had known then what I know now, I might not have bothered – instead, using the top to clean my golf clubs.

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For in the years that followed, I embarked on a pound-shedding odyssey that has taken in exercise regimes, celebrity personal trainers, a pulses-obsessed nutritionist – and, eventually, every fat jab that Big Pharma could squeeze into a pen.

But at first I relied on willpower. Knowing that I had the self-control of a Labrador in a sausage factory, I decided that I needed some peer-group pressure. And so I set up an Instagram account called ‘ashirtthatfits’ and invited people to comment on my progress.

And I wasn’t just looking for positive reinforcement – on one post, I signed off with the line: ‘Please start abusing me again, it really does help.’

I had zero interest in attracting loads of followers, but I needed something to incentivise me to keep fighting the flab.

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Within a few months, it worked. I lost over a stone. Unfortunately, success brought a new problem. People began accusing me of smugness. Apparently, my self-deprecating jokes now sounded like the sort of thing my 30-year-old friends who run marathons, and talk about it, say.

Annoyingly for me, this stage coincided with me finding a new job. I also lost the email address associated with my Instagram account, thus leaving my gym-bod persona frozen in time for all to see with no way of deleting it. A monument to fleeting disappointment.

A couple of years later the Covid pandemic arrived and, with it, two interminable lockdowns: one in spring, the other in winter. In between, we had then Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s ‘Eat out to help out’ campaign and I was an enthusiastic participant.

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After a summer of eating too much, the winter lockdown was imposed and it hit both my brother and me very hard. A combination of too much Guinness and my mother’s unhealthy obsession with butter meant I went from Billy Idol to Billy Bunter. Eventually, I got the closest to hitting 100kg I have ever come to in my life: 99.7kg. (Or, for those of you still using old money, 16st.)

Now properly overweight and still unhappily single, I decided something had to change. Fortunately for me, having moved back in with my parents to ride out the pandemic, I had saved enough money to pay for a celebrity body transformation service called Roar Fitness. Funnily enough, I believe my celebrity doppelgänger, Piers Morgan, has also given this particular regime a go.

After parting ways with a small fortune, I was assigned a personal trainer – a woman, of course, in the belief (correct) that I might be motivated to impress a female – and a nutritionist, someone who used terms such as ‘complex carbohydrates’.

I was given a strict routine that, apart from weight training, included daily walking goals, a ban on alcohol and a strict diet.

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Long story short, I became obsessed with the goal of turning myself into someone who looked like Miles Teller than my old friend Piers – and it was very successful.

After starving myself of my favourite treats for 12 weeks, I lost 14kg (just over 2st). However, the downside of abiding by such a spartan regime for weeks on end is that, once it was over, I was than ready to unleash my inner Oliver Reed.

The first night was a celebration with friends, which – given that I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol for three months – had a predictable result. I spent the whole of the next day in bed nursing the mother of all hangovers, eating Domino’s.

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In the weeks that followed, I proved that I was just as good at putting weight back on as I was at shedding it. Spectacularly good. I think I added 10kg (1.6st) in a matter of weeks, reaching a weight that I have since called my baseline.

That said, the next year or so was fine. I didn’t balloon too excessively, I was dating and generally in good spirits – perhaps because I had accepted that this might be it and, no matter what I did, I would always be slightly chubby.

Then came the day Ozempic entered our lives and my indirect investment in the Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk began.

I remember the idea came up at a dinner with one of my slightly honest friends. She said that my baseline weight simply wasn’t good enough and suggested I give weight-loss jabs a go.

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I was prescribed a 0.25mg dose of Wegovy and immediately felt I’d been given a new lease of life: Effortless weight loss for the same price as a Virgin gym membership.

Dusting the cobwebs off my notebook from Jason the nutritionist, I ate a well-balanced diet while on the jabs. No Maltesers mid-morning, no cookies after lunch, no binge eating on a hangover – I simply wasn’t hungry any . After two or three months, I had shifted 10kg, without even thinking about it.

Time to stop the jabs, I reckoned. And this time round, my experience was very different from the comedown from my celebrity transformation course: I didn’t immediately put on weight.

Unbeknown to me, I had just met the girl I would later go on to marry, and – unluckily for her – she had just met the thinnest version she was ever likely to see of her husband-to-be.

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After a couple of months, to my growing embarrassment, I noticed my weight was creeping back up, How pathetic of me. I had just lost all that weight and now, only two months later, it was going right back on again. Should I get back on the jabs?

While I had not told my family about my Ozempic experiment, I had never made a secret of it when it came to my friends. But something made me recoil at the idea of telling them that I was thinking about going back on them. Was this what my life was destined to be like: a jab a week to keep the podge at bay?

In the early winter of 2024, I returned to the injection route. At that time, Mounjaro was being hailed as the daddy of all weight-loss drugs and so, in my never-ending quest for a respectable waistline, I switched brands.

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Alas, Mounjaro and I didn’t quite hit it off the same way Wegovy and I had. For the first time, I experienced a side effect. I’m no hypochondriac but, after a while, I began to notice that I had developed a slightly acid stomach.

Anyone who has experienced acid reflux knows that it’s no fun waking up in the middle of the night with a burning sensation in the chest and a sour taste in your mouth. In fact, it’s utterly foul.

And so my experiment with Mounjaro came to an abrupt end. But I wasn’t about to abandon fat jabs entirely.

Enter stage left, my old friend, Wegovy. But this time round, the wonder drug didn’t perform to expectations.

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Perhaps I approached this second round of jabs with an element of entitlement: This will work, I will be thin again, no matter what. Or maybe it was because I had developed an odd sense of competition when it came to my own powers versus those of Wegovy.

Every time I laid eyes on food, I thought to myself: I don’t want that. But this realisation was immediately followed by the notion that it was down to the drugs and I don’t need drugs: Three hash browns please and a side of sausage!

The only way I am going to get over this new sense of competition, was by going higher, and further. And so it wasn’t long before I found myself on 1mg of Wegovy, a dose that I had previously almost found too much to handle. This time round, however, it was child’s play: Pass me the cookies!

It gradually dawned on me that I had ‘beaten’ these wonder drugs – or to put it another way, they had stopped working. Instead of spending so much money on my celebrity weight-loss journey, perhaps I should have paid for a course of eight therapy sessions and overcome my obsession with food via my head rather than my stomach.

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At the time of writing, I am giving up on my weekly jabbing, having come to the conclusion that the battle is with my brain, not with my metabolism. I must get over my cravings to sabotage my desire for a healthy life.

It’s this soul searching and hard work which I think will ultimately lead to a healthier, fulfilling – and, yes – thinner life.

I am sure there are many people who have weight-loss jabs to thank for turning their lives around and that is wonderful – but perhaps making the drugs so easy to get hold of is not the best course of action. My inner grit and determination to be healthy for my future kids is what will drive me now.

So I guess my parting shot to anyone thinking of going on the jabs, and to all those who merely greedy, bored, or lazy, is perhaps that the answer may not be pharmaceutical.

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Move and find some self-discipline. Stabbing yourself in the abdomen on a weekly basis for the rest of your life is not a good option. Indeed, it’s frankly embarrassing.