Last month I spent nearly $200 getting a stack of old trousers taken in at the waist. I had been keeping them folded up on a top shelf in a closet, in a kind of Carbohydrate Lover’s Strategic Reserve, because I know from past behavior that just because they’re too big for me now, there’s no reason to think they’ll be too big for me next year. This has been a lifelong pattern, and I have learned the hard way not to toss the XXLs just because I am now slipping into the mediums.
Mounjaro has changed all that. Ever since I was told, in a very somber and serious voice, by my doctor that my blood glucose levels were way too high, measured by a number called A1c, which is basically a 90-day average of blood sugar, I have done everything possible to get that number down. Everything, that is, except stick to a sensible diet. I tried every home remedy, every supplement, any product of the pharmaceutical industry no matter what the side effects. But nothing worked for long, which is why there was always a stack of clothes on a top shelf in the closet that were either aspirationally slender or reproachfully roomy.
And then along came Ozempic, Mounjaro, and their differently-branded cousins, and suddenly it was easy to get my A1c down to the low 5’s, where it should be, with the wonderful side effect of making the pants on the top shelf fit. A year into my Moujaro Period, the trousers I bought years ago when I was flush with cash, and also a 32-inch waist, fit me perfectly, along with the expensive cashmere blazer and the Savile Row suit, the bespoke shirts that bespoke a collar that’s 15 1/2 inches around, not 17 inches, and a jacket I bought one year in Milan that was so expensive my hands shook when I paid for it, but that within a year made me look like a baked potato bursting out of its skin.
Mounjaro is in a class of drugs called tirzepatides, and its worst side effect is that it’s really expensive — unless you’re lucky enough, like me, to suffer from Type 2 diabetes, in which case it’s covered by insurance. My weekly doses of Mounjaro cost me about $25 a month, which is way less than a low-cost monthly membership to the local YMCA, and ludicrously cheaper than a membership at a fancy gym such as Equinox. There are some unfortunate people who are too fat but who don’t suffer from Type 2 diabetes, and those poor folks have to pay through the nose for a tirzepatide, which isn’t fair. I promise that when I can finally wear the shirts again that I had made at Bowring Arundel in London in 1991, I will turn my thoughts to agitating for pharmaceutical access equity. In the meantime, it’s every fat, and formerly fat, slob for himself.
But as much as I like being able to wear what are essentially brand-new clothes, it’s disconcerting to grab a jacket from the front section of the closet, the pre-Mounjaro supply, put it on, and realize that whatever extra weight I was carrying, I was carrying it everywhere. For some reason, the shoulders seem too big — was I fat in the shoulders, too? — and the sleeves seem extra long — were my fingers extended a few inches by too many doughnuts? The seats of the trousers droop in low folds, and the shirts billow out like I’m a 16th-century courtier. There was a time, I must accept, when I filled out all of this material. The good news is, as long as the pharmaceutical industry remains ravenously greedy and voraciously competitive, I can get the old stuff altered and never have to go shopping for clothes again.
The bad news is that losing weight brings with it other challenges. As the brilliant and wise writer Thomas Sowell reminds us time and time again, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” Fatty tissue, it turns out, fills out wrinkles. And when you lose weight, you also lose muscle mass. Which means I look terrific in my clothes, but once out of them I look a little like a melting candle. The solution to that is, ironically, the place I was avoiding all along: the gym.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.