Boris Johnson stopped taking a controversial celebrity-favourite slimming drug as it made him ill.
The former British Prime Minister, 58, used his first newspaper column since his return to journalism to reveal he took semaglutide – also known as Ozempic or Wegovy – after seeing how the £2,700-a-year course of the medication helped a cabinet colleague lose weight.
Johnson, who has two of his six children with wife Carrie Symonds, 35, said in the Daily Mail about getting on the drug after a friend had “shared the number of a brilliant physician who had prescribed this magic potion”: “For weeks I jabbed my stomach, and for weeks it worked. Effortlessly, I pushed aside the puddings and the second helpings.
“I must have been losing four or five pounds a week – maybe more.”
But Johnson added he then started to “dread the injections, because they were making me feel ill”, leaving him fine one minute but then leading to him vomiting into the toilet the next.
Johnson also said he has now ditched the drug and has decided getting “back to exercise” and using “willpower” are the best ways for him to lose weight.
But he added about hoping drugs may help him in the future: “I look at my colleagues – leaner but not hungrier – and I hope that if science can do it for them, maybe one day it can help me, and everyone else.”
Johnson also predicted appetite suppressants will become “like statins” for obesity.
Semaglutide is currently only available privately under the brand name Ozempic for people with type 2 diabetes.
But it is widely used off-label by celebrities and has swept Hollywood, with a string of A-listers said to be on the drug to stay looking trim.
