Stephen Fry has revealed how he had started taking Ozempic to lose weight but had to stop as the drug made him vomit up to five times a day.
The actor and comedian, 66, said he got the jab – a treatment originally designed for people with diabetes – from his doctor in the US “years ago”.
Speaking on the River Cafe Table 4 podcast, Fry described how the first week of being on Ozempic reaped “astonishing” results, which made him believe he had found a “brilliant” solution to his weight-loss efforts.
“I’m an early adopter of these things,” Fry, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2018, said. “And I happened to be in America and I’d read about it.”
“I asked my doctor in America, my physician, as they like to call them, and he said, ‘I think I can get you some’.
“He tried me on it and [for] the first week or so I was thinking, ‘this is astonishing. Not only do I not want to eat, I don’t want any alcohol of any kind. This is going to be brilliant’.
“Then I started feeling sick, and I started feeling sicker and sicker and sicker. I was literally throwing up four, five times a day and I thought, ‘I can’t do this’. So that’s it.”
Rapid weight loss
Back in August 2019, the actor told BBC Breakfast that after reaching almost 21 stone in April that year, he shed five-and -a-half stone in four months by walking a lot and eating sensibly.
It is unknown whether the weight loss coincided with the period when Fry took Ozempic.
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Fry told the BBC: “I walk a lot and that helps my mood as well, I find. It’s not a guaranteed help for mental stress and anxiety or anything else, but it does help me and it means I can listen to audio books as I walk, and podcasts, and you eat up the miles that way and, talking of eating up, eating sensibly.”
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Ozempic works by suppressing the appetite and lengthens the amount of time food stays in the stomach, leading to weight loss – at least for as long as you carry on taking it.
It has been banned as a treatment for obesity in the UK due to high demand for the drug causing a global shortage.
