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.”
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.