Ask Rachel: My husband has lost his lust for life (and sex) now that he's on a weight-loss drug

Telegraph

3 days ago

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Dear Rachel,
My husband has never been a slim man. Even when we got married 26 years ago, he despised the pictures because he said he looked fat. He tried those Cambridge diet sachets years ago and did manage to shrink his gut, but his residual grumpiness made our family life (we had three young children at the time) so unbearable that we all decided it wasn't worth the aggro.
Yes he's a little chubby – but he's always been such a cheerful man. When he mentioned one of his friends was on one of those weight-loss drugs I didn't discourage him from looking into it because I know how much his belly has bothered him all our married life.
I had no idea how much it would change him. It's not just food that has become irrelevant – all the fun seems to have been squeezed out. Dinner parties are a bore because he doesn't even fancy the odd glass of Gavi, and by the time we get into bed he is too exhausted to even consider sex.
If I'm honest, although his trousers are dropping off him and he looks 10 years younger, he's so lethargic he's become boring to be around. The only thing that perks him up is when someone tells him how sprightly he looks. I don't want to discourage him, but watching a man push his pasta round his plate just isn't sexy. What on earth do I say to him to get him off this bloody drug and back to the man I married all those years ago?
Any advice is most welcome.
- Melanie from Tiverton
Dear Melanie from Tiverton, or 'Tivvy' as we West Countryfolk call it,
This is possibly the most on-trend question I've had.
The first thing to say is his body is his, not yours, but I hear where you're coming from. I went to a big fat English lunch earlier in the month. There were lashings of Léoube, a smorgasbord of River Café-level scran, and exquisite wisps floating about in broderie anglaise maxi dresses.
I'm not going to mention the women again as they were the same. No carbs have passed their lips for decades and they weigh less than they did on their wedding days. No, it was the men that jumped out (not literally, from the bushes, but you know what I mean). Around half of them looked different…and somewhat diminished.
In this day and age, we know of course that when men suddenly become thin and listless and silent it's not because they're 'battling' some horrid disease. It's because they've become hooked on weight-loss jabs.
At the lunch, when asked why they were half the men they used to be, the slimmed-down boasted proudly they were on Mounjaro or Ozempic or whatever. I have to say it. Most of them were shadows of their former strapping selves. Instead of the raucous carousing they were known and loved for in their past lives, they sat uneasily at the feast, nursing their sparkling waters and pushing their micro-portions of grilled sea bass with salsa verde around their plates as I went up for seconds and thirds.
As the host joked afterwards, 'next year I'll just lay on some crisps and save myself a fortune!' as many of the blokes were so birdlike in their appetites. And this is the point isn't it. Mounjaro (and the other jabs) are designed to decrease appetite. Of all sorts. Appetite and lust for life. It creates feelings of satiety and fullness even when you've barely touched a morsel.
It also seems to lower the mood. I know a few men on Mounjaro and, like your husband, they seem tired, both of London and of life. Your old man has been turned off the pleasures of the flesh apparently by a drug that is making its manufacturers bigger and bigger as its millions of users become smaller and smaller.
According to anecdotal reports, some reported side effects do include lower libido, erectile changes and flat mood or 'emotional blunting' as the weight drops off – but so does general mojo. And as we all realise as we get older, people are appealing not so much for their outward appearance, but their inner energy.
Big Pharma, its prescribers, makers and users will cite the manifold benefits of losing a lot of timber: improved confidence, self-esteem, cardiovascular health (and that can improve sexual stamina too) and higher testosterone, ie it could indeed prove to be a miracle wonder drug and who are you and I to knock it? Well, in your husband's case, the weight-loss drug has served as a fun- as well as fat-suck. And for others too.
Like you, I've also noticed something… grey about men on the pen. But if you beg men to stop it and say, 'But I preferred you like you were before, all…normal and jolly,' I've noticed they brush you off because they quite understandably love their new svelte physiques more than they loved being the life and soul of the party.
After being the chubby one all their lives, or carrying too much middle-aged spread, it's too late for them to stop the weight jabs now. After a lifetime's bad body image, they have achieved their BMI nirvana and that's all that matters, never mind that they no longer care about sex very much, they can't be arsed and what matters now is not the notches on the bedpost but the belt. The pen is mightier, it turns out, than the penis.
In terms of advice: until he achieves his target weight, I'd suggest your chap take some supplements such as zinc, magnesium, Omega 3, calcium and Vitamin D, and see whether that increases his sexual appetite.
Oh yes, when my husband gave up booze for a year – he switched to an alcohol-free beer called Kaliber – I was quite relieved when he started drinking again as it chirped him up (it still does). I missed the Rabelaisian man and good-timer I'd married, so you have my sympathies.
And also tell your chap this. Men don't love skeletal self-denying women who live on a rocket leaf a day even if it makes them as ripped as Demi Moore, and – newsflash! - nor do women. We like a dad bod (think Jon Hamm in Friends and Neighbours …mmmm….). Unlike men – annoying generalisation alert – we don't find the opposite sex attractive only on the basis of looks alone.
I'd tell him you love him as he is and always will, but fancied him more before, then quickly quote Shakespeare's Julius Caesar before he takes his diet too far.
'Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look' etc. And then tell him he's gorgeous and seduce him.