Over lunch in Manhattan with a new friend, she describes how it feels to be building a new body in secret. We are sharing a salad, after which I will eat pasta and she will drink water – water, she says, is the unexpected thing she now has to remind herself to ingest. In the general flattening of her desires, some days she gets to bedtime and realises she has barely drunk a single cup all day. Now, when she finishes eating, she uses the remaining time to determinedly chug water until everyone else has stopped as well.
She has been on a GLP-1 for four months and lost 40 pounds (18kg), but nobody in her personal life knows. Or rather, they have noticed the weight loss but she has not disclosed the medication. At the same time that she received her first prescription, she signed up for a keto meal-delivery service and joined a hardcore gym, so the development could be explained elsewhere. We made our acquaintance at a work function and I know nobody in her real life. Not even her husband knows about the injections which, she says, she bundles in brown-paper bags and buries in the fridge. Why the secrecy, I ask her?
“I have this thing that looks amazing, but because it happened so quickly I haven’t had time to get used to it,” she says. “I don’t yet feel as though I own it. I want some time alone with just the two of us to figure it out.”
