Having struggled to control his weight since childhood, David Clarke was intrigued when he heard about the new Wegovy pill through an advert for the telehealth company Hims.
Clarke, 40 from Brooklyn, New York City, had lost weight in his early thirties through the combination of a strict diet and joining a rugby team. But through his mid to late thirties, things had slipped – he’d quit rugby, figuring that his joints were no longer up to the rigours of the sport, and it had become harder to find the time for healthy habits. Over the course of five years, he’d gained 22kg (three stone and 6.5 lbs) in weight, and his annual health check-up revealed that he had high cholesterol.
“I knew that I needed to start losing some weight again,” he says. Clarke’s mother, a type 2 diabetic, had been taking the injectable weight loss drug Mounjaro for two years with impressive results. He had found the idea hard to contemplate due to a fear of injections – a phobia shared by an estimated one in 10 people in the UK – but the emergence of a daily pill, a tablet formulation of the injectable drug Wegovy, felt like a more viable option than weekly injections.
“I know it sounds silly, but I’m not a fan of shots,” he says. “Even when I’ve had to prick my finger for a blood test, that freaks me out, so it was a barrier in a lot of ways. I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of injections.”
