It is the festival of the dead Jewish carpenter, when we are all urged to be less unkind to each other than we generally are. Since I have no regard for Jewish carpenters, dead or alive, and no belief in his supposed Sky Daddy, I might be inclined to ignore the urgings and to carry on as usual. However, this is a custom of my people, and I feel some obligation to observe that. So, if I may not drip kindness in what follows, I will try to restrain my habitual lack of restraint.

My subject for this morning begins with a report on the BBC website. On the 21^st December 2025, it published this about the new slimming injections. The drugs work, it says, but only while you are on them. Stop, and the hunger returns “like an avalanche”. Between 60 and 80 per cent of the weight comes back. Patients describe stopping the injections as “jumping off a cliff”. Some conclude—quite sensibly, given the premises—that they must stay on the drug indefinitely.

Nothing new here. I wrote about this last May. I said these drugs were not cures but maintenance contracts, and that stopping them would bring instant rebound. All worthy of note about the Beeb report is that the truth has reached the regime media. As for the truth, it is not in itself a scandal. How the drugs behave is part of their design. That much the Beeb still won’t admit. It does concede that no one really knows what the long-term consequences of permanent GLP-1 manipulation will be. The drugs are new. The side-effects are mounting. Yet the tone remains reverential. Two women are photographed smiling, thinner, happier, still tethered to a syringe. The message is implicit but unmistakable: you may escape fatness, but only on licence, and only for as long as you keep paying:

“Between one and three years after stopping the medication, people will see a significant proportion of weight go back on.”

I don’t need clinical trials to tell me these drugs are bad news. Roughly half the boys in my class are on one of the other of them. They began them last summer with all the misplaced optimism of the British Government’s support for the Ukraine. At first, they spoke about their progress constantly. They would look at me through the corners of their eyes, doubtless ready to assure each other how they would soon have firm shoulders and pectoral muscles and abdominals as visible as mine. Still waiting, they have ceased looking. We did have a class discussion in September—some stinking fat pig of a supply teacher no doubt thought it would help her “bond” with us. I explained then that my own superb appearance had nothing to do with caloric restriction, but with correct eating and correct exercise. The only result was a chorus of hostile whining.

Well, it’s Christmas, and everyone who hasn’t given up and grown still fatter flops about school like a deflated football. What they show isn’t a sudden rush of health and beauty, but nausea, lethargy, erratic attendance, and a strange new fragility. The drug suppresses appetite, but never instils discipline. It does not replace habits. It does not teach restraint. It simply turns the volume down on gluttony for a while, and then turns it back up the moment the needle goes away. Yes—if you cut down on nutritionally-depleted crap from Greggs and replace it with nothing, you lose body fat. You don’t miraculously acquire muscle mass or bone density. You don’t start to look like me. That needs protein and fat. It also needs exercise as regular and strenuous as malnutrition doesn’t encourage or allow.

If it weren’t Christmas, I might call my classmates genetic dross. I might dwell on the despair and humiliation that come from realising how their promised salvation has become a permanent leash of more or less untested chemicals. Or I might observe that starving themselves while feeling bad about their lack of progress towards real health and beauty, may bring them to a better view of the distinction between those who govern themselves and those who—in the wider sense discussed by Aristotle—are only fit to be governed by others .

But it is Christmas, and I have promised to be charitable. There are three boys in my class who are biologically defective in the sense that they wouldn’t survive in a world that didn’t coddle them. One walks on tiptoe, opening and shutting his mouth with every step. Another has a recessive forehead, and his teeth seem to rot a little more between every involuntary glance I give him. The other must weigh twenty stone, and he stabs himself with a pencil whenever I explain that the Coronavirus vaccines are time-delayed poisons. If it were not Christmas, I might well have dark thoughts about the negligence of the parents who brought them into the world.

None of the other boys, however, is defective in quite that sense. They are not very bright. Even looking past their saggy, swollen flesh, their bodies are misshapen. They are in every sense my inferiors. This being said, there is nothing innate that prevents them from having turned out better than they have.

Let me return to the BBC report. This contains one line of genuine clarity. A GP interviewed in the piece remarks:

“Obesity is not a GLP-1 deficiency.”

Quite so. The sort of obesity I mostly see about me is a problem of behaviour. It is a problem of self-indulgence and a refusal to accept limits. It is the effect of a schooling system that refuses to show or to preach excellence, and of a corrupted commerce that profits from encouraging people to live like laboratory rats. Injecting people does not correct any of this. It merely postpones the reckoning. The women profiled in the article illustrate this. One remains on the drug because she is terrified of stopping. The other succeeds only because she used the drug as a temporary scaffold while completely rebuilding her lifestyle—diet, exercise, habits, psychology. In other words, she succeeded precisely because she did what fat people are no longer told to do. The needle did not save her. She saved herself.

The central fantasy behind weight-loss injections is that the body can be hacked without any involvement of will. It is that one can remain essentially unchanged—same tastes, same laziness, same excuses—while chemistry does the hard work. This fantasy has never been true. It is not true of steroids, antidepressants, beta-blockers, or nicotine patches. It is certainly not true of drugs that interfere with one of the most basic regulatory systems in the human body.

The BBC report admits that many users feel “addicted” to the medication, not because it produces pleasure, but because it suppresses panic. Without the drug, they must confront themselves again. With it, they can delay that confrontation indefinitely. From the point of view of the manufacturers—Novo Nordisk and its competitors—this is ideal. A customer who cannot stop is not a failure. He is an asset.

There is no mystery here, and there never has been. People lose weight and keep it off by making conscious, sustained, and often uncomfortable changes to how they live. They eat less. They eat better. They move their bodies regularly. They accept hunger and fatigue as normal features of life rather than emergencies requiring intervention. This was true in 1950. It was true in 1850. It was true when no one had heard of GLP-1 agonists, and most people still managed not to be enormous.

The injection does not change this. Those who hoped for a narco-solution—some chemical trick that would spare them effort while delivering virtue—were always going to be disappointed. The BBC has now confirmed it, gently and with sympathy. I prefer to say it plainly. If you will not change your life, no drug can save you. If you will, you never needed the drug in the first place. There is no drug on earth that will make you look as good as I do.

But, I will repeat that it is Christmas, and I want to be kind. So, as a gift to my less fortunate classmates, I make this offer for 2026. Stop those horrid injections. Instead, put yourself absolutely in my hands. Eat what I tell you to eat. Move when and how I tell you to move. And learn to think about yourself and the world as I teach you to think. You will never look like me, but you will, come Easter, look and feel better than you do. Oh, and give me £100 a week for my trouble. I assure you that I don’t need the cash. But there will be no refunds, and you will certainly miss the cash if you fail to do exactly as I direct.

So, whether or not you are in my class, I wish a Happy Christmas to all my readers. And please remember that I am not really the nastiest young men you have ever met or will ever meet. I do have a most charitable side to me.

Related posts:

Wegovy, Will-Power, and the Limits of Moral Purism

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