The Daily Beast Podcast - The Fat Shot Changed My Life, Cured My Depression

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

Joanna Coles talks with author and TV producer Daisy Goodwin about her injectable weight loss drug journey. Goodwin explains how she learned to stop worrying and love the fat shot. After grappling with the stigma and shame of taking GLP1s, Goodwin admits that losing 50lbs also helped her shed anxiety and depression. She credits the medicine with forever changing her life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, I'm Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of The Daily Beast. And today we're going to be talking about one of my personal obsessions, which I suspect you may share. You may not be obsessed by it. But the question is, should we all be on GLP ones? Everyone I know is on one at this point. Both people who need to be for weight loss and others who just want to maintain their thinness. And now I'm like, why am I left out of this? Should I be on one?

even though I don't actually believe in going on drugs for life, but people say it's a miracle drug and 11% of the population are on it now. And apparently it's going to have an impact on the economy as big as the iPhone. It's changing the way we eat. It's changing what we wear. Anyway, we're going to be talking to a friend of mine who is a wonderfully successful woman who has been on a GLP1 and initially secretly for a few months until she lost 50 pounds. So we're going to talk to her about that journey, which turned out to be full of surprises, not least the reaction of other people, the reaction of her husband. And also her own reaction when she realized that not only was she feeling physically lighter,

but mentally she was feeling lighter too. And as someone who suffered from depression, she found that extremely curious and frankly exciting. So I'm very curious to talk to her. I want to know what I'm missing out on. And truthfully, I have put along 15 pounds over the last five years and I would really like to lose them. I don't like carrying them around. Everybody says, oh, it's just the impact of menopause. But if I could lose those 15 pounds, I would like to. So we're going to be talking to Daisy Goodwin. But before we do, I wanted to give you a sense of who she is. Because I've known her for, many, many years. She's been a very close, thoughtful, helpful, wonderful friend. But she's also one of Britain's best television producers. She reimagined the landscape of daytime television. And her big, most wonderful piece was a creator of Victoria, which you saw here on PBS with

Rufus Sewell and Jenna Coleman. She's written several bestselling books, not least Diva, which is a novel imagining the life of Maria Callas. And she's got a play by Royal Appointment, which kicks off this summer on tour that I want to talk to her about. And this incredible piece that she wrote, first of the Times, and then for her own substack about the impact of losing weight. So Daisy, welcome. Hi.

Tell us about what made you decide to try going on a weight loss drug. Well, it was because I'm a very glamorous friend of mine, and I was sort of hanging out with her. And I looked in her fridge, and I saw a box of what I thought must be a Zen pic. And I said, this is a Zen pic? She said, yeah, you should try it. And I was like, okay, and then she said, yeah, it's fine. You know, you just get it through this app and you do it and you feel great and you should just try it. And I thought, well, you know, why not?

I'd read about it, of course, in the newspapers, but I'd never actually thought of doing it myself because I don't know, it felt like cheating. But here was this person I knew pretty well who was doing it. And I thought, well, if you're doing it, then, you know, clearly it's kind of not that weird. So I, I, you know, signed up to the app and they sent me a box. And so I started. But I didn't tell anybody I was doing it. No one.

Not even my hump. A couple of things. First of all, were you insulted when she said, you should go on it. And two, can you just talk us through the whole interface with the app? And did you feel you needed proper medical attention to go on it? I mean, the idea of going on an app and just getting a drug, even if everybody else is using it, still feels a little frightening to me. Well, I wasn't really insulted because I mean, I've speeded the conversation up because I was sort of looking at it. And she said, why, are you interested in doing it? And I went, well, yeah, maybe, maybe. And then she said, well,

if you are interested, not that you need to do it, which is what everybody always says, not that you need to do it, Daisy, but if you were thinking of doing it, then really it's fine. And, you know, it's not a big deal and she lost £25 or whatever it was. And so I was like, okay. And then I downloaded the app and the app asked me lots of questions that seemed to me fairly, you know, sensible. I saw a doctor on the app. I had to take some really awful pictures of myself in my underwear, standing straight on and standing sideways to camera. And after that, really, frankly, I would have, you know, horrifying idea.

There was no way I wasn't going to do this, you know. So once I've done that and they sent back, they went back and said, yes, yes, you have preview to this. And so I then started doing it. But I kept it absolutely stum, which is. very unlike me because I'm not really very good at keeping secrets, but I, you know, I got the box. I sort of, the moment, you know, the box comes in sort of plain packaging like a set. And, you know, you kind of open it up and then I would make sure that nobody could see me. I would hide the box in my knicker drawer and I would sort of shreddle the package so no one would know.

and I managed to do it for about five months before anybody noticed. Take us through the first shot. I mean, you've got this furtive behaviour. I'm fascinated that you did this through and out with the doctor that you didn't know and didn't have your history. How much did it cost? And what was it like putting the first strut in? Okay, so it costs about, it's a lot cheaper here than this is in the States, which we know, don't we? And which the president talked about this week.

Yeah, I know. About 50 pounds a week, so whatever that is in dollars, about, I guess, 80 bucks. Yeah, maybe 60, 70, with the rate of exchange changing all the time. It's a lot less than to us in America. The box arrives, you get a sort of a pen and you get a little box of needles and some alcohol wipes. And then you have to decide where you're going to do the injection. So do you do it in your thigh, do it in your... in your stomach. And, you know, the first time I was a little bit sort of nervous and was I doing it right and all the rest of it. And I spent a lot of time sort of going like this with the, you know, priming the pen and seeing whether the little stuff came out of the end and so forth. There's lots of very, very clear instructions on the app.

And of course, with COVID testing, we're all used to doing things like this at home now. Exactly. Exactly. So I had, you know, a little bit of sort of, a bit of sort of medical, you know, fantasy going on and I was kind of, you know, being a bit. your own nurse. Yeah, yeah, Dr. Daisy. And I put it in my thigh and then you can't even feel it. Well, maybe I just had so much thigh that I couldn't feel it at all. And I thought, have I done it? And then I look back and I think, yeah, no, I have. But, you know, you spend a lot of time doing stuff like that. Did you have a small dose at the beginning? I mean, it starts off at 2.5 and then you go and then after a month, you know, they say how you're doing and you're doing. go, yeah, that's fine. And then they put you up to five and then to seven point five and then to

ten. And let's go back to your first week. Just talk us through, did you feel any different? Did you immediately start losing weight? What was the impact of it all? Well, I didn't feel particularly different, but I did start to feel less hungry quite soon. I mean, it took about three or four days and I suddenly just, you know, my appetite was not as much as it was. And it's really interesting because I'd like read so many books about you know diets and you know the grapefruit diet and the fibodiac. You know almost you know keto and paleo and high fat and low fat and what have you but actually it's just about eating less and it's a really it's quite sort of weird because you suddenly realize that how much how much that you normally eat because once you stop thinking hungry

you think, oh, gosh, you know, I've got all away from lunch to tea time without eating anything. And what would you normally have eaten? Well, I never felt that I was eating that much, but clearly I've worked. I mean, you know, for breakfast I have yogurt and for lunch. I'd have, you know, sandwiches and whatever. And then you'd think, obviously, I'd drink three bottles of wine and eat, you know, half a cow. No, but, I mean, you know, I don't think I was eating massive amounts, but clearly the difference between, you know, not.

not feeling hungry all the time. And, you know, I was one of those people who'd get hungry. So if I wasn't eating on a regular basis, I would, my blood sugar would start to plummet and I would begin to get very, very grumpy unless I could eat something now. And my family would kind of, you know, know to have sweets. Blood sugar lows. Yeah, yeah. I go. I remember once almost when I was pregnant stealing a hamburger out of a stranger's hand as she was walking past because I thought if I don't eat in the next five minutes. I'm going to kill somebody. I remember when you were pregnant. You were really quite scary when you were hungry. Yeah. No, I can, I was always hungry. Yeah. Exactly. So, but when that goes, it's really interesting because you forget to think about food all the time. You've just, you know,

and suddenly you've got all this time to do other stuff and you're just, you know, there's more to life than your next meal. So interesting. Well, you know, the same thing happens when you're in love. You know, when you're in love, you forget to eat because you're getting pleasure from other places, you know what I mean? But with this, you obviously, it's not quite the same, but you just don't have that kind of compulsion to eat. So food takes up a role in your life and then when you go on one of these drugs, and you're a Monjaro, correct? Yeah. It rewires the neural pathways so you're not thinking about food. I mean, people talk about it cutting out the food noise. What it does is it dampens down your appetite, whatever, so you feel fuller for longer.

Okay, so you're on 2.5 for the first month. At what point you ratchet it up and are you having a trek in with the doctor? When you say they reached out to you and said, how's it going, was that in a text? Does the doctor call you? They do it in a text. They do it electronically. if you have any concerns or worries, you can speak to someone. I got as much feedback as I wanted.

So next month I went on to 5 milligrams. And, you know, at 5 milligrams, you start feeling slightly different. I felt slightly queasy sometimes, especially on the first day. Nothing appalling, but nothing I couldn't handle. And those effects get worse. Occasionally you get sort of the old rather unpleasant burp, which was pretty horrible. horrible and you get you have a certain amount of either constipation or the opposite.

I got to 10 mg and then I got very bad sort of diarrhea and I thought I can't do this. So I went back to 7.5. You did ask for all the details. Yeah, I'm fascinated by it. And then I went back to 7.5 and that was fine. And so I was on that for six months. And in six months, I mean, I lost, I don't know, 22 kilograms. which is about... It's about 50 pounds, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And when did people start noticing? It's quite funny, because my husband would look at me sometimes, but because we were living together, he wouldn't really, he just didn't know, he was like, oh, hmm, and he noticed I was eating less, but he didn't sort of, he didn't put two and two together. The person who figured it out was my daughter, I think, because she'd been rattling around in my knicker drawer

and finally, found the stash, found my stash. found my stash and she just went, Mom, are you taking a Zempec, Minjaro, whatever? You're taking one of these weight loss drugs and I went, no, no, no. And she said, Mom, and I finally went, oh, all right, then yes, I am. Well, why did you initially, instinctively want to cover it up? I don't know. I suppose I was embarrassed that I was so vain. I mean, I think there are very, really valid health reasons for doing it. I mean, I've had breast cancer and, you know, the one thing they say to you is if you've had breast cancer, do not put on weight. But let's face it, the reason I was doing it was because I wanted to look better. And I do look a lot better.

I'm still the same person that I've got a smaller waist. And that is not the be all and end all by any means, but it's quite interesting. Daisy, hold that thought. We're just going to take a quick break for these messages and then we'll be back in a minute to hear more about your weight loss journey. And we're back with Daisy Goodwin, who is talking about her weight loss, having now been on Monjaro, one of the GLP ones, for the last six months. All right, so your daughter rumbles, do you? Your husband is, when does he start to notice? He finds that when I go and stay the weekend with another couple. And the woman is one of those people who always says what she thinks.

She was, Daisy, you look amazing. Are you not one of those weight loss drugs? And I'm about to say no, and then I think, oh, fuck it. And then I go, yeah, actually I am. And then Malkis is like, what? And so I have to confess. And does he have, does he care? Does he mind?

No, no, no. He's rather sort of jealous. And in fact, now he has been, may even be taking it himself. So you're both on it? Yeah, he's reversed his diabetes. He was, you know, had diabetes too, and he's reversed it. Oh, wow. I didn't realize if I had diabetes.

And I will say that the two of you are incredibly good entertainers. You cook brilliantly and you love nothing more than having a table full of dinner guests with lots of alcohol, lots of cheese and very delicious food. So I hope this isn't going to impact guests in any way. No, no, no. We just might eat a little less of the cheese. I'll be the any person eating at your house. So you also say in your substack, that one of the things you noticed is not just feeling physically lighter, but you feel mentally lighter too. And you wonder if the two are connected. I'm pretty sure they are connected because I went, I had a huge health check about three months ago. And I'd been to the same place, you know, two years back. And they measured all my kind of body metrics. And they couldn't believe

how much things had changed. You know, my liver function. was like extraordinary. I, you know, my visceral fat had diminished. But the really interesting thing was that my inflammation markers had gone from, you know, slightly concerning to nothing. And I had noticed pretty much from a month in that my mood was just generally lighter. And I'm quite an anxious and sort of worried person. And somehow, for some reason, I stopped fretting.

You know, I just didn't catastrophize. I stopped doing it. I stopped ruminating. I stopped waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, oh my God, the world is going to end, or it's all my fault or whatever. I just, for some reason, that weight was lifted from my shoulders, not just from my hits, but from my shoulders. And it's a really extraordinary thing.

I'm just sunnier than I was. And it's not because I've lost weight. I think it's literally because, you know, what the doctor said to me is that your fat is an organ, and it affects your hormones. And if you have less fat, it doesn't affect your hormones in the same way. So maybe that is how it affects your serotonin uptake or whatever it is that causes that sort of anxiety and depression. So I would say,

I mean, I don't want to be sort of a terrifying poster child for a, you know, pharmaceutical company, but actually it has genuinely changed my life in that I feel both physically and mentally lighter, more buoyant, really. Yeah, I want to point out you're not being paid by any No, no, I'm really not being paid. I'm really not being paid by anyone to sober. But your experience bears out what a lot of people are saying. You see a lot of it online now that people just saying it's a miracle drug. Are you reconciled to being on it for life now? I think so, yeah. I can see the incredible health effects it's had for me. I mean, it's not just that I can go into Zara and, you know, wear anything. It's more, and, you know, hey, I can wear shorts if I want to,

But I can, I know that, you know, I'm a lot healthier. I don't have all the indicators that were, I don't have fatty liver. I don't have, you know, all the other horrible things. And I feel much fitter too. I can sort of, I mean, I've always been quite energetic, but I can run around. I can, you know, run upstairs. I just feel a generally lighter version of myself. One of the side effects are supposed to be muscle wasting.

Are you doing extra weights for that? I do a lot of weight. I mean, I don't think it's actually muscle wasting. The point is if you lose weight, you lose muscle. You know, I mean, you lose fat muscle in the sort of equal ratio. I do a lot of weights. And I have to tell you, Joanna, that when I had my body metrics, my muscle ratio was still right up there.

It's in the cup. Good. Well, I've done weightlifting with you and you can hurl those plates around it. Yeah, hello. You have a lot of capacity. Let me put it that way. So can we also talk about one of the issues you raise in your substack about the attitude of other women that you felt somehow before you'd started taking Monjaro? Well, one of the things that made me, that really made me keen to do it was that I went on holiday with some other women and we all went shopping together and we were all trying on shots in a changing room in Greece.

and you know these women are all friends of mine but they're all thinner than me and they were all sort of you know trying all these things and they were looking at me and go oh and then they were sort of pulling out these kind of you know it was a bit tailor-type caftans and say well why don't you try this darling and I'm like hmm maybe not and it was just it took me straight back to my teenage years and I thought oh god this is so humiliating I can't bear this anymore and it's not that they meant it unkinded at all, but I thought, I just don't want to be, you know, silently pitied anymore for the way I look. I mean, not that they were silently pitying me, but there was a little bit of that. I felt, I felt

sort of, oh, you know, you feel self-conscious in a way, that I don't want to feel like that in my early 60s. I don't want to feel like a teenager again in my early 60s. So I just thought, well, you know, I'm going to see what I can do about that. And it's interesting, because once you do lose weight, It does sort of alter the ecosystem, you know, in terms of relationships. Because women who've kind of, you know, felt that that was fine, you were the fatter one in the group. If you lose weight, there's a moment where they have to kind of re, what do they say, re-narrativeise their story about you. I've never heard that word re-narrativeise.

Well, that is apparently what the youth say. so, but they have to kind of reshape, they have to reframe their image of view in their minds. And, you know, it can be, it can be interesting. So one of the things one woman said to me, she said, oh, Daisy, oh, well, I can say this to you now because you've lost so much way. And I went, what? And, you know, she was something, you know, it was something about, you know, something that has happened to her in hospital. And her doctor had said, you know, you're going to recover so fast because, you know, you're so thin. And I thought, So you would have censored your conversation with me beforehand because I was larger. I mean, you know, and you suddenly think, oh, my God, is this this whole world of thin conversation, slender conversation that I wasn't allowed to be part of? That was quite weird. And it's a very old thing. And you suddenly think, gosh.

And the way people look at you and they go, oh, my goodness, you look great. And then they go, oh, not that you didn't look great before, mind you. But now you look really great. And it's kind of one of those moments where you think, oh, Lord. But it's so interesting because there's a sort of mean girl narrative that can go on even as you get older. I always think we talk about peer group pressure as something that's restricted to teenagers, but obviously it continues well into adulthood. And there is definitely a superiority that I think some women feel about being thin,

which is reinforced on television. It's reinforced every time you see a picture of Nicole Kidman. It's reinforced in magazines, some of which I used to edit, and I used to think all the time about how do we put out positive images of people. You now feel, do you feel that your friendships have recalibrated because of it? A little bit. And I mean, it was quite funny because one woman said to me, oh, you lost a lot of way.

Yes, of course I lost three stone the real way, the proper way. Oh, that's annoying. So do you now, I mean, you mentioned earlier that you thought of it as cheating and that had been one of your resistances. You no longer think of it like that. No, I think it's like, you know, if you have high cholesterol, you're going to take statics. If you're a diabetic, you're going to take insulin. Why would you subject yourself to all this kind of, all the health risks and whatever of being overweight if there's what seems to me to be a very easy way to get past it, really? Also, I love the fact that I don't have to think about food all the time. Yeah. I mean, there are better things to think about. It means you can travel without thinking. I must eat soon, otherwise I'm going to kill myself.

Yes, I always think that when I'm travelling. I do think also that we haven't taken into consideration necessarily just how much our lives have changed when we were growing up in the UK, admittedly. But we didn't eat out all the time. First of all, the restaurants weren't there. and now I can have weeks where I eat out breakfast, lunch and dinner. Exactly. And there's this amazing statistic that in the 70s, we ate more calories every day, but we were all finock. How is that possible?

Well, and it's just because we moved more. You know, we didn't have remote controls. We had manual cars. We didn't have federal heating. You know, we lived in cardboard boxes. You know, I mean, we were... We had manual cars. What's the manual car got to do with it, that you're loving your armless?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and your foot. I mean, you know, everything in modern life contributes to moving less. And so that's just that, it's that difference is a huge one. And also, we didn't have corn syrup and everything. You know, we didn't have snacks in the same way. I mean, you know, our idea of a snack was a chocolate digestive. Yeah, it wasn't half a packet of chocolate digestives. Yeah, it's fascinating. And also, we weren't working as hard. We weren't working 25. or seven, so you have less time for cooking. Yeah, exactly.

And, yeah, I mean, I don't know what, I don't know, but it's just one of those paradoxes that, you know, I think is extraordinary. So one or two people I know who've been on Monjaro or Zempec and have lost similar amounts of weight, have become obsessed about it. And you can see their extreme anxiety, having been the fat person,

about putting on even a pound from where they are now. Do you feel you've reached a balance where you are now? Do you just want to maintain? How do you stop becoming a crazy person? I don't want to lose any more weight. I think I'd be mad. I mean, I think I'm about the weight that I was when I was about 22, and that's fine.

I don't want to be any thinner because I don't want my face to just sort of start drooping and sagging. And, yeah, I'm thin enough to be perfectly happy. Okay, so what does? are you on now? I'm back on 2.5. I'm on the lowest dose. And that's the maintenance dose. Yeah, that's maintenance. I mean, it starts me putting on weight. I mean, if I did start to put on weight, I'd probably do something about it. But I feel in control and it's not the end of the world. And yeah, I just want to keep my weight stable and not have to worry about it anymore. Well, your journey

of transformation is really, really interesting. And I'm appreciative of you sharing it. I thought your substack was incredibly interesting. And I know that you've had all sorts of responses from people. So if people are looking for your substack, where can they find it? You just go on daisygoodwin, sodstack.com. And it's all free, so you don't have to pay for it. But please sign up and subscribe. And, you know, there's lots of stuff on there.

But I think it's, yeah, people were really nice about it. I mean, a lot of people, I think, feel very complicated about weight because they feel it's somehow a moral issue. and that to, and I think I felt this too, that somehow to take an injection for it is cheating. But it's not a moral issue. It's just a metabolic issue and you shouldn't have to, you know, worry about it like that. You should just, you shouldn't think about it like that. You should just do it. If you want to try it out, don't let anything stop you unless you have thyroid cancer in your family. Because that is the one contraindication.

Interesting. Well, and I suspect you should probably talk to your doctor about it too. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what I'm saying is the thing that you really mustn't, that's the only one thing where they think there might be, you know, that it's a definite no-no. But, you know, otherwise, I mean, there's an article on the paper today that says it's the cure for pretty much everything, that everyone should be on it. Yeah, it should be in the water. Although, of course, our new health and human services minister has told everybody is cheating.

It is a moral issue, which is unfortunate. Because President Trump, it turns out, is currently on his MPEC, according to people at Mar-a-Lago who have to serve him. Well, the reason I decided to write about it was because I just thought, you know, it's mad for us all to pretend we're not doing it. Why don't we just be honest about it? And I'm glad I did, although I have had some funny conversations. People feel entitled to come up to me and go, oh, wow, you've got a waste now and stuff like that. And he's saying, oh, fuck off. So rude.

It is rude, but, you know, I'll take it. All right, well, Daisy, thank you very much for sharing your story. Thank you, Joanna. Great to hear from you. I love to see you. And I'll see you when you come to my play. I know, which I'm looking forward to. If people are in London or in the UK over the summer. In the UK, it's called By Royal Appointment,

and it starts in the wonderful city of Bath on June the 5th. And it's starring the wonderful Aunt Reed. Anne Reid and Caroline Quentin. And it's a lot of fun. I've just come from rehearsals. It's going to be fun. Well, I'm good to be there for the opening nights. I'm very excited. Great. Okay. Thanks, Joanna.

I will see you soon. Bye. Bye. Daisy, thank you. And I find this conversation completely interesting. I know so many people now on GLP ones. They're being touted as miracle drugs. You've heard Daisy's experience. And if I didn't know her, I would be less convinced by it, but I'm really fascinated by her transformation. And I'm, uh, I'm, totally intrigued by them and I'm dying to go on a low dose to shift 15 pounds, which has miraculously crept on and I would love to lose. Anyway, join us again on Tuesday for our next

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