Helena Gilhooly, late 50s

‘I nearly collapsed on Christmas Eve in the supermarket. I started having a panic attack at the counter’

Running her own small jewellery-making business, Busybeaders, led Helena Gilhooly to develop some “bad habits: late-night working and everything else. Rather than having a proper dinner, you’d have snacks because you’re working away,” she says, explaining how she gained weight. “You’re going to network events for the business, and I just didn’t feel good because of my clothes. So I stopped going to a lot of events. I was fed-up. I tried every single diet.”

Helena Gilhooly. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times

Last year she started to hear more and more about Ozempic. “I said, I’ll go and try it. I’ll give it a blast. I didn’t have the funds, so I borrowed the first amount of money off my son.” Initial costs were €60 for a GP visit, € 30 for blood tests and € 145 for Ozempic for one month. “I earned the money through the business to get the next lot.

“In eight weeks I lost 18lb. I had to make myself eat, because I was forgetting, and you get very dizzy when you don’t eat. I nearly collapsed on Christmas Eve [in the supermarket]. I started having a panic attack at the counter. Then my mam passed away and that just blew everything out of the water. Dieting was the last thing on my mind.”

Gilhooly was still on Ozempic at this time, “but I wasn’t dieting, and naturally there was no weight loss... I couldn’t justify the cost if I wasn’t losing weight.” So she took a break. She went back on Ozempic in March, but started getting “bad stomach cramps”. She tried “microdosing”, but “all it did was keep everything on an even keel. I still wasn’t losing weight.” Cost is preventing Gilhooly from being able to afford the full dose. “It’s a huge chunk of my income.”

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Gilhooly hasn’t gained back the weight she lost, but she would like to lose more. Christmas is her “busiest time. I’ll work hard to make an extra few bob, that come the new year, I’ll have the opportunity to go back on it.... I can get properly back to looking after my health.”

David Harte, 44

‘My wife said to me within my first month on Mounjaro: You’re actually a nicer person on it’

“As long as I can remember, I’ve always battled with my weight,” says 44-year-old David Harte. “From when I was a kid, all through my life. I’m a strength and conditioning coach so I’m well up on my training. I know all the right things [to do to control weight], but it’s still a battle every day.

“My mother went on [obesity