As a teenage girl I dreamed of a weight-loss drug – this is why I will never take it

I have been dieting since I was eight years old. One trip to the doctor for recurring tonsillitis somehow resulted in me having to get on a set of scales (because, obviously). The next thing I knew, I was being told I had to keep a food diary, scrutinising everything I ate. Not yet having a hang up about my body image – how naïve of me – I was honest in what I presented to the doctor two weeks later, not thinking anything of it. “Hmm, nothing too bad on here… lots of chicken and rice,” the doctor said. And? What about it? “But I think we could cut back on the KitKat Chunkies.” Thus began the decades long uphill battle: Saskia versus food. Name any fad diet from the early 2000s and I tried – and failed – it. The Special K diet (still can’t look at a brunette in a red swimsuit without wanting to slap her); SlimFast shakes (should be renamed diarrhoea in a jar); Weight Watchers (got too carried away with the snacks); vegetarianism (I lasted all of six days. Actually, it might have only been six hours, but who’s counting?) Nothing worked. And the harder I tried, the more I began to hate myself. The more insecure I got about my size, the less I wanted to give people the opportunity to comment on it. I started eating in secret. I hid my body under baggy clothes. I even stopped moving my body in ways I once never second-guessed. A child who used to run, ice-skate, scoot and participate was now holding her breath as she went up the stairs because she didn’t want people to hear her. And as we all know, kids can be cruel. So, after some relentless bullying, I would lay awake at night dreaming of getting a tapeworm – they eat everything you eat, I thought to myself, and that meant rapid weight loss. When I wasn’t fantasising about that, I would wish for a pill that would magically have me wake up thin and fabulous, never to be picked on again. All I wanted was to be rid of the burden of being fat, punished for taking up space and making other people feel uncomfortable. Fast forward to today, and the options for that fat little girl are endless. Mounjaro injections. Easy. Don’t like needles? Not to worry, we’ve got a pill for that that’s just hit the UK market courtesy of Wegovy. As much as that little eight-year-old used to lay awake praying for this day – and we have no idea how she would have looked today had she just been left to be a child – the 31-year-old version of her is putting her fat foot down and saying “no, thank you”. ‘A child who used to run, ice-skate, scoot and participate was now holding her breath as she went up the stairs because she didn’t want people to hear her,’ recalls Saskia People never believe fat people when we say we’re happy with the way we look. It doesn’t help that the “body-positive influencers” of yore, the ones who appeared to staunchly fly the flag for fat people everywhere, dropped half their weight the moment they got some fame and suddenly forgot what a plus-size was when it came to designing their own clothing lines. But years on from crying myself to sleep and feeling as if my life would never start unless I was thin, life happened. Priorities changed, weight fluctuated, my self-esteem grew. I have loved and have been loved, I’ve travelled, I’ve hit career milestones: all the things which society wants you to fear you’ll never get when you’re fat will come to you – regardless of your size – if you let them. Call it ego, call it pride, call it ignorance – but there is no way that after nearly two decades of enduring, relearning, self-reflecting and loving myself for all of who I am, I would then turn around and go back to equating thinness to happiness. And that’s exactly what taking weight-loss medication would mean. In this society, it’s always something. I am a fat, Black woman in the West where everything about my existence runs against Eurocentric beauty ideals. If I wasn’t fat, I’d still be Black. And if I wasn’t Black, I’d still be a woman. Once you peel it back, you start to realise when it comes to conforming to societal ideals, there is no winning. The problem was never the f**king KitKat. As long as my health is not in jeopardy – being a small size does not equate to good health, argue among yourselves – I will never again apologise for my body. As I get older, I notice the after-effects of a good gym workout – yes, fat people go to the gym too – or of getting an early night or eating properly, and I do those things now because I refuse to work against my body and continue ignoring its needs. That’s the trick. Being fat in a world of Ozempic and weight-loss pills is no easy feat – in fact, it’s a protest in itself. But so is choosing not to apologise for or eradicate everything that’s “wrong” with you. Crooked noses, gaps in our teeth, strawberry legs, saggy boobs – what would happen if we all just woke up tomorrow and said, “You know what? I’m good.” The cries of conglomerates profiting off our insecurities would be heard around the world. So, you’ll see me rocking that crop top in the winter and the bikini in the summer. You can watch me eat that cookie, if that’s what turns you on. But one thing you’re not going to do is weigh me down with your expectations.