The weight-loss race ramped up this summer as two new tablet formats from the makers of Ozempic and Mounjaro hit the market. 

For six weeks, our guinea pigs tried the Wegovy pill... only to stop taking it for different reasons. 

While Louise went straight back to the jabs, Lucy became one of the first to try the second ‘miracle pill’, Foundayo, released nearly two weeks ago by Eli Lilly, in the hope of getting better results... 

I have far more faith in this new pink-coated pill

Could weight loss drugs become part of our daily lives, just like statins or blood pressure pills? This is the question the big pharmaceutical companies behind the so-called fat jabs think they’ve successfully answered with the new tablet formats launched this summer.

First, in early July, Novo Nordisk – the maker of the original ‘miracle’ weight loss drug, Ozempic – released its jab-as-a-pill called simply the Wegovy pill.

Then along came Eli Lilly, the company behind Mounjaro, with its weight loss tablet Foundayo.

It’s important to say, incidentally, that Foundayo is not simply Mounjaro in pill form.

They’re made by the same company but contain completely different drugs: tirzepatide in Mounjaro’s case is a large peptide made from a string of amino acids, while orforglipron, the drug in Foundayo, is a small molecule compound which doesn’t get broken down in the stomach.

In fact, Foundayo is more similar pharmacologically – in terms of the way the drug works – to the Wegovy pill than it is to Mounjaro.

Both pills are much cheaper and hugely more convenient than the jabs, albeit with slightly reduced weight loss benefits. They should be an excellent option for the millions of people who don’t like the thought of injecting themselves, or who want to maintain the weight loss they’ve already achieved.

When waiting lists for these pills opened, they were overwhelmed with tens of thousands of applicants.

And I’m one of the very few to have taken both.

My GLP-1 story began back in 2024 when I started using Mounjaro injections, and within six months had lost an utterly transforming four stones.

At my target weight of ten stones, three pounds, I began jabbing a maintenance dose of 5mg every week to quieten food noise and keep the weight off.

But I didn’t like the hassle of the injections, the medical feel of it all, and when the tablets came along, it felt as if my prayers had been answered.

What could be easier, or more ‘normal’, than popping a pill every morning? In July, I quickly swapped my needles for the Wegovy tablet.

And yet… on Wegovy, not only did I feel nauseous and have stomach cramps, but I felt utterly ravenous, so I stopped taking it.

Now, however, I have my hands on Foundayo. Again, I’m one of the very first in the UK to get it. So is this one the miracle pill? Or has it made me feel both ill and hungry too?

Officially launched on August 24 in the UK, Foundayo isn’t available on the NHS, but can be bought at online pharmacies, including Boots, Asda and Cloud, which is where I get mine.

Both the Wegovy pill and Foundayo cost about the same – £90 for a month’s supply of the starter dose, rising to £110 to £170 depending on which of the several higher doses you stick at. This is £20 to £50 cheaper than the injections at the lower doses and £150 to £170 less expensive than the higher ones.

With Foundayo, the idea is you do one month of 0.8 mg and then go up incrementally until you hit the top level of 17.2, if you need it.

But the major attraction is its sheer accessibility. Where jabs have to be kept in the fridge and involve all the paraphernalia of sterile swabs and clicky pens, this goes on your kitchen shelf alongside your multi-vitamin and is just as easy to take.

The Wegovy pill has to be swallowed on a completely empty stomach – ideally first thing in the morning having fasted for eight hours – and half an hour before eating food. But Foundayo can be taken at any time of day with or without a meal.

Finally, it seems I’ve discovered hassle-free weight loss in a daily pink-coated pill I can take whenever I like.

But is it really the holy grail?

The truth is, I’m wary. I feel burned by the Wegovy pill, which was also heralded as a complete game changer despite the stricter instructions for taking it.

Within days of taking the Wegovy tablet, at the starter dose of 1.5mg, my appetite increased hugely. This came as a horrible shock: I’d honestly started to believe that all my GLP-1 use had reset my behavioural patterns, even my brain, and the food noise and hunger pangs had gone away for good.

Depressingly, I quickly discovered that I could still feel the nagging, unignorable hunger that has always sent me rushing to the biscuit tin.

I started craving food such as crisps and chocolate, muffins, cookies, chips – all the ‘bad’ stuff. And as if I’d never been on skinny jabs at all, I started thinking about food all the time. I’d get up in the morning, take my pill and time my 30 minutes – and then eat a huge breakfast. Ditto lunch and dinner.

Not only was I eating large portions of often-unhealthy food, I was eating three meals a day for the first time since I went on the weight loss drugs back in 2024.

I knew I was putting on weight, but I just didn’t seem able to control it. It wasn’t about greed – I just felt unbelievably hungry.

Half a stone went on within a month, and even when I went up to 4mgs of the Wegovy pill, the hunger and bouts of nausea remained. I crept up to 10st, 7lbs and more.

Had Foundayo not appeared on the market, I’d have considered going back on the Mounjaro jabs.

But I’m determined to give Foundayo a go. I’ve had one week on the little pink pill, and depressingly I still feel hungry. Indeed, I’m still eating three big meals a day.

But I do feel a glimmer of hope, since as far as side effects go, I feel much better and have barely experienced any at all.

This means I will go up a dose in three weeks’ time – you level up once a month – and see then whether my appetite is better controlled. By now I am feeling fairly desperate to stabilise my weight again.

And so the jury is still out on the pills. Had I been able to stomach a higher dose of the Wegovy pill, I might have got a grip on my hunger, but I couldn’t. The absence of side effects with Foundayo mean I’ll hopefully be able to keep dosing up until, once again, I feel happily in control.

And I do love the freedom of this new pill. Being able to take it at any time of day – even with the occasional glass of wine – makes the whole process far easier to slot into a busy schedule.

It’s a drug you can live with. Or that is very much my hope.

Wegovy pill made me put on 5lb... and I felt awful

When I switched from having weekly Mounjaro injections to a daily Wegovy pill at the beginning of July, I was full of hope that this clever new tablet would provide the little bit of extra support I felt I needed to stay slim and healthy.

I couldn’t have known how ill it was going to make me feel, and after six weeks I’ve had to abandon the pills. Thanks to Mounjaro injections, I lost two stones last year (dropping from 13 to 11 stones) and I was delighted by the transformation to my health and figure – I’m off blood pressure medication and slinking about in size 12 clothes.

I was fully resigned to taking a low-dose GLP1 injection for the rest of my life but after 18 months it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the £170 monthly cost of Mounjaro injections and like many I started investigating cheaper options.

The Wegovy pill was the obvious next step. It doesn’t have quite the same weight loss promise as the jabs, but studies show it can be very effective at high doses.

All the GLP1 weight loss medications are licensed for weight maintenance too, so as long as you can prove you met the correct criteria when you started – a BMI of 30 or 27 with health concerns – you can jump between them.

The lowest starter dose of the Wegovy pill is 1.5mg, but after discussions with a pharmacist at my provider (SheMed.com) I was prescribed the next dose up (4mg).

It wasn’t an easy start – I was hit by a full house of gastrointestinal symptoms: waves of nausea each morning, stabbing heartburn at the first sip of Prosecco or a nibble of croissant, constipation and at one point diarrhoea too. You’re warned about this in the paperwork, and I got the lot.

But I was determined to stick it out because the suppression was impressive – I had no hunger or interest in food. Indeed, the combination of nausea and suppression meant I was really happy to eat smaller portions and skip the occasional meal, and by week three I was thrilled when my weight started to drop slightly.

By week four I’d got into a comfortable rhythm of taking the tablet each morning and eating healthily. The gastro side effects faded into the background, but the suppression stayed. I thought I’d found the perfect weight maintenance solution.

On the Facebook support group I follow, many of my fellow pioneering Wegovy pill takers were starting to bail, but others were seeing impressive weight loss even on the lowest dose. But in week five things started to go wrong.

To my horror, my weight was starting to creep slowly upwards – even though I was carefully monitoring my food intake. By week six I’d gained four pounds, then five. I panicked. Something wasn’t right.

Although the gastric symptoms, particularly the nausea, had faded, I felt bunged up and my guts felt congested and sluggish. My lovely flat Mounjaro stomach was beginning to look a bit pudgy and there was an unwelcome overspill squidging over the top of my pretty, three-sizes-smaller bras. I found myself rummaging through my drawers looking for some of my old, larger bras. This felt like a depressing backwards step.

In fact, my breasts had become uncharacteristically sore and heavy. It felt like hormonal water retention, but I’m 62 for goodness sake and the only hormones running through my veins come from the low dose transdermal HRT I’ve been happily taking since menopause.

I asked my GP if I should raise or lower my HRT dose. She didn’t know, and recommended paracetamol.

That’s the problem with these weight loss medications: they are so new that the various metabolic effects are only beginning to emerge and no one really knows what’s going on.

But it was clear something about my new medical regime was affecting my mood. I felt grumpy, over-sensitive and tetchy with flashes of my old negative self-recrimination. That fresh, light sense of self-assurance I’d enjoyed since losing weight was disappearing fast.

And I felt tired. So tired. Waves of afternoon fatigue were so strong I’d want to curl up on the sofa and snooze. This was not like me at all.

I scoured the internet for some kind of explanation but found nothing helpful. It is clear everyone reacts differently. Some bodies work better on jabs, others on pills. Many people respond brilliantly to the GLP-1 in Wegovy (jabs and pill) and others react more favourably to the two peptides GLP1 and GIP (which stands for glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide) in Mounjaro.

Perhaps my body was great at metabolising the GLP-1 in the Wegovy pill (hence the strong suppression, slowed digestion and gastric symptoms) but it was struggling without the missing GIP?

Research shows GIP acts directly on fat tissue to improve how the body stores and breaks down fats, helping the body respond better to insulin. It also works synergistically with the GLP1 to amplify the weight loss effect. One US TikTok medic called it ‘a case of 1 + 1 = 3’.

By jumping from Mounjaro jabs to the Wegovy pill I’d dropped from 3 to 1 and my body clearly didn’t like it.

Logically I knew I couldn’t possibly have gained five pounds of fat in such a short space of time, especially on a diet of salads and seeds. This extra padding had to be water retention or inflammation, but it scared me. It was like a horrible flashback to the person I was before I lost weight, and I was haunted by memories of the perpetual struggle to eat less, exercise more, and the misery of having to watch my mid-life middle expanding year by year.

When my month three renewal came around, I faced the option of increasing my pill dose to 9mg in an attempt to stabilise my weight, but that would mean adding more of what my body clearly regarded as some kind of poison.

I decided to jump back to Mounjaro instead. I could not get my hands on that syringe fast enough.

The feeling of relief was immediate and within 24 hours of that injection, my digestive system felt settled and normal once more. The nausea disappeared.

Over the next five days the water retention or inflammation, or whatever was puffing me up, eased, my boobs shrank back to their former size and the numbers started dropping on the scales again.

It is quite clear that I’m just one of those people who responds well to Mounjaro. Something in those clever peptides seems to optimise my faulty mid-life metabolism, making everything work more smoothly.

I’m lucky I can afford the cost of Mounjaro, and I am excited to hear strong rumours that Eli Lilly is reducing the price of its injections by 10 to 15 per cent this month to bring it closer to the cost of the Wegovy jabs.

I don’t regret my mini experiment with the Wegovy pill, and I’m delighted that the new pills make GLP-1s more accessible for so many people.

But I’m going to be sticking with what I know from now on.