At 11 years old, Rose Stokes was pulling a calculator out of her bag at lunchtime to work out the calories in her school dinners.

‘I remember going to birthday parties and being like, “oh, I don’t have enough calories today for birthday cake”,’ she tells Metro.

That was the beginning of what would become a decades-long cycle of weight gain followed by diets, from Weight Watchers and Slimming World to SlimFast, Herbalife, Atkins and 5:2.

‘I sometimes think it’s just coloured my whole life,’ the women’s health journalist, now 38, explains.

‘It’s constantly undermined my self worth, and made me question, many times, my value as a human being. From a young age, I remember thinking, well, I better be really nice to people, because I don’t want them to call me fat.’

It wasn’t until she met her husband in her late 20s that Rose began to ‘fully let go of the notion that [she was] unlovable’ because of her size, and in the years since, she has spoken openly about body acceptance and fatphobia.

As such, some found it surprising to learn that she’s now taking Mounjaro to lose weight, accusing her of ‘hypocrisy’.

‘I’m only a hypocrite if you believe that you have to be thin to be beautiful, and I don’t,’ the mum-of-two says in response to these criticisms.

‘I have like felt beautiful at a bigger size; it’s not down to how much I weigh. Whether or not other people view it like that is down to the way that they’ve been conditioned.’

These conversations are among the many Rose deals with in A Matter of Fat, a new podcast she’s hosting alongside obesity scientist Professor Giles Yeo MBE, exploring the complicated relationship between weight, health, science and society.

Rose says: ‘I wanted it to be both science-based and also to have some heart, and to approach it not from that judgemental, moralistic standpoint that assumes fat people are lazy, don’t know what they’re doing, or need to just stop eating, but actually brought the more human side.’

It comes at a time when GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are exploding in popularity, and women in particular are being bombarded with messages that losing weight is easier than ever – a far cry from the body positivity movement’s rejection of diet culture.

However, Rose highlights that the two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and although she’s on Mounjaro, she still believes ‘representation is really important in society’ when it comes to breaking down the (incorrect) idea that ‘thin automatically equals healthier.’

In her case, she says she’s ‘not trying to be thin’, and deciding to take the jabs ‘is all about health.’

It hasn’t been an easy decision to come to, though.

When GLP-1 drugs first became widely available, Rose felt ‘very under pressure’ to give them a go.

Following the birth of her second baby in 2024, she was constantly seeing adverts for weight-loss injections, and the day she stopped breastfeeding, she tried her first dose of the ‘long promised solution’.

Within weeks, she was having ‘fairly significant mental health issues’ due to the way her hormones reacted with the jabs, and realised she needed to come off them.

In hindsight, she describes that first attempt as ‘a real car crash’, but in May this year — armed with better nutrition advice and a clear, achievable goal of getting back to where she was pre-pregnancy — she decided to try again.

This time around, while she has experienced physical side effects like headaches, nausea, heartburn and constipation, her mental health has been much better.

And, crucially, Rose says taking a GLP-1 has changed how she thinks about her own fluctuating weight.

‘I’m aiming for a healthier version of myself, and I tried to do that the old-fashioned way with diet and exercise, but my body just wouldn’t budge,’ she explains.

‘This has helped me forgive myself in the way that it shows if you just add a dose of a modified human hormone, I can lose weight — so how much of the weight gain was my responsibility in the first place?’

Still, that doesn’t mean she thinks weight-loss injections are the answer to everything. Far from it.

Rose is deeply critical of the way GLP-1s are marketed as an easy fix despite the side effects and complicated emotional consequences, not to mention the cost of these jabs, as a lack of financial access creates ‘an economic hierarchy to who is allowed to be thin’.

‘There’s a lot of simplistic thinking; that now all fat people should pay £200 a month as a penalty for something that their body has done differently to someone else,’ she says. ‘The inequality in that is insane.’

Either way, she doesn’t believe taking them is abandoning body positivity — rather, we’ve misunderstood what loving yourself actually means.

‘I don’t understand why you can’t love yourself and also be proactively trying to change your body if you have your own health reasons for that,’ Rose adds.

‘I think accepting yourself and loving yourself also means supporting yourself.

‘Essentially, I believe that people should be supported to be the healthiest version of themselves. And for me at the moment, that means losing some weight.’

A Matter of Fat

Rose’s new podcast, A Matter of Fat, co-hosted with obesity expert, Professor Giles Yeo MBE is available on all platforms. Apple users can listen here.

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