As a mother, Kate Frostford struggled to navigate with her daughter Ellen's unhealthy relationship with food. The decision to 'share' Kate's weight-loss drug became a desperate measure and has been ongoing for three months.
It could have been a family breakfast scene from any kitchen across the country. My ten-year-old twin sons fighting over remnants from the cereal packet, our spaniel begging under the table, homework being haphazardly finished.
Just one thing last week made this otherwise entirely ordinary tableau turn into something very unusual. Our 17-year-old daughter, Ellen, opened the fridge – not for eggs, butter or bacon – but to get out a Mounjaro pen. More specifically, my Mounjaro pen. Except it wasn’t for me.
With the nonchalance of someone entirely comfortable with injecting drugs into her stomach, Ellen whipped up her top, stuck the needle into her skin, closed the fridge door and left for college. Nobody batted an eyelid. Because this is now the new norm in our lives. In much the same way that a teenage girl might borrow her mother’s mascara, mine takes my weight-loss drug once a week – and has been doing so for three months now.
This might seem shocking to other parents. But the decision to ‘share’ my Mounjaro with Ellen was something I agonised over for ages before concluding that desperate measures needed to be taken. The last thing I’ve ever wanted to do is fat shame my daughter. But nowadays, telling your children they need to lose weight has become the ultimate taboo.
For years I have gone from cautiously circling this thorny issue to having gut-wrenching, door-slamming arguments about Ellen’s unhealthy relationship with food. In much the same way that a teenage girl might borrow her mother’s mascara, Kate Frostford's daughter Ellen takes her weight-loss drug once a week – and has done for three months I have watched her turn from a slightly plump child who was, for the most part, bubbly and confident, to a young woman hiding her body under baggy tracksuit bottoms and hoodies, fiercely defensive about her ‘right’ to be bigger.
It has been hard as a mother to navigate. I remember one holiday in Spain, years ago, when the twins, Max and Eddie, were toddlers and Ellen was about nine. Up until that point Ellen had been a slip of a girl and entirely disinterested in mealtimes. But that summer, in a way you suddenly notice things and wonder why you hadn’t before, I realised she was getting quite chubby.
Other girls her age around the pool were wearing skimpy bikinis but Ellen insisted on swimming in shorts and a T-shirt. She would sit on a sun lounger looking hot and sweaty, crouched over with her arms across her stomach.
Then one evening we were in a restaurant ordering dinner and she announced she wanted a double cheeseburger off the adult menu. To my shame, I gently suggested she might have a smaller portion of something instead. I’ll never forget how she pushed her chair back and stormed off to the loo. When she returned it was obvious she’d been crying.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether it was the birth of her brothers that switched something up in Ellen’s approach to eating. Certainly, from that holiday in Spain onwards, her daily diet became something that needed constant, sensitive handling. As a mother, this was an entirely unexpected hurdle. Before having children, I predicted parenting issues to do with discipline – untidiness, attitude, manners – but not eating.
Ellen is my eldest child and only girl, so I had nothing to compare this with. My only point of reference was my own mother’s attitude to food – her daily calorie intake was essentially an olive in a dry martini – and her brutal but clear-cut messaging that no woman wants to get fat. When I was a teenager there was no holding back if she thought I was putting on weight.
‘Darling, you need to go easy on the carbs, or you’ll never get a boyfriend,’ she would say. Did this sting? Of course. But this was the early 1980s.
I just went on the cabbage soup diet and sucked it up. Even as I write this, I can see it might be easy to assume I have my own, deep-rooted anxieties surrounding weight that have been inadvertently passed down to Ellen. Except it has never – consciously at least – felt this way. We have always, as a family, eaten healthy, home-cooked meals.
We live on a small farm just outside Chester and keep chickens and pigs. We eat organically as much as possible, grow all our own vegetables and we’re too far from civilisation to get takeaways delivered. But as puberty hit and Ellen started secondary school – travelling by bus to our nearest big town – what she consumed in the day drifted out of my control.
Kate began taking Mounjaro herself in July 2025 when she weighed just over 12st, and by Christmas she'd dropped to 9st 13lb. Ellen was absolutely mutinous, telling her mother she was shallow During the conversation about Ellen taking Mounjaro, there was a lot of yelling, tears and general evisceration of my mothering skills, writes Kate I know, for example, that she would stop at Greggs in the mornings to buy a sausage roll, or get chips for the journey home.
Naturally, her weight gain went up a notch. I’m not going to lie and say this didn’t bother me. Of course, nowadays, you are forbidden from admitting it out loud – ever – but here I go . .
. I didn’t like her being fat. She is a beautiful girl and I could see she was getting the wrong kind of looks in public and that this was affecting her self-esteem. I thought long and hard about how to approach the issue.
I never once talked to Ellen about body image and how she looked. Instead, I focused on the health benefits of losing weight. How, physically, she would feel so much better and have more energy. I surreptitiously removed all snacks from the larder and stopped cooking pasta.
But at every step there was violent resistance from her.
‘Stop policing my diet,’ she would scream during rows. ‘How I look has got nothing to do with you. I’m happy being a bigger girl. ’ At the most troubling point, last year, she was tipping over 12st 6lb on the scales.
I know this because she had a mandatory health check at school for vaccinations. She isn’t that tall at 5ft 5in, so her BMI was showing as obese. Ironically, around this time, I decided to go on Mounjaro. I, too, have piled on the pounds in recent years – not from overeating but from the menopause.
Having always been slim, it felt a bitter blow to suddenly have all this extra weight that was just refusing to budge. At just over 12st, for the first time in my life I hated the way I looked and felt. I began with a 2.5mg jab in July 2025 and immediately started dropping pounds. While I was absolutely delighted with the results, Ellen’s reaction couldn’t have been more hostile.
She swung from simply refusing to engage in what I was doing to being openly belligerent about weight-loss jabs in general, calling them out for being ‘dangerous’ and the people taking them ‘shallow and self-obsessed’. I took the hint and jabbed in private, still cooking meals for the family and continuing to tread on eggshells around Ellen’s own eating habits.
But the slimmer I got – and it was pretty drastic because by Christmas I’d dropped to 9st 13lb – the more mutinous she became. It was as if she felt repulsed by my new, skinny body. One day she stared at me with such disdain before saying: ‘You look absolutely awful. You think you look better but now you’re just scrawny, your skin is saggy and you have got no boobs.
’ Everyone knows how cruel teenage girls can be to their mothers. And yes, this hurt. But I also kind of got it. Despite all her constant bravado about body positivity , I knew there was a deeper, inner turmoil going on.
Ellen preferred me fat and frumpy because that is the natural order of things. It also somehow excused her weight gain and gave her permission to be bigger. It doesn’t take a psychologist to work out that having a mother half your size – who is loving her new figure and enjoying a renewed feeling of attractiveness, not to mention a sexier wardrobe – is the stuff of nightmares for any teenage girl.
Let alone one who has been struggling with her own body image for years. Which is why, over sleepless nights, I came up with what was, admittedly, quite a morally dubious plan. I was going to put my hard hat on, take my life in my hands and propose to Ellen that she start jabbing herself with my Mounjaro.
I knew she wouldn’t want to go to a doctor about her weight and I wasn’t even sure – at her age – if she would be prescribed a weight-loss jab on the NHS. I also knew, with a selfish, sinking heart, that if she agreed, there was no way we could afford to pay for two Mounjaro pens every month on our household budget.
With the price of these jabs having rocketed since last September, a 10mg pen was now costing me £270 every four weeks. Unless I sacrificed my own to give to Ellen, the cost for two of us to be jabbing would be astronomical and financially out of reach. I’m aware that sharing my Mounjaro with a 17-year-old is a very risky thing to do.
It’s bad enough that adults like me take fat jabs without medical supervision, but for a child to take any drug without it being properly prescribed by a doctor and without regular check-ups is nothing other than reckless. But the truth is I was desperate. With Ellen a year from leaving home for university, I felt strongly that this was my last chance to do something proactive to turn the situation around.
Because, sure as milk turns to butter, if she couldn’t lose weight in the healthy environs of our home, she would never be able to do it living in the fast-food world of student digs. The ‘conversation’, if I can call it that, happened in January. There was a lot of yelling, tears and general evisceration of my mothering skills.
‘I can’t believe you’re even suggesting this to me,’ was screamed several times before she finally flung herself out of the house. If I’m honest, I thought that was that. Secretly, I also thought: ‘Thank God. I can keep my Mounjaro and I won’t get fat again.
’ Because there was no denying that the major downside of this unwelcome altruistic offering to my daughter was the fear of piling the weight back on myself. This very much isn’t about me, obviously, but surely any woman who has been on Mounjaro will understand that it was going to be a tough forfeit.
What happened next probably shocked me more than anything ever has and proved what I had suspected all along – that, deep down, Ellen has never been happy with her weight but was stuck in a spiral, unable to do anything about it. The following day, she wrote me a letter, leaving it propped against the recipe books next to the Aga. In it she outlined her terms.
Yes, she would like to try Mounjaro but nobody outside the family was to know. Read More Is THIS why everyone was so thin in the 70s? I lost 5lbs in three days on this controversial diet I wasn’t allowed to ‘butt in, be controlling or micro-manage’ her weight-loss journey. She would do it herself, in her own way.
I wasn’t allowed to ask her weight at any stage. She would tell me if she wanted to. I can’t describe the wave of relief that flooded over me. Just to have that dialogue finally opened and to feel that I could, in some way, help her.
Because I knew she wouldn’t regret it. How could she? If my own experience was anything to go by, in a few months she would be loving her body and be wanting, like all her friends, to show it off with a belly button piercing and a crop top. Of course, I also had concerns.
She needed to increase her protein intake, eat lots of eggs, chicken and salmon and generally research the healthiest way to take Mounjaro and lose weight without adverse effects. I came back to Ellen with my own conditions. I wouldn’t cluck over her if I could see she was being sensible about her diet, but would step in if that wasn’t the case. So far, fingers firmly crossed, I haven’t needed to.
Better still, it’s not only been a positive experience for Ellen as she gradually and responsibly loses weight, it’s been an unexpected bonding experience for the two of us as well. It feels, thanks to Mounjaro, as if we are healing a wound together, stitching something back that has been open and vulnerable for too long. As for my own weight, I am finding it matters less and less as I get a bit fatter and Ellen becomes considerably slimmer.
After three months, she is now a healthy 11st, beautiful as she’s always been, and glowing with a confidence she hasn’t had in years. It has been every bit worth the sacrifice as I switch to fasting, swimming and cycling to keep off the pounds, though I can’t deny the weight is starting to steadily creep back on – around half a stone in the past three months.
But sometimes, if I’m very lucky and she’s in a good mood, Ellen will let me inject just a tiny drop of Mounjaro from her – sorry my – weight-loss pen. All names have been changed to protect identities.
Weight-Loss Drug Mounjaro Pen Ellen Family Lifestyle Health Sharing Desperate Measures Taboo
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