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Cheryl Fergison has revealed she’s lost three stone on weight-loss injection Mounjaro - but says the so-called 'wonder drug' has left her battling devastating side effects.
The actress, 60, best known for playing Heather Trott on EastEnders between 2007 and 2016, told how she was prescribed the jab after being diagnosed as diabetic and 'clinically obese.'
But she now admits she’s now questioning whether it’s worth the toll on her body after devastating side effect has seen her hair fall out in clumps.
‘I’m on Mounjaro. It doesn’t really agree with me, so I think I’m going to probably come off it,' Cheryl said on the Secure the Insecure podcast.
'I was on quite a big dosage. The doctors put me on it because I’m diabetic. I was clinically obese, as they would say.
'They said this was this wonder drug, and I took it and then they upped [the dosage] again.'
Cheryl Fergison has revealed she’s lost three stone on weight-loss injection Mounjaro - but says the so-called 'wonder drug' has left her battling devastating side effects (pictured in November)
The actress, 60, was prescribed the jab after being diagnosed as diabetic and 'clinically obese' but has seen her hair fall out in clumps (pictured left in November and right in 2016)
She explained that at first, the injection appeared to work exactly as promised. ‘It was suppressing my appetite,’ she said.
‘It stopped me from feeling hunger. I felt full. I realised I wasn’t really eating things I used to enjoy before. I could eat a whole pizza before - now I can only eat a slice.’
But the reality has been far less glamorous than the hype. ‘The side effects are, I think, worse,’ Cheryl admitted.
‘There are fluids coming out from both ends a lot of the time. I’m sick, I’ve got diarrhoea with it. My hair... I can pull it out in clumps. Luckily, I’ve got a lot of hair. But there’s a lot of stuff I’m not sure about with it. I’m not sure it agrees with me.’
Mounjaro - the brand name for tirzepatide - has become one of the most talked-about 'fat jabs' alongside Ozempic and Wegovy in a wave of injectable appetite suppressants.
The medication mimics the naturally occurring GLP-1 hormone, which helps lower blood sugar and can increase feelings of fullness.
Cheryl said she lost 'nearly three stone' at first, but her health struggles - including a stroke earlier this year - have impacted her progress.
In May, Cheryl was rushed to hospital after suffering a stroke, which she later described as ‘one of the lowest times in my life’.
‘I’m on Mounjaro. It doesn’t really agree with me, so I think I’m going to probably come off it,' Cheryl said on the Secure the Insecure podcast
She’s since been rebuilding her strength from her home in Blackpool, where she lives with her husband Yassine Al-Jermoni and her son, Alex.
'I've probably put on a stone since the stroke, because I was not exercising,' she added. 'And when I say exercising, I don't go to the gym - I'd ride my bike and [go] swimming.
'I haven't been doing that, so I put another stone on. I don't walk now as well, because I'm walking with a stick and I walk quite slowly at the moment. That will get better, but I've got to listen to my body at the moment.'
She continued: 'It's hard to listen to my body and do what everybody's telling me to do with it - take the injection, only eat this, do that - I can't do everything.
'I know what I need to do, and I've had lots of chats with the Stroke Association and all of my physios and people that come to know what I can cope with and not at the moment.
'In the beginning, I could only have an hour and a half before I had to go and lay down in a dark room because talking to somebody was really difficult. It was really hard.'
As well as her stroke, Cheryl previously battled cancer and has spoken publicly about binge eating and trauma, and was left broke after her accountant stole her savings.
Earlier this year, she told The Sun she was 'just surviving' financially and had turned to food banks for support.
Last week, she was spotted selling clothes and household goods for as little as 33p at a car boot sale in Blackpool.
![Cheryl said coming off Mounjaro might not be such a bad thing for her career as she admitted: 'I keep thinking, ¿Carry on jabbing everybody else and give the fat [acting] parts to me!¿'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/10/13/10/102937597-15186851-Cheryl_reflected_that_coming_off_Mounjaro_might_not_be_such_a_ba-a-11_1760349203410.jpg)
Cheryl said coming off Mounjaro might not be such a bad thing for her career as she admitted: 'I keep thinking, “Carry on jabbing everybody else and give the fat [acting] parts to me!”'
Cheryl reflected that coming off Mounjaro might not be such a bad thing for her career.
‘Since the stroke, I’ve realised how much I need to be fit,’ she said. ‘At the same time, I’m a bit rebellious. I keep thinking, “Carry on jabbing everybody else and give the fat [acting] parts to me!” The world takes all sorts. If you haven’t got enough fat people left to play parts, I’m still around.’
She added: ‘I’ve been big all my life. I remember Dawn French saying when you’ve been bigger and you lose weight, there is something about you, your personality, that you lose.
'It’s really difficult to change that about yourself. It’s a mind change and a re-education of yourself. And I don’t know if I want to. I quite like me.’
Despite her recent health scares, Cheryl remains as ambitious as ever. She said: ‘I still want to go in the [I'm A Celeb] Jungle. I want to be parachuted out of a plane with a man strapped to my back! And I love singing. I’d love to collaborate with Lewis Capaldi. The world is my oyster.’
She’s also planning a belated 60th birthday celebration next year - a hot air balloon ride with her son, Alex, after her original plans were derailed by the stroke.
‘Nobody wanted to come with me,’ she said. ‘They were all going, "Oh no, we don’t want to go in a hot air balloon." But my son said, "I’ll come with you, Mum." So I said, "Okay, me and you next year in a hot air balloon."'
The truth behind new diet drug craze - Hollywood is hooked on it, and social media is fanning demand for the latest weight-loss 'miracle'
Over the summer I was lucky enough to be invited to a 60th birthday at which the after-dinner entertainment was a private performance by one of the UK's leading male pop stars. More eye-popping than the actual show, though, was how incredible said star looked. He was a mere shadow of his former self, prancing around the stage in a silver catsuit. His secret? Semaglutide, or Ozempic as it is branded, a new diet drug that everybody – but everybody, darling, including one of the world's most famous supermodels – is apparently taking.
Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, it is used off-label (for a purpose other than that for which it was licensed) in both the US and the UK to treat obesity. In research conducted by its billionaire manufacturer, the Danish-based pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, patients lost an average of 17 per cent of their overall body weight over 68 weeks. This compares with five to nine per cent for 'oldschool' anti-obesity drugs such as Metformin.
Only available in the UK on the NHS if you have type 2 diabetes, Ozempic can be obtained through a private doctor, and if you are willing to take it without medical supervision – not recommended by doctors (see panel) – you can get it online through various weight-loss programmes. It is sometimes taken in tablet form but more commonly as an injection.
Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, Semaglutide is used off-label. It has been branded as a new diet drug that everybody is apparently taking
Predictably, Hollywood has been aware of Ozempic for a lot longer than us – Variety magazine recently quipped that the drug deserved its own thank-you speech at the Emmys, as so many stars on the podium had obviously been taking it. Elon Musk raved about its more powerful sister drug, Wegovy, on Twitter; Kim Kardashian, it is hotly rumoured, used semaglutide to lose 16lb in order to fit into Marilyn Monroe's dress for the Met Ball. On TikTok the hashtag #ozempic has had more than 285 million views.
Thanks to the hype, there has been a surge in demand, causing shortages on both sides of the Atlantic, with a backlash against influencers and celebrities hogging supplies ahead of desperate diabetes sufferers. Predictably, Big Pharma has come up with an alternative – tirzepatide (brand name Mounjaro), manufactured by Eli Lilly – but it has yet to be approved by the US Food & Drug Administration for weight loss.
Novo Nordisk has issued a statement to say its supplies will be replenished by the end of the year, but it hasn't quelled anxiety. At least two middle-aged male friends of mine who started using it in September are getting themselves in a twist about being caught short before the holidays. As one private London GP remarked to me: 'It's like the H RT panic last spring.'
So what exactly is this drug? Semaglutide belongs to a class called GLP-1 agonists, which not only regulate blood sugar but, as was discovered about a decade ago, also mimic the gut hormones that regulate our appetites – the ones that tell the brain when we are hungry or full. There are, of course, side effects: acid reflux, nausea, exacerbation of IBS symptoms and fatigue (but much less so than in earlier GLP-1 agonists such as Saxenda), as well as pancreatitis, gallstones and, in very high doses, it has caused thyroid tumours in rats. Meanwhile, when you stop using it the effect wears off immediately and in some cases it won't work at all.
'I would describe semaglutide as an example of very smart science,' says leading consultant endocrinologist Dr Efthimia Karra from her private practice off London's Harley Street. 'But it is not a panacea for everyone. Around a fifth of users do not respond to it. This is because the human body favours weight gain, thus when you lose weight the body will do anything to revert to its highest BMI. The heavier you are the harder it is to lose weight. If a patient has made no progress in three months, I will take them off it.'
Banker's wife Laura, a native New Yorker in her mid-50s who had hovered between decades, started using it in January. 'The Paleo diet, 5:2, CBT, NLP, bootcamp, diet delivery services – I've tried them all,' she says from the family home in Hampshire, 'and I've always yo-yoed right back. After my last annual checkup I seriously contemplated giving up. Then my doctor suggested semaglutide.'
After only a month she noticed her clothes had become looser. From then on, the weight started dropping off. 'The strange thing was, I wasn't eating anything different. I just couldn't physically have seconds any more, and the idea of pudding after a full meal had lost its allure.' Three months on, she is two stone lighter ‒ though occasionally she suffers heartburn if she eats too late at night or drinks alcohol ‒ and when we spoke in autumn, she was looking forward to losing another stone by Christmas.
'There is a niggling voice that tells me it is both risky and lazy to take a drug to lose weight, and I worry that it will all pile on again if I stop taking it. But if it does, I will seriously consider taking it indefinitely.'
Private London GP Dr Martin Galy has been prescribing semaglutide for about a year to clients who cannot lose the weight they gained in menopause. He has seen it have a transformational effect, too, on much younger women who suffer polycystic ovary syndrome. 'PCOS sufferers are difficult to treat, and you can imagine how body image plays a very important part when it comes to self-esteem.'
But according to Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London, it is not a magic bullet. Commenting on a study on semaglutide published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, he says, 'The challenge post-weight loss is to prevent a regain in weight,' he wrote. It may prove to be useful in the short term, but 'public health measures that encourage behavioural changes such as regular physical activity and moderating dietary energy intake are still needed'.
That said, given our rising national obesity statistics and the escalation in accompanying health issues such as heart failure, cancer and obstructive sleep apnoea clogging up hospital beds, we're going to need something. Semaglutide may be the rich person's drug today, but might it be approved for more widespread use? Only time will tell.
