Do You Want Thinness or Do You Want Health?

From Spud U Like to Helping Cheshire Get Healthy

Sammy Williams knows Chester well. Growing up on Anglesey in the nineties, she’d make the two-and-a-half-hour journey up the A55 with her mum and brother for shopping trips that felt like proper adventures.

“Me and my brother would be running around M&S while my mum was trying clothes on,” Sammy laughed. “We’d hide under the rails. There was this white chocolate bar with nougat that she always used to buy us.”

But it was Spud U Like that really stuck in her memory.

“That was the place to go because it was so different. I used to have tuna mayonnaise jacket potato. The cobbled streets, the lights at Christmas – I have a lot of very fond memories of Chester.”

These days, Sammy’s back talking to Cheshire – not about jacket potatoes, but helping people across the region navigate one of the biggest health conversations of our time: weight loss injections.

The Silver Bullet That Isn’t

When I sat down with Sammy this week, she didn’t hold back on the realities of what she’s seeing in her work as a holistic nutritionist and intuitive eating coach.

“Everybody’s looking for this silver bullet, this one thing that’s going to change their lives, make them lose weight and feel amazing in their body,” she said. “That is just not reality. That doesn’t exist.”

Even the injections – which have dominated headlines and social media feeds – aren’t the magic solution people hope for.

“I think a lot of people are hoping that the weight loss injections are that, but they’re not. Even if you’re taking the injection and it feels good and you’re losing weight and you’re not getting side effects, you still got to put the work in longer term.”

Thinness vs Health: The Question Nobody’s Asking

A friend of mine was watching a dating show recently. Afterwards, she told me something that really struck her: contestants were talking about how great they looked after doing this diet, that diet, the injections – but to her, they looked terrible.

There was a gap, she said, between having the so-called ideal weight and actually looking healthy.

Sammy jumped on this immediately.

“Do you want thinness or do you want health? The injection is an amazing tool for people who are really struggling and they’ve tried everything else. That’s brilliant. But if it’s being misused by people that don’t actually need to lose weight, that’s causing an issue.”

Her concern is that the injections are being promoted without the essential component: education.

“It needs to be used alongside dietary and lifestyle education. Use the tool, but embed the new behaviours and habits as well. So when you stop taking the injection, you’ve got this fundamental knowledge about how you should be eating and the foods you need to nourish yourself for the rest of your life.”

Otherwise?  “You depend on drugs for the rest of your life. That’s the dream deal for pharmaceutical companies.”

The Return of Skeletal Chic

One of the most troubling things Sammy’s noticed is how the injections are reversing years of progress on body image.

“There was so much work that happened over the last few years around body image and what a healthy body looks like,” she explained. “The injection is destroying all of that. The skinny, skeletal kind of look is back in fashion.”

With celebrities openly sharing that they’ve taken injections to get so thin, the message to the public is clear: the trend is now to be very skinny again.

For someone like Sammy, who went through her own eating disorder recovery in her twenties, this shift is particularly concerning.

The Voices from Childhood

Much of Sammy’s work centres on something most of us don’t think about: how our childhood experiences around food still influence us decades later.

“It’s all psychology, really,” she said. “As an intuitive eating coach, you look at your relationship with food, your relationship with your body, what happened to you as a child, how the role models around you ate.”

I admitted I’d definitely heard the “eat everything on your plate because there’s starving children in Africa” line growing up. Turns out, everybody did.

Sammy referenced a comedy sketch where someone jokes: “Next summer I’m going to Africa and say thank you for this belly – I did it for you.”

The serious side?  “All these things that we were told as children – from parents, grandparents, friends – it’s in there. It’s other people’s voices talking to us. We have to recognize the things that are good and the things that maybe are not quite helping us in our lives.”

The Confusion Problem

If you feel confused about nutrition advice, you’re not imagining it.

“We’re bombarded with so much information and it’s often really conflicting,” Sammy said. “You can be watching one person on the BBC News saying something, then you go on Instagram and see another health influencer contradicting that.”

Her advice? Check your sources. “If you’re consuming information, whether it’s social media or normal media, just check the source. Where is it coming from? Is it somebody that’s actually qualified to talk about these things, or is it just somebody’s opinion?”

And remember: “One size does not fit all with nutrition.”

Quick Fixes in a Quick-Fix World

The injection phenomenon, Sammy believes, “perpetuates that belief that there is a silver bullet out there.”

But here’s what she wants people across Cheshire to know: real, sustainable health change doesn’t come from a needle or a pill. It comes from understanding your relationship with food, learning what your body actually needs, and building habits that serve you for life – not just until the prescription runs out.

• Find out more about Sammy Williams at naturalnut.co.uk or follow her on Instagram