There’s a moment in Alison Spittle’s recent touring play BIG, when she appears onstage dressed in a gown made out of bath loofahs and layered tulle, a costume that manages to be ludicrous and tragic simultaneously. She built it on her own. She wears it for a moment, then takes it off, standing in a sparkling two piece, her changed body obviously the object of attention. It’s theatrical. It’s accurate. And it’s about as far away from a before and after Instagram image as comedy can go.
The narrative of Alison Spittle weight loss is not really about weight loss at all, or at least not in the way the internet tends to market these things. It starts with a beach trip that nearly killed her. A tiny scratch on her skin allowed bacteria to enter her tissue. She acutely got cellulitis within days. The ancient phrase is blood poisoning, and within a little longer the infection had become full septicaemia, and from there into sepsis. Her body was fighting for its own survival as she lay in a hospital bed surrounded by Ferrero Rocher chocolates and bacon fries, gifts from friends who had no idea what else to bring. She has said that in those days she felt like Willy Wonka on his death bed. The black humor is routine, but so is the clinical precision underlying it.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Alison Spittle |
| Born | London, England; raised in Ballymore, County Westmeath, Ireland |
| Profession | Stand-up comedian, screenwriter, playwright, actress, broadcaster |
| Known For | Nowhere Fast (RTÉ2/BBC America), Wheel of Misfortune (BBC Sounds), The Guilty Feminist podcast |
| Medical Events | Acute cellulitis, septicaemia/sepsis, pre-diabetes diagnosis, obstructive sleep apnea |
| Weight Loss Method | Tirzepatide (Mounjaro) — prescribed for pre-diabetes and sleep apnea |
| Mental Health | Diagnosed with Complex PTSD (CPTSD) |
| Edinburgh Show | BIG (formerly titled Fat Bitch), 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe |
| Other Shows | Wet (2022), Soup (2023) |
That hospitalization led to a series of diagnoses that affected her options profoundly. Prediabetes. Severe obstructive sleep apnoea. Doctors have warned her, in terms she has called clear, that serious weight loss is now a medical imperative, not a cultural discussion or a lifestyle choice. Partly because of metabolic stress, her body had almost let her down, and now, if she went on, she was in significant danger of permanent type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular damage. But for a woman who had spent decades consciously refusing to consider her body as a problem to be remedied, this was not a comfortable ultimatum to receive.
Spittle started weekly doses of tirzepatide, known as Mounjaro, a dual hormone drug originally created to treat type 2 diabetes that has since become one of the more talked about pharmaceutical weight loss treatments on the market. The results were physiologically meaningful. She won’t say how many kilos she’s shed, preferring to talk about losing the weight of a concert harp or an adult American XL Bully dog – numbers that feel more genuine and honest than a scale reading. Sleep apnea resolved. She was able to keep her blood sugar stable.
But the thing she keeps coming back to on stage and in interviews is what the drug did to her head, and that’s the more interesting part. For the first time since I was a kid, the internal clamor regarding food just ceased. The clinical term is “food noise” the persistent neuronal static of thinking about what to eat, when to eat, why to eat, what eating means. This silencing was nothing short of astounding for Spittle, who has spoken freely about her food addiction as a result of childhood trauma, including surviving sexual assault and eight residential burglaries during her early years. One day she got on a bus without gasping for air. She came sliding down a train passageway with little friction. Little things. Not so tiny.
The relief was tinged with remorse. Spittle has been outspoken about not doing gratitude in the way the wellness industry wants. She’s termed the societal fixation on celebrity walking changes and eat less, exercise more messaging total nonsense and she means it scientifically, not just provocatively. If it was just a matter of willpower, she says, most of the individuals who desire to be thinner would already be thinner. She didn’t go through a moral awakening. It was a corrected biological signal, supplied by weekly injection.
What disturbed her most, she has said, was how people began treating her differently almost immediately holding doors for her, smiling at her, giving the kind of basic social decency that had often been denied her when she traveled through the world in a larger body. It’s hard not to find it disturbing. It made her feel sick. Sitting on a sofa crying about this with a close friend who was also fat, the friend gently reminded her that she still wasn’t skinny by conventional standards. Spittle said the comment was “actually comforting” to her.
BIG*, which opened at Monkey Barrel as part of the Edinburgh Fringe before transferring to the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, the Soho Theatre and venues around the UK, has received five star reviews in Rolling Stone and the Irish Times and has regularly sold out. There’s the pus buckets by her hospital bed, her childhood CPTSD diagnosis, a TV executive’s leaked email rejecting her from a show because viewers wouldn’t want to sleep with her which she directly funneled into the creation of Nowhere Fast, her Shrek fixation, her devastation over Adele, her thoughts on Lizzo. The loofah outfit. The two piece. The entire arc.
The Alison Spittle weight reduction conversation, if it must exist at all, is actually a discourse about what medicine can and cannot heal, and what the world owes individuals in larger bodies nonetheless. She hasn’t budged from that spot. She just dropped the pounds. Is she deserving of the acclaim she now gets in corridors and train carriages? It’s a question she’s been asking out loud, in sold out venues across two nations. The crowds, apparently, already know the answer.
i) https://evoke.ie/2025/09/04/entertainment/celebrity/alison-spittle-weight
ii) https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/review/2025/09/18/alison-spittles-show-big-at-dublin-fringe-is-harrowing-and-hilarious/
iii) https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2025/08/09/alison-spittle-im-treated-more-like-a-human-being-now-ive-lost-weight/