Weight Limit is a series that examines the rise of weight loss drugs like Wegovy and how they impact young people. In this op-ed, Amanda Richards explores how fatness fits into the Ozempic era.
For most of my life, my understanding of fatness has swung like a pendulum between two contradictory states.
On one side, the “obesity epidemic,” wherein fatness is a public health crisis with no end in sight, a risk factor for disease (or a disease in and of itself), a sordid fate that everyone in the Western world is destined to meet if we don’t stop eating fast food and sitting in our stupid little chairs.
On the other side, the “end of obesity,” the hopeful promise of the eradication of fatness, made by whichever over-the-counter drug or workout routine or diet plan was having its 15 minutes that month. Today, that promise takes the form of Ozempic and other glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs, including Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Saxenda. One incredibly expensive shot or pill per week and you, too, can fix your fatness problem, perhaps more easily than ever before.
Of course, that’s not the exclusive purpose of each of these drugs, nor is it necessarily the most important one. GLP-1s are undeniably life-saving medications for millions of people living with Type 2 diabetes, and studies demonstrating how the drug lowers blood sugar and regulates insulin are nothing short of extraordinary. When it comes to weight loss alone, though, these drugs can feel like more of a gray area. There is a lack of long term research about the drugs’ safety effects (the drug has generally only been studied in individual patients for a one year period, and increased risk for intestinal obstruction peaks around the one-and-a-half year mark).
Then, of course, there is the way we’ve decided to collectively engage with the idea of a drug like Ozempic, and how that discourse reinforces the narrative that fatness is a problem that needs to be fixed. Heralded as a drug that could “spell an end to the world’s obesity epidemic,” Ozempic and drugs like it are often presented as the fat person’s ultimate, obvious cure for, well, themselves. And, if you’re not willing to embrace this seemingly simple solution, this injectable white knight sent to rescue you from fatness, then what, exactly, is wrong with you?
Like many other fat people, I’m uncomfortably familiar with that sentiment. Over the years, I’ve often felt like my body was “part of the problem,” just another pudgy piece of evidence that society was succumbing to its fate. I spent my teenage years journaling about how much I hated myself, took over-the-counter weight loss pills and committed, quit, and recommitted to a weight-loss driven exercise routine more times than I could count, beating myself up more mercilessly each time I failed to become thin. I spent my 20s with the pursuit of thinness in the back of my mind at all times, convincing myself that my body was just one more promising weight loss plan away from finally being “fixed.” In my late 20s, I learned about body liberation and fat acceptance, and spent my 30s trying to unlearn my own internalized fatphobia, attempting to leave behind the idea that my mere physical existence required a solution. And just when I thought we might be making progress in terms of how we collectively view fatness, the pendulum swung again and in walks Ozempic, promising a relatively safe (though, who knows) and eventually affordable path to thinness for anyone who wants it. With its arrival comes the assumption that it's something everyone — specifically, everyone fat — should be excited about. But what happens if a fat person doesn’t want Ozempic? What will it mean if you can access something described as a “magic bullet” for thinness, but choose not to? How will society interface with a group of people who live inside the physical manifestation of “the problem” while refusing to participate in the solution?
I realize that right now, these questions are somewhat rhetorical, though given recent history I think I can guess at the answers. It’s a slightly more subtle iteration of the messaging we’ve seen around weight loss for years: The solution to your problems is right at your fingertips, should you choose to accept it. It doesn’t matter if it’s an exercise routine, a magic pill, a specialized diet plan, or a nationally televised screaming-at from a celebrity trainer — yet another solution for fat people is coming, and it's up to us to use it. Fatness, this tells us, is a personal failure, as is using these solutions and still being fat. Each new so-called cure is a reminder that, despite a promising turn toward size acceptance and radical inclusivity in recent years, we never quite figured out how to be OK with fatness as a choice to make or not make, a morally neutral state of being that’s at its most dangerous when it's being used against us.
And speaking of that morally neutral state of being: I have noticed something else strange at play, something about Ozempic discourse that is different. While everyone seems to be talking about how many people are using Ozempic, we don’t hear much from people actually using it. In the past, it was commonplace to brag about your diet, your exercise routine, your commitment to making your body the absolute best it can be. Doing so was seen as righteous and good, the kind of thing that garnered praise and served as perfectly acceptable conversation in almost any environment.
These days, it sometimes feels like people are quietly getting thinner right before our eyes, morphing into smaller versions of themselves without any mention — and when that happens, the hushed whispers about whether or not they’re taking Ozempic seem to follow. I’d like to believe that this is because we’ve finally gotten to a place where we recognize people’s health choices as their own, that we’ve collectively evolved to a point where bragging about the pursuit of thinness is no longer the status quo. Unfortunately, it more often feels like the chatter about who is or isn’t on Ozempic is the result of yet another pendulum swing between two states: Ozempic as a moral imperative to anyone who needs to lose weight, and Ozempic as a way out of fatness that made it all too easy.
All of this considered, it’s clear to me that the rise of GLP-1s like Ozempic might change the course of public health in myriad ways, and many of them are wildly positive. That said, they’ll do exactly nothing to relieve us from our complicated understanding of the role fatness has in our society, or within ourselves. Whatever choices we make along the way, though, are not the problem. It’s how we judge those choices that keeps the pendulum swinging.
Read the rest of the series here:
Teens Are Taking Wegovy, and Experts Wonder What That Means for Mental Health
Nearly 1 in 10 Teenagers Have Turned to Pills for Weight Loss, Research Shows
We Don't Always Know What's In Those Cheaper Ozempic "Dupes"
Diet Culture History: From Ancient Greece to Ozempic
Young People Are Struggling to Get Ozempic for Diabetes Because of the Drug's Popularity
