We’ve reached peak hypocrisy. In simpler times — like maybe yesterday — here’s how the judgment went: Use one of the new miracle weight-loss drugs and get shamed for taking the easy way out. For cheating your way into a thinness you don’t deserve
But now? A whole new group is being judged, too. If the world thinks your body is too large, and you’re not using a GLP-1, well, be prepared to explain yourself
“We have spent years trying to remove shame from obesity treatment,” said Sarah Isenberg, a certified health and nutrition coach in Boston. “We should be careful not to replace it with this strange new form of pressure.”
Uh, it looks like it’s already too late
Just ask Traci Finkel, 37, an executive assistant at Boston Children’s Hospital, who’s been dealing with pressure to lose weight since childhood, when her sister was taken bikini shopping while her outing was to Weight Watchers
“It’s almost like people are in a cult,” she said of those using GLP-1s. “The drugs are [messing] with people’s minds. It reminds me a lot of the diet pills in the ‘80s. Just do this easy thing, and you don’t have to do anything else.”
Or Ashley L., 37, a bartender and server from Malden who knows she has weight to lose but who wants to do it naturally, and to say “[expletive] you” to the co-workers badgering her to take a weight-loss drug
“The ladies I work with, they’ve all taken GLP-1s, and they’re like, ‘What are you waiting for — do you want to stay like that forever?’” she said, requesting that only her last initial be used for privacy reasons
And Jun Ni, a railroad project manager from West Roxbury, who describes herself as “larger,” and puts off medical care because she dreads her doctor’s relentless pressure to start on a GLP-1
“I’ve worked through shame and body-image issues, and I don’t have any health issues,” said Ni. “It feels predatory.”
It seems hard to believe, but the “Ozempic era” is only a few years old. In 2021, views for TikTok videos tagged with #Ozempic were a mere 2 million, according to a history of the drug’s rise by the Medical University of South Carolina. In 2023, the views hit 1.2 billion, the school reported
The society-wide makeover it enabled was so intense that at the 2023 Oscars, host Jimmy Kimmel joked about it from the stage. “Everybody looks so great,” he said. “When I look around this room, I can’t help but wonder ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’” And a cosmetic dermatologist coined a term to describe the look: “Ozempic face.”
But not everyone wants to use the medications (and some patients with certain pre-existing conditions have been advised not to for safety reasons)
For starters, even with insurance, the drugs can come with high costs, “and,” said Finkel, “you’re supposed to do it for your whole life.”
Many people don’t want to risk the known and unknown side effects — which can be as temporary as nausea or as long-lasting as eye damage. Others say they want to repair their emotional relationship with food at its source
Virgie Tovar,host of the “GLP-1 Truth Serum” podcast and an expert on weight-based discrimination, says the new weight-loss drugs have unleashed “peak weight stigma or fat phobia.”
Because conversation about weight has now been “medicalized,” it’s given friends, family, and even strangers the self-appointed right to meddle, she said, as she captured the thinking: “It’s my job to step in if someone has a disease they’re not treating because GLP-1 ads are using that language.”
“But I don’t think it’s about health,” she said. As evidence, she pointed to the fact that people are being shamed whether or not they take a weight-loss drug
Meghan Garcia-Webb, a medical doctor who runs a boutique weight-management practice in Newton, hears those very challenges from patients in her practice
“You are policed if you are too thin,” she said (cue the frenzy around Ariana Grande). “If you lose weight, people say inappropriate things to you. And if you accept yourself as you are, people ask why aren’t you taking these meds?”
Given our pre-GLP-1 obsession with weight and dieting, it would have been hard to imagine things getting even more bonkers, but Lauren Beckham Falcone, the WROR radio host, captured the heightened madness
She lost weight a little while ago, she said, and wanted everyone to know she did it without the use of drugs. But now that she’s gained the weight back, she’s insulted because she thinks others are thinking that she’s not using a drug. “It’s the new embarrassing life status: She’s not taking the shot.”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell
