Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty
ByAnna Rahmanan
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.to see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
I have a friend who is gorgeous, outspoken and seemingly incapable of keeping an opinion to herself. For as long as I have known her, she has also been openly trying to lose weight—constantly trying new diets and limiting her food intake—the effort was visible
Then, fairly suddenly, she became very thin
At the same time, she stopped talking about the methods she had been trying to shed weight
I have no idea whether she took Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound or another weight-loss medication, and I have never asked her. Her medical history is her business. Yet her transformation was dramatic enough to make me wonder whether a GLP-1 drug might have played a role. Her unusual silence was what really caught my attention
Meanwhile, inside my own home, I was watching the opposite phenomenon. My husband has taken Zepbound for more than six months and lost over 30 pounds, a figure he’s constantly telling people about. Someone says he looks thinner and he explains why. Someone else asks what he has been doing and he immediately mimes giving himself a shot in the stomach
I occasionally find myself telling him he does not have to lead every conversation with this information. I am not embarrassed by his taking medication and tell folks around me myself. Still, some part of me thinks—Does everybody really need to know?
The contrast sent me on a decidedly unscientific investigation into whether women are more reluctant than men to admit using GLP-1s—and, if so, why?
I posted the question in Reddit’s Ozempic community and asked women taking the drugs to talk to me about the emotions surrounding disclosure. The response was immediate and strikingly divided
People volunteered for interviews and emailed me, wanting to explain why they tell everyone they are taking the drugs. Others wanted to explain precisely why they do not
One woman wrote on Reddit that she deliberately admits taking the medication because she is challenging herself “not to be ashamed of it.” Then came the explanation
“Because of course I’m ashamed of it. It feels like I failed.”
Another said she regretted telling an acquaintance because afterward, in the acquaintance’s eyes, none of her weight loss was “earned.” Another was unequivocal. “I’d never tell my friends or even family.”
Then there were women like Meranda Hall
Hall, a 34-year-old New Yorker who works in law-firm administration, told me she has taken Wegovy, Ozempic and now Mounjaro since beginning GLP-1 treatment in 2023, a process that has helped her lose 144 pounds
She has no interest in hiding how
“I am open about using a GLP-1 medication and losing 144 lbs,” Hall told Newsweek. Asked whether taking medication amounted to cheating, her answer was simple, “I am not competing against anyone to cheat.”
The men I heard from made it harder to draw an easy gender line
Chris Owens, a 52-year-old sign-language interpreter in Columbus, Ohio, told Newsweekhe has taken Zepbound since May 2024 and lost 155 pounds. Like my husband, he has made little effort to conceal it
“I have been very forthcoming about my taking a GLP-1,” Owens said. He has also chronicled his experience publicly on social media
The reactions blew apart my original theory almost as quickly as they made the question more interesting
There is no strong evidence yet showing that women conceal GLP-1 use more often than men. What does emerge—from the women who responded to me and from a growing body of research—is a fight over something more fundamental. When somebody loses weight, why do we still care whether they earned it?
The New Penalty for Losing Weight the ‘Easy’ Way
GLP-1 drugs have created a peculiar social trap. The medications can produce substantial weight loss, but researchers are increasingly finding that people judge how the weight came off
A 2026 randomized study involving 1,313 participants across two experiments found that a fictional person described as losing weight with a GLP-1 was evaluated more negatively than someone who lost weight through diet and exercise. In the first experiment, participants were also less willing to associate with the GLP-1 user than with a person who had not lost weight at all
Another 2026 experiment involving 402 Black and White women with overweight or obesity specifically measured beliefs that a woman using a GLP-1 had “took the easy way out” or “cheated to lose weight.”
The stigma is also appearing in interviews with actual patients. A 2026 JAMA Network Open study of GLP-1 patients found participants describing or anticipating stigma, particularly when the medication was used for weight loss rather than diabetes
This is the strange bargain of the GLP-1 era
We stigmatize people for being overweight, and then we can stigmatize them again for using an effective medical treatment to lose weight
Margarita Uricoechea, a 63-year-old retired real-estate investor and small developer in Washington, D.C., sits firmly in the tell-everyone camp. She told me she began with Ozempic, later used Mounjaro and went from 191 pounds to about 161 pounds
When people comment on the change, Uricoechea does not dodge the question
“Several people have noticed how much better I look,” she told Newsweek. “I immediately volunteer that I used injections.”
She also rejects the idea that medication did the work in isolation. Uricoechea described an exercise routine that includes six weekly classes, yoga and weight training, alongside changes to what she eats. “These meds don’t work unless you change your habits,” she said
Her answer gets directly at the tension running through the GLP-1 debate: the assumption that an injection eliminates effort may be precisely what some users resent and what makes others reluctant to disclose it
Women Have Been Taught That Thinness Is an Achievement
The gender question is harder to prove
Hall said that some women may feel pressure around weight, but she does not. “I have never been pressured to do anything, personally,” she said. She also described herself as “very body neutral” and said she does not identify as thin despite losing 144 pounds
Her experience complicates the neat story I originally went looking for
Perhaps women are not inherently more embarrassed about GLP-1s. Perhaps some women are simply navigating a culture that has spent decades treating their bodies—and the methods used to change them—as legitimate subjects for public judgment
The Reddit responses repeatedly returned to that distinction
One commenter who said she would never tell friends or relatives wrote that women who use the drugs can be assumed to be doing so for vanity rather than health. Another said she tells doctors and her mother but virtually nobody else, adding that her friends probably assume she takes one anyway. A third said disclosure depends on the audience: she avoids telling people she considers judgmental and is less likely to tell people who are naturally thin
These anecdotes cannot establish a gender difference. They do, however, line up with experimental evidence that the method of weight loss changes how people judge the person who lost it
That produces what we’ll call the thinness-credit problem
Dr. Rachel Goldman, a psychologist who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy and health behavior change, told Newsweek that the idea of “earning” weight loss gets unusually close to the psychological heart of GLP-1 stigma
“People often feel differently about an outcome depending on whether they believe they ‘earned’ it,” she said. Someone who says they changed their diet, exercised and worked hard, Goldman said, is describing behaviors that fit the cultural expectation of what weight loss is “supposed” to look like. Medication can disrupt that narrative because people may fear others will see the result as “less deserved or somehow less legitimate.”
For generations, women have absorbed the idea that weight loss demonstrates restraint. The skipped dessert, the early workout, the smaller portion and eventually the smaller dress size become visible evidence of discipline
A GLP-1 complicates that story because it changes appetite and satiety pharmacologically. Disclosure can therefore change the meaning outsiders assign to the exact same body—Before they know about the medication, the weight loss may look like discipline. Afterward, some may see a shortcut
Although the body has not changed, the story attached to it has
Owens’s experience also suggests that the “earning” mentality is hardly confined to women. He told Newsweek that before Zepbound, losing weight had always required enormous effort. “I could only ever ‘earn’ weight loss because it was a lot of work,” he said. “Mostly I felt that I had to ‘earn’ food by exercising, in order to offset the calories I was consuming.” After starting the medication, he said, his understanding of hunger changed: “I finally understand what normal hunger and satiety feel like—I’ve never felt those before.”
That is a pretty hefty complication for the gender theory: the pressure women face around appearance may be different or more intense, but the moral language surrounding weight—discipline, restraint, deservingness, cheating—can clearly reach men, too
Privacy Is Not Shame
There is also an obvious danger in treating every person who keeps quiet as embarrassed
Prescription drugs are medical information so nobody owes friends, colleagues or relatives an inventory of what is inside the medicine cabinet simply because the effects become visible
Goldman draws a sharper line between privacy and secrecy
“Someone can say, ‘This is my medical information, and I don’t feel the need to share it,’ and that’s a completely healthy boundary,” she told Newsweek. The distinction, she said, is whether someone is choosing privacy or feels unable to disclose because of fears that others will think they “took the easy way out” or “couldn’t do it on my own.” “Those are two very different scenarios,” Goldman said
The FDA approved Zepbound for chronic weight management in 2023 for adults meeting specified weight and health criteria, alongside a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity. Treating disclosure as mandatory risks creating another intrusive rule around weight: first people felt entitled to comment on somebody’s body and now they may feel entitled to know exactly how that body changed
My own reaction to my husband’s openness may belong in this category. I am not ashamed that he takes Zepbound, but I also do not necessarily think every conversation about his weight requires his medical history
Hall sees it differently, Uricoechea volunteers the information and some Reddit respondents guard it closely. One is actively forcing herself to say it aloud because saying it feels uncomfortable
Those differences make it difficult to reduce disclosure to shame, much less to gender alone
Ozempic Is Exposing an Older Double Standard
My unofficial investigation began with a suspicion about women and ended with a question about everyone else
The strongest evidence I found does not prove women hide GLP-1 use more than men. Rather, it shows that people can judge medication-assisted weight loss more harshly than weight loss attributed to diet and exercise
The women who responded to my Reddit post seemed to be living at opposite ends of that finding. Some refuse to grant the stigma any power and so they tell people immediately. Others have learned that disclosure can invite judgments about vanity, laziness, health and whether their success counts. The comments themselves ranged from an emphatic desire to disclose to explicit shame and deliberate secrecy
The question researchers could now answer is straightforward: among otherwise comparable GLP-1 users, do women disclose their medication less often than men? And if they do, is the difference driven by shame, privacy, fear of judgment or something else?
Until those data exist, the gender gap remains a hypothesis
The cultural contradiction is easier to see: GLP-1s have given millions of people a new medical route to weight loss while preserving an old instinct to grade the route they took to get there
Perhaps my friend took one, perhaps she did not. Hall will happily tell you she does, Uricoechea will apparently beat you to the question and my own husband may have told you before you thought to ask. But why do any of these disclosures change your judgment of the person standing in front of you?
After decades of telling women to lose the weight, the Ozempic era is forcing a more uncomfortable question: Did we want women to be thinner—or did we want them to prove they suffered for it?
Request Reprint & Licensing
View Editorial & AI Guidelines
