Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Saxenda – from Hollywood to high street pharmacies, they are everywhere. These are the weight loss drugs that have been hailed as a “miracle” and the “wonder drug[s] of the twenty-first century” by scientists and healthcare professionals alike.
While I understand why they are lauded as such, I fear they have only fuelled the rampant fatphobia that still sees us jeering at celebrity weight gain, applauding weight loss, or intensely hating ourselves for the unforgivable crime of not being thin enough. Weight loss drugs can certainly help us shed the pounds, but they have only added to the stigma of being fat.
The active ingredient in all these medications is a GLP-1 agonist (glucagon-like peptide-1), a drug that mimics the naturally occurring hormone of the same name that is made in the small intestine. This hormone triggers insulin to be released from the pancreas, prevents too much glucose entering the bloodstream, slows down digestion, and affects how your brain processes feeling full after food. GLP-1 agonists were originally developed to treat diabetes, but it quickly became apparent that that they did significantly more than that.
The impact of these medications can be dramatic. People taking them can expect to lose anywhere between 5 and 22.5 per cent of their bodyweight within 18 months. They’re not cheap though. At the time of writing, the only way to access these drugs through the NHS is via a weight management specialist, and access to these is highly restricted. This being the case, right now, a private prescription is really the only way to go, and that will set you back a couple of hundred pounds per month at least. But it is a price many are more than happy to pay.
However, these drugs have also laid bare just how much we, as a culture, truly, viscerally hate fat people, and this is going to be much harder to shift.
As more and more people are turning to GLP-1 drugs to battle the bulge, a vicious narrative has arisen that anyone doing so is “cheating” at weight loss, or “taking the easy way out’.” This phenomenon is now so common that it has been dubbed “Ozempic shaming”. You don’t have to look very far to find it, just read through the comments section of anyone posting about their GLP-1 journey online. You can also see it in the rhetoric used by fitness influencers who talk about losing weight “naturally”.
What is underpinning this is not any kind of genuine concern for the wellbeing of someone taking a GLP-1, but rather a vicious belief that being fat is a just punishment for a perceived life of gluttony and laziness. Because that’s the assumption being made about anyone who is perceived to be overweight, isn’t it? That they lack the required willpower to control themselves, and therefore, by extension are bad people. Within this overly simplified viewpoint, a fat body is welcome, tangible proof of a person’s lack of worth. And how dare anyone achieve the hallowed status of thin without having sacrificed and suffered in the gym to get there.
Obesity has been linked to many health issues, and fatphobia often masquerades as faux concern around health. But that isn’t what is going on here. I doubt the kids who bullied me at school, or the men who shouted at me in the street for being fat, were ever seriously interested in my blood pressure staying within a healthy range or minimising my risk of a stroke. That isn’t why fat people are stigmatised and harassed, and research shows that weight-related bullying is one of the most common forms of harassment. If fat-shaming was truly about health, no one would suggest weight loss drugs are “cheating’’ – we would simply be cheering them on.
I can also tell you from personal experience that weight loss drugs are not an “easy way” to lose weight. I took Wegovy for the best part of a year and lost about a stone and a half. But I found it very difficult to take and decided to pack it in, a decision made much easier by some pretty unpleasant side effects (nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, etc). Imagine trying to power through a squat rack at your local leisure centre with those side effects ready to hit at any minute and you’ll start to understand why this is far from an easy way out.
The medication makes you feel fuller for longer, but you can still eat, and if you snack a lot on high fat foods, you really won’t lose very much. You still have to exercise and make sure you are eating within a calorie deficit if you want to see the results you are hoping for. Believe me, you still have to work for it.
But even if the drugs did instantly make you slim, would that be such a terrible thing? What is it that that makes us feel so threatened by the idea that thinness is only an injection away? Why do we want fat people to suffer?
Over the years, I have grown and shrunk more times than the Take That fan club, and there is one horrible thing that I absolutely know to be true: the world is nicer to you when you are thin. People cheerfully tell you that you “look great” when you’ve lost weight. Well-meaning relatives load up your plate at family parties because “there’s nothing on you”, strangers flirt with you, and all the shops carry your clothing size. The assumption was that I had lost weight because I was healthier, but for all anyone knew I may have had a tapeworm or some hideous wasting disease. In the eyes of many, thinner means healthier.
Ironically, when my body is bigger, I feel myself shrinking. My confidence starts to wane, I feel like I am being judged for what’s in my shopping basket, or when I walk back into the gym. I all but vanish from the admiring eyes of men. What is particularly galling about this is when I am bigger, I am generally happier. It takes a huge amount of effort (and medication) for me to slim down to a size 10, and I tend to be intensely grumpy about it. Yet when I am at my happiest, I feel the most judged.
There is a very simple reason for this: we collectively reward thin and punish fat. It is an ugly and unpalatable truth, but we want fat people to struggle and suffer. This is why GLP-1 medications are being disparaged as a cheat sheet to thinness.
For all the good they can do, I fear these medications have only amplified fatphobia in our culture. Not only do people experience shame for taking a GLP-1, but others feel shamed for not taking it. Anyone who dares to exist in a body that isn’t rail-thin is now subject to a barrage of online abuse, demanding that they take these drugs and lose weight. I have listened to many friends and loved ones talk about the pressure they feel to use medication to shift the weight because “there’s no excuse now”.
When it comes to taking GLP-1, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I recognise that these drugs save lives and can improve the quality of life for millions of people. But what they cannot help with is our own cultural stigma about body size. In fact, they have made this worse.
I fear the advent of these drugs, as marvellous as they are, has made it even easier to mock, belittle and judge those of us existing in bigger bodies. They have dramatically increased the expectation of thinness and threaten to undo much of the good work of the body positivity movement.
There is no drug in the world that will help us to lose fatphobia. That really will take hard work.
Comments
Leave a Comment