The Ozempic elephant in the room
Weight loss’s hype era
Over the past week or so you might have noticed a flurry of hype news pieces about how weight loss drugs are going to epically change the world and solve all our problems. No more fatties skiving off work! Flying around the world will be cheaper without all those bellies weighing planes down! No one (RIP Weight Watchers) apart from the cash cow drug companies (Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic had a revenue of $42.13 billion in 2024, its GDP is greater than Norway, where the company is based) making these drugs will get another penny from weight loss regimes. We’ll all just pop a pill, slither into our size 10 jeans and live tee-totally forever in our sanctimonious bubbles of moral authority.
This has all stemmed from a press trip with scientists and pharmaceutical chiefs instead of influencers jollying around at the 32nd European Congress on Obesity, held in Malaga, Spain. Among the headline grabbing stats garnered from studies and trials run by the drug companies (urging the NHS to start stock piling them! 🤑) selling these wonder jabs was one rather buried factoid: the unhelpful reality that anyone who stopped taking this medication put any weight back on they had lost. Ah, the awkward truth of diet culture, but who cares about that!
There are no long term studies yet on this medication, but in theory by 2033 Ozempic’s patent will run out and generic versions will be pennies to buy. We’ll all be chowing them down, vomiting and soiling bed sheets as wantonly as we and Gwyneth Paltrow’s house guests can bear in order to fall in line with the new thin world order.
Fat is the enemy. We must kill the fatties. There are of course unhelpful realities here. Thin people get all the cancers and heart disease, too. What happens when we’re all thin and people still die inconveniently early? Who will be allowed to fit into this ableist, homogenised future, devoid of physical idiosyncrasies, where poor health is a moral and social failing and we must all meet a measuring stick of acceptability? Exciting scientific developments to look forward to next decade, I guess.
For balance, there are evidently a lot of people paying and taking these drugs and finding themselves thrilled with the results. Which is inarguably great. There is nothing as insidious as waking up and being unhappy with your body. That killing of confidence seeps into so much of life. But because some are into it, it shouldn’t follow that we all must be. Or indeed, that everyone taking it is doing it for holistic reasoning. Fashion models, for example, are taking it to get into tiny samples so they can still work. An extreme example, but a true one nevertheless.
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is when personal responsibility becomes public property. We act singularly, but when lots of us do the same singular thing for ourselves and it becomes a mass influence, any negatives from that behaviour can be seen as detrimental to the whole. Society, if you will.
If loads of people take weight loss drugs that unwittingly pressures more people to think they need to take them too. Some find the subject of weight loss intensely emotional, others have more of a pragmatic approach. That will depend heavily on your relationship with food, which is a hugely fraught area for many.
It’s the same with beauty or aesthetic treatments - you have a face lift for yourself (ideally), but if everyone has them then what does that mean for a collective view on ageing/beauty standards? I’ve really appreciated Polly Vernon’s open thoughts on this recently. How responsible should anyone be to everyone else when they are making choices for themselves? Maybe a lot, maybe not at all. But I guess the tenet of a civilised society is that we act in ways that don’t appal, but we can only ever draw our own line of where that is.
I think with weight loss medication it’s hard to have a measured view. Whenever I’ve written about it, two things have happened. One, I end up on science-y PR lists and receive press releases about pharmaceutical weight management and programmes, which are even more jammed with bollocks-y hyperbole than the worst type of fashion tripe exalting the iconic glories of a new ballet shoe.
Two, more publications ask me to write about it (Ozempic headlines = major clicks - another reason the reporting on it is outsized, we’re obsessed with reading about it). When I wrote a piece in The Times magazine last year about being one of the few fatties in the fashion world, I had a flurry of editors essentially wanting me to write the same piece again, for them.
This I had no appetite to do. I offered to write something balanced, looking at the failures of diet culture and pretty simple realities that are ignored by the hype weight loss content culture. That, like any diet if you stop you’ll put weight back on; that there are doctors who take a weight-inclusive approach to healthcare which has better outcomes; that if all you do is to constantly tell people they’re fat and not allowed to be, they probably won’t fancy going to the doctors until whatever issue they have is too severe to ignore, making treatment harder. That there are personal trainers and expert yogis who don’t fit the ‘accepted’ body state - they might not be slim but hell they can move. That maybe exercise is a great, fun thing to do for its own end, i.e. fitness, strength, better mental health and that removing weight loss as a goal is much more likely to encourage people to keep doing it. But no one wants any of that!
No, what they want is either a sad, fatty sob story about how awful my life in a giant pair of jeans is, or they want me to ask other people and collate everyone’s sad fatty stories and why even though being fat is clearly awful they want to stay that way and GOD FORBID not even try Ozempic and its related click-y pen pals.
So I usually turn those commissions down, TBQH.
There are another couple of things I’ve noticed happening, or being ignored, too. These drugs are widely available through sending some shrewdly angled pictures across the internet to secure them. We’ve unwittingly entered a back door American style approach to drug taking. These are quite heavy, serious drugs. It’s not popping a paracetamol for a hangover. You can start whacking it into yourself without any qualified doctor going anywhere near you. The reality of this came to shocking light when a friend of mine ended up