Image by the fabulous Stuart F Taylor
Recent additions to the drug market mean it is now much easier for people who are unhappy with their weight to change it if they’d like to. Ozempic, Mounjaro and other injections have made it possible to lose weight in a rapid and simple way. As always, I want to state very plainly that the shape and size of your body is not a moral question – you are not obliged to be a certain size or look a certain way in order to be worthy of love and admiration. Diet culture is incredibly fucked up, and the way society encourages us to police other people’s bodies is deeply problematic and incredibly harmful to all of us (me included), so you should never feel obliged to change your body if you don’t want to. However, some people do want to, and they choose to use weight loss injections like Mounjaro to help in that process. And holy FUCK do some people want to have opinions about that choice!
I have a personal interest in these drugs, which I’ll tell you more about that at the end of the piece (and in another one later perhaps). But for now I just need you to know that I’m not unbiased in this area. I think that if people can change their bodies in ways that make them happy then they should follow their heart. They should be able to do that freely, without others popping up to spaff their critique all over the place. I know I’m here having an opinion myself, but I reckon that’s legit because my opinion basically amounts to ‘what someone else does with their body is not my concern’.
I change my body when I want to. I’ve been going to the gym lately, like a wanker, and starting to lift weights that make me feel powerful. When I walk past the mirror and catch a glimpse of my strong thighs, I’ve been known to grin about it like an insufferably smug cunt. I’ve also had Botox because I like the way it smooths out my anxiety lines. I have tattoos, because I think tattoos are cool and I wish to be cool one day (fingers crossed!). I’ve had facial piercings since I was 18, much to the misery of my Mum, and I refuse to take those piercings out even though I know some people have even stronger opinions about them now that I’m in my forties. Once, I even got someone to brand my forearm with hot wire – not because I was wedded to the aesthetics, I just wanted to know how it felt.
I like to do shit to my body sometimes, and although you’re more than welcome to ask curious questions about why I chose this or that tattoo, or compliment my adjustments if we’re friends, you don’t get to comment on the choices as a whole. The answer you’ll get if you ask ‘why botox?’ or ‘why the nose ring?’ is: because it’s my body and I’ll do what I like.
And so to Ozempic. Or Mounjaro. Or whichever weight loss drug your friend is taking that makes you want to purse your lips in judgment. I’ve seen a fair bit of this judgment lately, usually couched in tones of concern. These tones echo the exact same vibe that used to be conjured when – during fat periods in my own life – a ‘helpful’ relative would ask me if I’d considered maybe trying a different diet. I find so many of these ‘caring’ objections odious and dishonest, so I thought I’d haul out my soapbox and address a few of them.
Your objections to weight loss drugs
“I just worry because it’s a quick fix”
Too easy, eh? You expressed concern for your fat friend’s health when you were nagging them to join your insufferable running club, but now there’s a drug that will allow them to lose weight easily, your concerns have magically changed shape.
Maybe it’s time to consider what you’re actually upset about. Are you really just annoyed that your friend hasn’t had to put in whatever work you think you’ve done in order to be thin? Are you worried that Mounjaro shouldn’t be allowed because it’s cheating?
Why not say what you really mean? You think thinness should be earned through ‘virtue’. Salad and exercise – no shortcuts!
“I’m concerned about the long-term effects of these drugs!”
Scientific minds are working on this. I doubt your snide comments at a party will be included in the peer-reviewed research, so pipe down.
Besides, are you concerned about the long-term effects of the way your thin friends choose to live? Are you lecturing runners about knee problems or nagging cyclists to wear a helmet?
“But won’t they have to take it forever?”
Maybe! Your diabetic friend might have to take insulin forever too, though. If you’re that concerned about such matters, go and do a medical degree about it.
“Eating is a social activity! You have to join in!”
A recent article in Cosmo discussed this phenomenon: people starting to lose their social lives along with their appetite, as they could no longer ‘join in’ with meals the way they used to.
Grace wasn’t just dealing with her own discomfort; her friends started noticing, too. “I’m usually the life of the party,” she says, “but it was pretty obvious that I was on [GLP-1 drugs], because I wasn’t hungry at all.” Comments started coming at her thick and fast. “‘You never finish your plate anymore’; ‘Why are you trying to be skinny? Just eat the burger.’”
I can’t actually imagine saying something like this to a friend when we’re eating, but apparently people do. Apparently it’s a thing. Apparently ‘not finishing up all your din dins’ is now a social crime deserving of public shaming as opposed to, say, a very common choice that your thin friends will have made many times in the past without ever receiving critique.
With most of these objections, it can be helpful to ask yourself whether you’d extend the same judgment/questions to someone you know who has always been thin. Are their choices up for discussion in the same way your fat (or ex-fat) friends’ choices are?
The truth is that just as with alcohol, drugs or any other item, your friends don’t need to consume the same as you in order to be worthy of love and community. We’re not fifteen years old any more, trying to peer pressure our mates into puffing on a joint behind the bike sheds. If you’re pressuring your friends to consume anything – food, drinks, drugs, whatever – then it’s you who is killing the vibe! You’re the one being antisocial! Let people live their lives!
“It gives a false impression of how easy it is to lose weight!”
One of the things I’ve heard people complain about when it comes to weight loss drugs, and it pops up in the Cosmo piece too, is the fact that often those who are taking them don’t talk about it openly. Some will choose to tell people that they’ve just been eating differently rather than acknowledging that their weight loss cost a few hundred quid a month and a weekly injection.
Hmm.
I understand the desire for honesty on a social level, because I am the kind of person who makes an obsessive, aggressive point of telling people what I’ve changed about my body. These days if anyone tells me I look good, I reply:
“Thank you, it’s botox!”
So I get where people are coming from. They want more open discussion about weight loss drugs, because they don’t want everyone to think that being thin is easy (it is not). However, while I understand this point in the general sense (we need to avoid making weight loss drugs such a taboo subject that no one ever mentions them), on an individual level the blanket rule still applies: someone else’s body is not yours to critique. If your friend doesn’t want to talk to you about their weight, they don’t have to. You don’t get to demand it. Perhaps they actually are talking openly about how pleased they are with Ozempic, you’re just not privy to that conversation because you’ve made your judgmental outlook clear in the past.
The only time it’s OK to have this opinion out loud is if you are the one on the drugs. By all means feel free to spread the word, educate, whatever you want to do… but only if it’s your body on the line.
“So are we spreading the message that people just HAVE to be thin now?”
Lol. We’ve told people that for decades. That might be part of why your friend chose to take the drugs in the first place. Health reasons could be in there, but let’s not pretend that relentless societal pressure to look a certain way hasn’t had any influence on how popular weight loss injections are.
Do you know what, though? The weight of responsibility for this extremely fucked up attitude towards body size and shape isn’t something your friend is going to be able to change on their own. Society will continue to hate on fat people regardless of your friend’s individual medical decisions, so you can help by… shutting the fuck up about other people’s bodies, as well as their choices when it comes to Mounjaro or whatever it might be.
If you’re choosing to interrogate your friends about whether they take weight loss drugs, and insisting on having opinions that were never solicited in the first place… I doubt you’re the social crusader you’re painting yourself to be. In fact, I think these objections usually come from the same place that fat shaming seeped from before.
The most common problem people have with weight loss drugs is an unspoken one, I think. And it’s this:
My fat friend isn’t fat any more and that gives me difficult feelings!
I believe a lot of the objections about weight loss drugs amount to ‘I am uncomfortable that my friend lost weight, and now the relationship they have with food/their body is giving me difficult feelings about my own.’
To be honest: I feel this myself. It is hard to acknowledge, because it is ugly, but I’m going to have a go at showing you so you see what I mean.
Someone I love has been on Mounjaro for about six months now. He has changed a lot – both physically and in terms of his relationship with food. I won’t tell you my opinions on the former, I’ll save that for a better blog later down the line – one that contains not a single line of critique, or encouragement to either ‘change’ or ‘maintain’ a particular type of body. But in terms of his relationship to food, I was struck by something that happened the other day when we were making dinner.
We wanted cheese and coleslaw baguettes, and had a two-pack of Marks and Spencer ‘bake at home’ loaves. This blog isn’t sponsored by M&S, but I’ll tell you for free that they’re delicious. Soft on the inside, crispy on the outside, butter melting perfectly when you eat them fresh from the oven. Lovely stuff.
As we were prepping, he turned to me – this man who used to have a bigger appetite than I – and asked:
“We probably only need to bake one, don’t we?”
In that moment, my brain flashed with horror, self-disgust, shame and defensive anger. My thinking ran thus:
How could he suggest we would only bake one? They’re delicious, and perfectly portioned for one baguette each! I’d been dreaming about my whole, fresh-baked cheese and coleslaw baguette! Why would we possibly bother making just one, then cutting it so each of us only had half a sandwich?! What the fuck?!
Maybe… I am wrong? Maybe all these years I’ve been eating twice as much baguette as I should be eating, and I am somehow gluttonous and unrestrained and gross. Maybe there is something wrong with me. I am Bad and Greedy and I want to eat too much bread. Maybe he thinks that I am? How dare he! I’m perfectly fine, and I deserve my bread, goddammit!
This is all a tangle of problematic bullshit, obviously. Firstly, eating one of these baguettes is a completely normal thing to do. Eating half is a normal thing to do too, if you only fancy half a sandwich. It is not bad or greedy for me to want more, as it is not bad or unhealthy for him to eat less. There is nothing wrong with each of us eating exactly what we need. I am not gluttonous and he is not mean, neither of us is making a moral choice worthy of judgment, nor a judgment about the other person’s choice – we’re just satisfying the individual needs of our bodies.
Food is emotional, and so are we
I was ashamed of these feelings because I realised that although I know on an intellectual level that they are harmful nonsense, there is still an emotional response to someone suddenly eating far less than I do. It makes me feel a certain way. The emotions it triggers are all rooted in bullshit societal expectations about weight (it has a moral value, and the bigger you are the ‘worse’ you are as a person), layered with gendered expectations about women (we should eat less than men), combined with a personal worry that someone I love might be judging me on my food choices.
I think most of the objections people pipe up with when it comes to weight loss drugs are also rooted in emotional responses to food. Maybe your ‘worries’ about your fat friend’s health are actually just repackaged feelings about your own relationship to weight. Maybe your ‘concerns’ about what will happen when they come off Ozempic are actually ill-disguised hopes that they’ll put the weight back on and get the ‘punishment’ they deserve for ‘overeating’. Maybe something ugly inside you is disappointed to realise you can no longer feel superior to the friend who used to enjoy two helpings of pudding.
The way I feel about this guy’s Mounjaro-induced eating habits could easily be framed in terms of care for him, but actually they’re all about me. I see him being restrained in portion sizes and I panic, thinking ‘fuck, should I do that too?’. I see him putting chocolate down after one or two bites and envy the fact that he can. I feel guilty if I’m still peckish and I polish off whatever food he has left. These feelings are very hard to quash, and they’ll keep popping up: every time he places a bag of Haribo aside but I want to keep eating; when he just orders a starter at a restaurant while I tuck into two courses and four cocktails; when I hunt for snacks in his fridge and find nothing but Coke Zero. I will feel… greedy. Like I have less willpower than him, and therefore am less as a person.
Acknowledging these feelings does not mean I have to indulge them though. They are irrational. Allowing them to spill out into the world – by commenting on what he’s eating or interrogating why he’s lost his appetite – is a harmful thing to do. Having feelings about someone else’s body or eating habits doesn’t necessarily make you a terrible person: it means you’re a normal person living in a society that actively encourages us to police each other. You can avoid becoming a terrible person by keeping the more hurtful thoughts to yourself. Recognising the emotions that sit behind them, and refusing to perpetuate the cycle of harm that caused those to bubble up in the first place.
Your friend might have lost weight pretty quickly, and that might give you some feelings. Those feelings are valid, and well worth examining, but the negative or critical ones aren’t things you need to share. They certainly aren’t things you should wrap in faux concern so you can ‘just ask questions’ that are really emotionally-driven kneejerk judgments in disguise.
Feel however you feel about weight loss drugs, but just as with any other thing someone chooses to do to their body, ultimately it’s their choice: not yours.
