The Ozempic Files
Plus a sandwich poll
Hi NGFYGF enjoyers,
I’m adding more stuff to this newsletter because a lot of funny things happened this month and I wanted to include them. Feel free to add your own NGFYGF moments in the comments!
Love,
Emma
NGFYGF Conversations In the Wild:
Overheard in Ithaca: A friend’s fellow grad student holds up a grocery bag and says “Finally, something I can drink in this country!” He pulls out a handle of Smirnoff and a quart of Ocean Spray cranberry juice.
Great meme:
Sandwich hate: Another friend confessed to me how she hates sandwiches, almost on the verge of tears from the frustration of that feeling being unspoken for so long. I felt seen, as I rarely enjoy a sandwich, but feel like The Joker for saying I don’t like such a versatile food. (Cold, slimy turkey between gritty toast makes me genuinely want to vomit. I’ll take a panini, but I think the key is every element of the sandwich needs to be warm for me to enjoy it. With the exception of crisp iceberg lettuce and fresh tomato. Whatever.)
Please vote below so I can better understand what people think of sandwiches.
Pepper X: Some guy named Ed Currie (haha, spicy last name) invented a pepper that is hotter than bear spray. Yes, an “edible” pepper that will burn your mouth as though it were a 600 pound predator. This news found me in a dark week, and I’m so glad it did. Here’s the video of Sean Evans from Hot Ones trying it.
Why is Ozempic Still in the News?
So, I did an Instagram poll a while back asking what topic I should write about next. For some reason, the winning answer was “Ozempic.” I broke the news to a NGFYGF reader who did NOT vote Ozempic, saying to them, “I have no idea why people chose that.” They replied, “Bad taste.”
And that’s a perfect segue into the topic, as Ozempic makes one’s desire to taste anything almost non-existent!
Ozempic has become a household name—partially because it was hailed as a “miracle drug” to treat people with diabetes, but mostly because of its welcome side effect: weight loss. People on Ozempic tend to lose about 15% of their body weight by doing nothing but taking the drug. It mimics the hormone that makes you feel full, thus you barely desire to eat throughout the day. You mind turns to other things, and you live without craving.
Reading that, did you lick your lips, wondering what it was like to be free of the desires of the flesh? To never let a horrid mixture of fats, oils, wilting greens, and rotted meat pass behind your decaying jaw again? You’re not alone.
Shocker: I’m not an Ozempic stan. But make no mistake, I believe everyone has the right to make decisions that are between them and their doctor. Whether vanity or unfair body image standards is at the root of those decisions is none of my business. Personally, I think Ozempic medicates the symptom (“If I lose weight I will be happy”) and not the problem (“I’m unhappy, and part of that is because of expectations on my body”). But that’s personal. I celebrate all who make their own choices, and scorn those who wish to judge others about what they do with themselves. Ok, with the table set, let’s start judging.
Thinkpieces have been coming out by the score about how Ozempic, the apparent cure to fatness (sarcastic), will change how society views weight loss and damage the body positivity movement. If the primary thought behind body positivity is that people can’t necessarily change their bodies, Ozempic’s arrival on the scene pokes a massive hole in that argument. But as someone who supports body positivity regardless of people’s “excuses” for their bodies, I’m not particularly scandalized by the fact that the FDA has come up with a new weight loss medicine. People gain and lose weight all the time. But I think the essays on Ozempic that have really piqued my interest have been about how it changes the way you think.
According to the Cornell Food and Brand Lab (research NOT done by Brian Wansink), humans make about 200 decisions about food a day, many unconsciously. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic that promotes weight loss, doesn’t change the way your body processes fat, or your metabolism. It changes how you feel about food.
One opinion writer from Wired had struggled with weight loss for his entire life. He found that one of the most jarring results of starting Mounjaro (an Ozempic-like drug that boasts similar weight loss effects) was how his inner monologue around food had changed.
“Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume—there was sudden silence.”
Soon, he replaced food thoughts with a different set of thoughts.
“‘I urgently need,’ I thought, ‘an analog synthesizer.’ Something to fill the silence where food used to be.”
He basically reused the old infrastructure of his brain spent on food, snacking, and diet-cycles to learn a new instrument.
Some Ozempic-takers report that it’s not just their cravings for food that are satisfied. Scientists have also found that these drugs work on the neurological level, binding to receptors in the brain, altering dopamine pathways, and potentially changing your gut biology. As of earlier this year, Ozempic was being tested for its potential as an anti-addiciton drug, and some psychiatrists now prescribe it to circumvent weight gain from antidepressants.
I’m aware that there is always a non-zero potential for body transformation. But what are the thought processes that actually get us to do that? What are the thought patterns that keep some of us puttering along with our energy needs fulfilled and some of us locked in an obsessive spiral of biting our nails and cutting our appetites with cup after cup of green tea? Is it really one fuck-ass hormone?
I will also say the intellectual interest in Ozempic I’m describing feels pretty divorced from its real-world uses. Before Ozempic was a huge hit amongst the closeted eating disorder community, it was used by people with diabetes for some time. And the people who are still searching for Ozempic online seem to have medical needs, not “Met-Gala ready bod” needs. (Although you never know! It could still be pressure around body image, or maybe doctors are simply prescribing the medication more in the below states.)
Some people really do just want to lose weight. And that’s cool! I’m thin enough that I can shop at thrift stores and my doctor doesn’t hate me, and yet most of my brain is consumed with non-stop terror around my own decision-making anyway. For me, the problem Ozempic could solve isn’t how much I weigh, but with some of the thought patterns I’m genuinely tortured by.
As compelling as that is, I don’t want to pay a bajillion dollars and give myself diarrhea to solve it.
Oh yeah, the diarrhea part. While we know Ozempic has a variety of side effects, most people are very fixated on the one where you lose your body fat and that helps you for some reason. To address that, I’d also like to add that there are plenty of risks to taking Ozempic.
From the horse’s mouth, there are a few common side effects of Ozempic, which may include but are not limited to nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Recently, the University of British Columbia was able to link injectable weight loss medications, including Ozempic, to stomach paralysis. Use of Ozempic for only weight loss is actually using the drug off-label, or not for its intended purpose, which is to treat diabetes. This means that the population that was tested for the drug’s effectiveness and safety was people who have diabetes, not non-diabetic people seeking to lose weight. (There are semaglutide medicines specifically for weight loss, but Ozempic isn’t one of them.)
Also, we know that Ozempic doesn’t work for everyone. Because it resembles your satiety hormone, it just makes you eat less. But we know that eating less doesn’t always mean a patient is going to lose weight.
In an episode of The Daily, one source was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), which makes it really difficult to lose weight. Her doctor suggested she go on Ozempic, but she experienced debilitating side effects.
“I don’t know if I ever felt hungry. I know there were times where I felt less nauseous and eating didn’t sound disgusting. If you don’t eat for too long, you can actually get nauseous.”
She started to feel fatigued and overslept, and after a while of taking the medicine, she returned to her doctor. Her doctor thought she might be malnourished.
“All of it felt very bizarre. I’m still overweight, and I only had lost 8 pounds in four months. Even after taking this medicine, somehow now I’m both overweight and malnourished. How does that work?”
People will sacrifice a lot to experience the privilege of being thin. But not everyone is going to do that, and even for those who try, it doesn’t always work. Ozempic isn’t the game-changer everyone thinks it’s going to be for a lot of reasons, and this is definitely one of them.
Ozempic has helped some people who have been prescribed it by their doctor, and we’re all waiting to see what the research will show us going forward. But the boutique, non-medical application of this drug is clearly getting into everyone’s heads in a weird way. There’s a deeper, sublimated desire to experience a life free from food that Ozempic seems to offer people like No-Face from Spirited Away. It’s like a monkey’s paw, or a genie’s wish. “I can’t keep watching myself succumb to my desire to be nourished. What if I never wanted to eat again?” And according to my diagnosis, that is a disease called “shame.”
Even if Ozempic could answer that question for you, or actually rid you of your shame, you should know Ozempic isn’t a genie’s wish or a monkey’s paw. It’s an
extremely expensive
injectable medication
with a limited amount of research on its side effects
that you have to take on a strict schedule
or else you literally turn back into raggedy Cinderella after midnight.
And let’s say Ozempic was a miracle cure. And it was free, and had no side effects. Well, fat people would probably still exist. Sadly, I think the reason this medicine has made waves is because some people wondered what would happen if fat people no longer had an excuse for their bodies being the way they are. We’ll only be able to let go of the allure of Ozempic if we just let other people exist exactly they way they want to.
But yeah, some people really like Ozempic. And honest-to-God, good for them!
Ozempic recommended reading list:
Warning: Some of these articles are triggering. I’m recommending them because they give the reader a good sense of the conversations about Ozempic that are both toxic and interesting. Mostly toxic. Read with care.
Will The Ozempic Era Change The Way We Think About Being Fat And Being Thin? —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker*
Ozempic Can’t Fix What Our Culture Has Broken — Tressie McMillan Cottom, NYT*
The Ozempic Era Of Weight Loss —NYT, “The Daily”
A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? —Paul Ford, Wired*
Ozempic, the ‘miracle drug,’ and the harmful idea of a future without fat —Fady Shanouda and Michael Orsini, The Conversation
Life After Food — Matthew Schneier, The Cut
Ozempic — Maintenance Phase
*banger alert
Podcast: Amy’s Ozempic Prescription
This starts with Amy, the writer of the Half As Interesting video above, and me splitting three desserts: a chocolate chip cookie, a piece of cheesecake, and a cannoli from the bakery around the corner.
The following audio is a behind-the-scenes conversation about the making of that video, where Amy goes to a doctor’s office and gets an Ozempic prescription within the first 15 minutes of her appointment. She did it for work, it’s an unfilled prescription that exists for research purposes. (She didn’t even have to use her fake persona, a dog stylist who goes to the Met Gala!) It’s also a discussion on her other research findings and just our general musings on the weight loss and medicine. Watch the video for full context on the conversation.
Thing of the Month:
Check out this white guy from Kentucky trying Indian food for the first time. It’s so beautiful.