I’ve been on Wegovy now for seven months. I’ve lost a ton of weight – about 60 pounds – and my risk of getting diabetes has gone way *way* down. I think it’s a total fucking miracle. But there are people on the left and the right that hate what’s happening. I have been observing these arguments with interest.
On the right, it’s a matter of not being sufficiently ashamed. It’s the notion that losing weight should be a form of repentance for sin, and if you take the easy way out, by just taking in chemicals, it’s not honest (read: painful and doomed to failure) enough. That’s why you see lots of people hiding the fact that they’re on one of the semiglutide miracle drugs (others are Ozempic and Mounjaro, and there are many more to come). I obviously disagree that one should be ashamed of being fat, and I wrote a whole book about it. My premise is that it’s not even actually a choice, and therefore it’s unreasonable to expect people to conform to a norm that has them “making a better choice.”
On the left, it’s kind of different but kind of the same. It’s that people should *not* be ashamed of their weight, and everyone should learn to be happy with their weight whatever it happens to be.
Now, that’s a worthy goal of course, and if it were just a matter of aesthetic norms, it might even be achievable! But this is not the case. It’s actually a pain in the ass to carry around 100 extra pounds: it’s hard on your knees, your hips, your joints in general. It carries a huge risk of diabetes. It’s hard or impossible to fit into airplane seats. And yes, they should make airplane seats bigger. But if you look at my list, that won’t address most of the actual problems of actually being 100 pounds overweight.
I’m choosing my words carefully. If someone is only slightly overweight, which I’ll define as 40 pounds or less, then it really is mostly an aesthetic problem for them. I should know, I’m now in the category, and I do not see the point of losing more weight.
We still fit into clothes and seats and are only at mild or even zero extra risk for most health problems. And moreover, overweight but not really fat people are typically the ones who talk their doctors into getting a prescription, then they lose a bunch of unwanted weight for aesthetic reasons, and then they talk about it confessionally.
So, to be clear, fuck those people, and there are a lot of them. They are just vain and I don’t care about them. And they might arguably be taking on more risk of side effects than benefits, except psychic benefits which are harder to measure.
Who I *do* care about are the huge number of people who have diabetes or almost have diabetes, who struggle to walk up hills and stairs, and for whom Wegovy or other drugs would be a miracle, as it is for me, if it became affordable and widely available. The risks are much lower than the benefits for this population. And although I say that as a person that’s had very little in the way of side effects – some running to the bathroom every now and then and that’s it – I suspect that most people are like me, and you just mostly hear about the people for whom Wegovy doesn’t work, because who is going to publish an article about drugs that work great?
Also consider the strong possibility that the meds will be improved and will get even better with fewer side effects. We are already learning of some of its other miraculous health effects. And of course, while it may be true that it has longer term deleterious effects, I’ll take a few more years of not getting diabetes, which has well known and absolutely awful side effects.
If you’ve read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, you’ll know that people used to be blamed for getting cancer. Now we (mostly) know better. I am looking forward to the day, which I predict will come soon, when anti-fatness medicine will be standard, affordable, and accessible, and people will wonder why there was ever such a stigma attached to fatness or for that matter why there was ever a stigma attached to treating fatness with a miracle drug.
