STOP
GLP-1 SHAMING ME
STOP GLP-1 SHAMING ME
Death to Stock
By Mikala Jamison
7 Minute Read
The most transformative drug in modern medicine is also one of the most divisive. The growing culture of judgement around GLP-1s makes life uncomfortable for women who inject.
“You’re not using a jab, are you?” So goes the discourse that has become familiar to Elizabeth, a 41-year-old Mounjaro user. She has been using Mounjaro for nine months, and, through a combination of medication and strength training four times a week, she has lost around 45 pounds. The question is usually accompanied by observations, mostly from women, that she’s lost weight.
“I don’t think they were saying this to me because they are concerned for me,” she says. “I think they feel opinionated about this. It grates on them. They are voicing what a lot of ‘hard-working, driven’ thin women like them think—but don’t necessarily say. That is: ‘You are cheating. You didn’t do this the right way.’” Elizabeth is experiencing the all-too-familiar narrative that is emerging in popular culture: that GLP-1 medication is a “sneaky short-cut.”
Perhaps naturally for any woman faced with unsolicited body shaming or body surveillance, this makes Elizabeth feel “defensive.” And she’s not the only one. I’ve seen many GLP-1 users online discuss the criticism and judgement they’ve faced for using these medications, and public-facing women like Serena Williams–who revealed she lost more than 30 pounds on Tirzepatide–face the same on a more significant scale.
As a writer who has built my career writing about body culture and body image, I’ve come to realize that much of the discourse lacks the nuance that conversations around the body naturally demand.
Many conversations around GLP-1 use are offered by people who are not taking the medication. Common arguments I see are that use of these medications is in pursuit of extreme thinness; that medications will decimate muscle mass or bone density; that users will surely become starving skeletons. And there I’ll be, like a broken record, repeating and repeating: That’s not always true. Not necessarily. You’re not considering the entire picture.
Why do I care? I’m not a GLP-1 user myself, I haven’t been, and I also don’t plan to be.
The reason is that I used to live in a much larger body than I do now. I understand the experience of constant “food noise” that GLP-1s are said to quiet. When I was heavier, I was in the throes of a binge eating disorder that made me constantly preoccupied with food regardless of my hunger levels. If GLP-1s had been available to me at that time, I can easily imagine myself taking them to find relief from that torment.
“A”, a 33-year-old GLP-1 user who did not wish to be named, says the judgement is jarring with her personal experiences of the drug. “People see it as the way to get skinny, and [are not interested in] how much this medicine has changed my life.” She’s been on Tirzepatide for 13 months and has lost around 42 pounds. “I no longer engage in binge or restrictive eating, I am confident, and I am not as hyper fixated around food and snacking.”
Still, she is “extremely avoidant” to discuss her GLP-1 use with anyone she knows due to the “stigma.” Her parents asked her directly if she was taking medication and she lied to them. “The discourse on social media”—where people have “such strongly negative opinions”—makes the idea off-putting.
For those that take the medication, the binary view that exists online exacerbates feelings of shame. Negative perceptions of the drug skew the narrative for non-users, and the sheer volume of discussion has empowered those with no experience to weigh in on the conversation. Elizabeth has been offered countless unsolicited opinions or warnings about how she should manage her prescription medication. Where are all the stories about women for whom it has been transformative?
What’s also worth noting is that weight loss and diabetes management might be only the beginning in terms of why people use GLP-1s. There is strong evidence that GLP-1s help calm inflammation, reduce cholesterol, can slow progression of kidney disease and improve liver function, and reduce risk of stroke and cardiovascular death. There is also promising but preliminary evidence that the drugs reduce symptoms of IBS-related disorders and can curb addictive behaviors like drinking or gambling.
“GLP-1 is seen as a way to get skinny; people are not interested in how much this medicine has changed my life.”
But when it comes to using GLP-1s for weight change, they have exposed how misogyny continues to show up in our culture, and within womanhood. Women criticize or shame other women for their choices, perhaps because women have been raised to believe that our self worth is inextricably linked with our bodies: that her smaller body says something negative about someone else’s bigger body. Meanwhile, bigger bodies are subjected to social shaming simply for existing.
A. Janet Tomiyama, the director of UCLA’s Diet, Stigma, and Health lab, told me that people who lose weight through GLP-1s experience social stigma even more than people who haven’t tried to lose weight at all–this speaks to the notion that for many people, perhaps especially women, it feels like there’s no winning when it comes to weight.
“Women’s bodies have always been up for discussion,” says Elizabeth. “There’s a constant need [for women] to comment, control, educate, share, to make sure people are doing what you would do,” she says. “It’s probably because people have been commenting and trying to control their bodies.” Under this guise, bodily commentary effectively becomes an emotional projection—women often don’t (or can’t) separate themselves from another woman’s physique. “It reeks of the way we have always treated fat people—giving unsolicited health and nutrition advice.”
When I was bigger, I encountered mistreatment from other people daily. Simply put, being in a fatter body made my life difficult. This is the reality for so many people, and this is why the body acceptance movements exist, after all. I wanted to lose weight because my size contributed to health issues I was experiencing—which, by the way, is not the case for everyone in a larger body.
I did lose weight, and not through GLP-1s. I went to therapy to recover from my binge eating disorder, and I also took up strength training. But I had easy access to those things, and not everyone does. GLP-1s might be the best option for some people to feel better in and about their bodies. We need to allow more room for people to feel better in and about their bodies in whatever ways work best for their lifestyles and personal values. We should also understand that some people start GLP-1s with only weight loss in mind, but realize other, more nuanced benefits.
Like Sasha Pallari, a British podcaster and body positivity advocate with 140,000 followers on Instagram. She spoke openly about her GLP-1 use, and experienced a lot of criticism. In an episode of her podcast, Spill, she spoke candidly about her experiences, from getting trolled by strangers to the positive domino effect of taking the medication.
“People who lose weight through GLP-1s experience social stigma even more than people who haven’t tried to lose weight at all.”
Not only is Sasha now consistent with nutrition and exercise, but she has also started journaling, reading more (and thus has expanded her vocabulary), and she even found the confidence to travel to Japan solo. She’s also gotten her PCOS in check. Talking to her co-host Billie Bhatia on Spill, Sasha noted that her body might be smaller, but taking GLP-1 medication has “unlocked self care” for her.
For Sarah S., a 30-year-old who has been strength training three to five times per week for the last eight years, GLP-1 use enabled her to see the results of her efforts in the gym. In the past 18 months, she has lost around 55 pounds. Her story highlights one narrative that is vastly missing from the discourse: that women who train regularly can still struggle to lose weight, or have complicated relationships with food.
“As a person in a bigger body, there's the narrative that you are lazy and undisciplined—that if you just eat less and workout more you wouldn't be so large,” she says. “And think it's also being presented that if you are larger, but take a GLP-1, it's because you are still so lazy and undisciplined that you need a drug to make it easier for you,” she continued. “That’s just not what it is about.”
Like A., Sarah hasn’t told anyone that she’s on a GLP-1 because she’s “scared” of being judged. She thinks the majority of GLP-1 users are people like her who have struggled with binging and restricting eating disorders. People, she says, who “have spent the majority of every waking moment of their days thinking about food and their bodies.” GLP-1s have provided a way to “eliminate that, and allow me to build healthier, long-lasting habits.”
The medication has also helped heal her relationship with exercise. “Before I was on a GLP-1 [it] could be a form of punishment—’you ate too much so you need to work out to burn it all off.’” Now, she said, “I’ve never been more consistent in going to the gym because it is just about the enjoyment, not the in vs. out metric.”
I know there are some people using GLP-1s who aren’t seeking extreme thinness. Like me some years ago, they’re just seeking the potential greater ease in their bodies that can come from a modest reduction in body fat. Perhaps they want to be able to exercise more comfortably. Maybe they need to qualify for a surgery.
“If people haven’t seriously struggled with their weight, I don’t think they can really understand how much mental and physical effort goes into losing weight or maintaining a healthy body weight,” says Marianne Martinez, 39, who has been on Zepbound for two months and has lost 15 pounds. She lifts weights three to four times a week in her home gym. “When I lost weight ‘the right way’ without medication, I basically had to treat it like a part-time job. My family needs me to be able to devote those hours and that mental energy to them.”
Being on Zepbound, Martinez said, is “incredibly freeing.”
Ultimately, we should care about uplifting the positive experiences some people are having on GLP-1s—and about how these medications can be a tool, among other things, for truly better health. I hope women can feel how Martinez and the other women I spoke to feel: freer in their bodies. That’s what I eventually came to feel when I recovered from binge eating disorder and got into strength training. This saved my body image, my health, and I think my life. We shouldn’t gatekeep that feeling from anyone, no matter how they achieve it.
