In a fat-phobic world, Ozempic is hardly the easy way out

Imagine living in a body that is, by overwhelming consensus, regarded as wrong. Imagine being told your entire life that you need to change it. Imagine trying everything humanly possible to do that, only to wind up exactly where you started, or worse off.

Now, imagine there’s a drug that, by many reports can maybe, finally, help you achieve what the world has been asking of you your whole life. Imagine taking it and finding it does work for you (though importantly, this is not the case for many).

Ozempic is a controversial drug around the world.Credit: Bloomberg

Then imagine, just one more time, that instead of being met with the approval you were promised by your peers, your primary school teachers, your friends’ parents, and the angry mob that is the internet, you’re told you did it wrong.

Maybe you don’t have to imagine. Maybe you’re one of the majority of Australians living in a bigger body. Or maybe, like me, you don’t know what that’s like. Instead, you live in a body our culture finds acceptable, but somewhere along the line your brain started doing the hard work of deciding it isn’t, and you developed an eating disorder as a result.

The two experiences are wildly different, but as someone who has seen the reaches of our cultural obsession with thinness, I find the choice to take weight loss medication understandable. The backlash labelling it akin to cheating, however, is one of the most blatant examples of medical gaslighting to date.

Late last year, Oprah Winfrey famously led the charge denouncing Ozempic (the type 2 diabetes medication being prescribed off-label for weight loss) as the “easy way out”, before concluding in her recent ABC special Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution that her long-held beliefs about body size were misguided.

“All these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower, and they were, for some reason, stronger than me,” she laments. Unfortunately, it’s her initial take that we still see widely represented in the commentary denouncing the choice to take weight loss medications.

The rise in Ozempic’s popularity brought with it headlines like “Why Ozempic is Cheating”, and debates about whether taking the drug is lazy or easy are still playing out across social media.

Despite being famously anti-fat, Howard Stern revealed he is not pro-zempic, sparking debate after sharing thoughts like: “It pisses me off. Because, you know, I just love that I have the willpower to be thin. That’s not even a superpower any more, everyone’s walking around thin.”

Similarly, actor Josh Peck went viral on TikTok when he complained that those using the drug weren’t losing weight the “natural” way (as he did) only, to be met with many reassuring comments that his way was, indeed, correct.

Recently, in her piece about Oprah taking the drug, the brilliant Kate Halfpenny jokingly referred to the “judgmental and outdated” side of her that feels taking Ozempic is cheating. But she’s touching on that same belief underpinning the reaction labelling the drugs the “easy way out”, that regular exercise and a healthy eating regimen would keep everybody the same size, a small size, in Halfpenny’s case, the size she was when she married.

Recent research suggests that body diversity is inherent, and diet and exercise may not play the role in long-term weight loss that we once believed them to. But facts don’t matter when we’ve collectively concluded that fatness is a moral failing. Indeed, it seems anti-fatness has been our default for so long that it extends to those who choose to lose weight the wrong way.

While the inside of a stranger’s medicine cabinet is as much our business as the inside of their diary, we still seem to need constant reminding that it’s not our job to judge what others do with their bodies.

The truth is, our collective scoff at those choosing to take these drugs is nothing new. But many of us are trying, in our own ways, to better understand what life is like outside our own bodies, to be more critical of our biases and replace the harmful and outdated with the true and kind.

We will get there, and in the meantime, instead of asking if Ozempic is cheating, let’s just leave it to individuals to decide what’s right for their own wearied and brilliantly imperfect bodies.

Hannah Vanderheide is a freelance writer and actor.

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