This story mentions GLP-1 drugs, which are FDA-approved for weight management in adults diagnosed with obesity or with overweight and at least one weight-related health condition. For your safety, only take medication that has been prescribed to you by a licensed health care professional and dispensed by a state-licensed pharmacy.
Jenny* was at a bar when she ran into a former colleague she hadn’t seen in two years. The women began catching up about their new jobs and relationships when her colleague suddenly asked Jenny—who lost a substantial amount of weight—if she was taking Ozempic.
“I was like, that’s bold. I mean, I had been taking it but I wasn’t planning on telling anyone,” Jenny tells SELF. She ultimately told her coworker the truth, but the interaction didn’t sit well with her. “It just felt intrusive,” says Jenny, “and then I got in my head and was worried she was judging me.”
Jenny isn’t an anomaly. On Reddit, there are entire forums in which people share advice for how to respond when someone asks if you’re on a GLP-1—drugs, including semaglutide (Wegovy and Ozempic) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound), that can help manage type 2 diabetes and obesity. And like Jenny, many find the question weird, uncomfortable, and downright inappropriate.
Asking people if they’re on a GLP-1 places unwanted attention on their body, invites discussion about their previous weight, and can pressure them to open up about private health issues they may not be ready to talk about, Debra Safer, MD, a psychiatrist and co-director of the Adult Eating and Weight Disorders Program at Stanford Medicine, tells SELF. “It’s a very rude question to ask,” Dr. Safer says. And yet in the past couple of years, asking if someone is on a GLP-1 has become commonplace. We have one question: Why?
We live in a society that’s obsessed with body shape, size, and appearance. Body image has long been a hot topic in our culture, but in recent years, it’s become nearly impossible to avoid. You see the fixation everywhere, from wellness influencers sharing their experience with various diets to Instagram ads promoting weight-loss supplements and tabloids ripping apart celebrities for gaining or losing weight. These messages create unrealistic and unhealthy ideas about what our bodies should look like and train us to evaluate other people’s bodies and compare our own to them, says Dr. Safer.
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