Content warning: Please note this article contains topics that may be unsuitable for some readers, with mentions of potential triggers related to mental health, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders.
This year it seems the media has adopted yet another miracle practice in achieving the ever-so-sought out “slim figure.” It’s lab grown, it’s factory manufactured, and it’s now made readily available for the misguided masses looking for a back-door weight loss solution—it’s Ozempic.
While not intended for the use of weight-loss, the commodity drug only recently began to be promoted as such by suddenly skinny celebrities (e.g. Sharon Osborne, Amy Schumer, Khloe Kardashian, etc.) fueling the craze of false body positivity to the mass media. Due to its rise in popularity and public demand—for the sole purpose of fast weight loss—Ozempic, and other pharmaceutical variants of the drug, can now be commercially consumed with a write off from your health-care provider.
The commercial practice of these drugs raises concern of the health implications that aren’t made evident to misguided consumers and questions the ethicality of the alternative weight-loss method.
With the reach of this trend seeing its way to younger, impressionable demographics, it’s only necessary to analyze these concerns to really understand what it means to be skinny on Ozempic.
The Science
To the public’s basic understanding, Ozempic is marketed as a drug that’s supposed to miraculously induce a rapid weight loss without the need to adopt any supplementary health changes to users’ lifestyle (e.g. introducing a work-out regimen or making diet substitutions).
However, what seems to come as a surprise to new Ozempic users is the mechanism behind the drug, acting as an appetite suppressant that restricts normal hunger behavior; but that’s just looking at it with a broad perspective. Chemically, the components utilized in these weight loss medications do a lot more than simply “stop hunger.”
The main component found in these weight loss drugs is semaglutide—a peptide that acts by mimicking GLP-1, a naturally regulating hormone that already exists in the body, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. GLP-1 is secreted by cells lining your intestines, in other words, it’s responsible for regulating our blood sugar, as well as assisting the rate at which we feel hunger and carry out digestion.
In small doses, use of semaglutide can actually be very beneficial for the body’s autonomy—it’s been proven to reduce cardiovascular incidents and strokes and is even used to assist the digestive obstacles for Type 2 diabetes patients. However, excessively consuming a synthetic hormone like semaglutide in the absence of any real health concern leads to users running the risk of altering the body’s natural clockwork, what your seventh grade science teacher may have defined as ‘homeostasis.’
The health Implications
While this only recently became a hot topic on social media, Ozempic and its pharmaceutical variants have been around since 2017, when the FDA had first approved the semaglutide compounds for use by Type-2 diabetes patients.
For Type-2 diabetes, these medications utilize semaglutide’s activity in order to regulate a healthy balance of glucose and insulin in their bloodstreams, as excessively high blood sugar levels that most diabetic patients are susceptible to can lead to multiple organ failures, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Going back to the case of semaglutide users without any severe health concerns, the health implications that may ensue as a result of its misuse could involve the bodies desensitization to insulin and other glucose driving mechanisms—which is why most of the initial pro-Ozempic celebrities report experiencing too severe of a weight loss than anticipated paired with unanticipated digestive issues.
The ethical concerns
Where the Ozempic craze begins to stir ethical concerns is in light of the shortage of the pharmaceutical product faced in 2022, when the variant began seeing sales for a demographic other than type-2 diabetics. The weight-loss aspiring audience caused a scare for Type-2 diabetics, beginning to question the ethicality of the practice in using Ozempic and semaglutide variants for cosmetic-esque purposes.
Stepping away from a public health perspective, the glorified essentialism created around medications like Ozempic pushes a counterintuitively negative agenda on the ideals of true body positivity and encouragement of practicing heathy habits. With more celebrities taking semaglutide variants to obtain a “slim physique,” there is a false standard of beauty and wellness being absorbed by wide audiences, feeding the cycle of a questioned ethicality behind the medications’ involvement in rapid weight-loss.
With how easily obtainable semaglutide medications have become to the average weight-loss aspirant, it’s concerning to see the lack of knowledge consumers have on the drug, aside from the prevalent misconceptions surrounding it. Keeping this in consideration, it can’t help but be questioned how much further Ozempic’s reign will have on the mass media and how its grasp on an impressionable demographic will continue to grow with every new misguided propaganda.
We can only hope that, at the very least, more awareness will be taken from the Ozempic epidemic.