Carry That Weight

On weight gain, weight loss, and the semaglutide industrial complex.

TW: Weight, body image, and eating disorders.

I’m being cyberstalked by companies selling weight loss drugs.

I think this all started because I saw someone comment that a celebrity had “Ozempic face” (Scott Disick?), so he must be on Ozempic, an injectable diabetes treatment that doubles as a weight loss drug. Or maybe it was because I saw someone on Twitter insisting that a celebrity wasn’t on Ozempic (Lana Del Rey?) and lost their weight the old-fashioned way because they didn’t have Ozempic face. Whatever it was, I Googled “What is Ozempic face?”

Answer: Ozempic face is a phenomenon in which the face loses elasticity and appears saggy and gaunt following rapid weight loss caused by medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, etc. Their active ingredient, semaglutide, regulates appetite and makes the body feel fuller faster, reducing food intake.

I haven’t had a day of peace since.

When I first noticed myself gaining weight back in 2015, a friend of mine said I shouldn’t worry about a little “boo weight,” the phenomenon in which you put on a few pounds after entering a relationship due to dining out and drinking more. I did start dating Rob the year prior, but that weight slowly transformed into regular, unremarkable weight gain, likely due to a combination of my metabolism slowing with age, inconsistent exercise, an increase in alcohol and red meat consumption, and the simple fact that I fucking love to eat.

I gained a lot of weight in the last decade, especially in the last five or six years. Rob noticed it, my parents noticed it, and I’m sure my friends did, too.

I’ve had stints at the gym and flirtations with smaller portions, but I wasn’t fretting over my body composition to the point of spiraling. Things were going on in my life that were more important than my pants getting a little tight around the bum.

But since gaining even more weight following Rob’s death, I’ll admit: It’s starting to get to me. 

A few days ago, I went to one of my favorite restaurants for dinner and indulged. It was a Friday and all I’d eaten that day was a couple of string cheese packets, so I decided to treat myself. I ordered two cocktails, two small plates, an entreé, and a dessert. I ate it all with no regrets until I began my walk home: I was so bloated that I looked like I was in my second trimester.

I decided to play the part and held one hand gently over my stomach until I got home. If there was ever a perfect application for that Jemima Kirke meme where she says, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much,” it was that moment.

I’ve long described myself as big. I don’t say this as a pejorative; I am simply not a small woman! I’m taller than the average woman. I have a large chest, meaty thighs, and big feet. Is this what people used to call zaftig? I haven’t been skinny since the Bush Administration, and while I wasn’t noticeably overweight until recently, I was certain that I was for most of my twenties. I find that funny now. It’s not “ha ha” funny; it’s something uglier and sadder. Because when I look back at photos of myself from the early 2010s, posing and preening in American Apparel dressing rooms, I can’t believe I ever saw myself that way. It’s strange, the tricks your mind plays on you in your youth, only to make you feel deeply stupid years later, wondering why you didn’t just love the body you were in when your metabolism was fast and your life was even faster. 

Coming of age with the body ideals of the nineties and aughts thrust in my face—skinny, slender, hip bones protruding above low-rise pants when you move your body just so, curvy perhaps but slim slim slim in the waist—clearly fucked with my head even when I thought I was above the indoctrination. I grew up seeing Livejournal posts dedicated to thinspo and knew it was harmful. In high school, I visited my friend when she was undergoing rehab for an eating disorder. The body positivity movement was in full swing by the time I finished college and officially entered adulthood. I knew that beauty and thinness were not intrinsically attached. I understood that being fat wasn’t some mortal sin. But nothing, other than being poisoned to hate yourself a little, can explain why I would sometimes look at photos of myself and think, “Ugh, I look so fat at this angle.”

I thought this way as a teen, I thought this way in my twenties, and I still feel this way now, in my thirties. Not all the time, mind you—I was never so preoccupied about my weight to the point of it becoming an Actual Problem—but enough. More than I should. More than I’d like. Maybe more than I even realize.

It’s all very body positivity for thee, but not for me.

There are several reasons why the song Charli XCX song “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” is so impactful, and one is the fact that Lorde’s feature includes the following:

’Cause for the last couple years 

I’ve been at war with my body

I tried to starve myself thinner

And then I gained all the weight back

You don’t have to have an eating disorder to see a part of yourself in this verse. Being a woman in a body that you may (at times, often, always) scrutinize is enough for those lines to act as a mirror.

I had a stomach bug at the tail end of June and lost ten pounds in a few days. I stepped on my smart scale, opened its accompanying app, and saw the graph calculating my weight illustrate a dramatic drop. There was a sick little part of myself that was pleased, even though I felt miserable and was subsisting on chicken soup and saltine crackers. I’d stand in front of my full-length mirror and rotate my body from side to side, noting how flat my stomach looked, both amazed and disgusted at what could be achieved after uncontrollably shitting water for a week straight. 

I knew it wasn’t sustainable, that my weight would creep back up as soon as I could eat normally again. And it did. 

My phone knows I am thinking about losing weight. It also believes that I want to lose weight with the help of weight loss drugs. All because of a couple of Google searches about Ozempic face. I know that this was bound to happen—data, cookies, whatever the fuck—but still, it’s jarring. Here are just a few examples of what I’ve encountered recently:

And here’s the truth: I have some degree of Ozempic ideation. I’m a mere overweight mortal, after all, bombarded by the sneaky advertising that ranges from Instagram ads to celebrity gossip over who might have done what. I think about what it would be like to go on it. I helped my aunt with one of her injections after Thanksgiving, and it seemed so easy. I casually mentioned the drug to one of my doctors, half-jokingly, to see if she’d talk to me about it. But she didn’t take the bait. Maybe it was for the best. 

I do worry that we’re going to be bombarded by more stories of the nasty side effects of semaglutide injections in a few years and tales from people who abused them to get thin. I’m also not keen on thyroid cancer as a possible side effect. But I’m not too keen on the potential side effects of being very overweight either, especially since I have a family history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and my last physical revealed that my bad cholesterol was slightly out of the normal range. I also know of a few women taking these injections for health reasons who have expressed limited complaints. One told me that her only regret was not starting sooner. 

And then I think about a dear friend who confessed over dinner a few months ago that she would love to go on Ozempic to tackle some mild weight gain. She has a history of disordered eating. I told her that was a horrible idea for that very reason. After a bit of back-and-forth, the subject was dropped, but not before she admitted how much she starved herself to fit into her wedding dress. 

A few days ago, I had a moment where I realized I’d been unconsciously sucking in my stomach. I was aching and didn’t know why until I exhaled. Fully. 

At what age is this introduced? How long does it take to become muscle memory? Do we learn it from our mothers? 

Other people talk about this stuff a lot more eloquently than I do. My old Jezebel colleague, Kelly Faircloth, regularly covered body image and the politics of fatness, and I still think about her essay “The Weight.” Culture critic Emma Specter covered binge eating disorder, restrictive diets, Ozempic abuse, and more in her new memoir More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for “Enough.”

Weight is not a subject I’m comfortable writing about often or at length. To me, it’s more intimate than writing about sex or grief. But I don’t know what else to do with these warring thoughts I have about my body. I suppose I could keep them to myself, but that’s not why you’re here.

I obviously don’t think we should villainize weight gain, but I’ve finally hit a point on the scale that I wish to retreat from. Is that fair? I think that’s fair, in my case. I can only speak for myself, after all. I will happily buy clothes in a larger size and love the way I look in them. However, I still want to one day be able to fit more comfortably into the clothes I bought a few years ago because they’re languishing in my closet and who can afford to build an entirely new wardrobe every few years?

I want to lose weight, but counting calories bores me after a few days. I want to lose weight, but that doesn’t stop me from ordering another cocktail. I want to lose weight, but I still resent this woo woo doctor I had years ago who suggested I go on Whole 30 because there is no way I’m giving up grains or dairy or pasta for a fucking month, are you kidding me? I love food; I love cooking, I love going out to restaurants, I love dinner parties with friends, I love a solo lunch on a park bench, I love demolishing a slice of pizza while I’m en route somewhere, I love traveling to new places and planning entire days around where we’re going to eat and when. I love to remember the times when Rob and I ate something so good we would talk about it for hours after; I don’t love remembering when Rob was so sick that he relied on a feeding tube connected to his small intestine and could barely eat anything without throwing up. Food will never be my enemy.

I don’t always love how I look in the mirror, but life is short and often cruel, and I do not want to be needlessly cruel to myself to achieve my goals. Those goals are still a little murky to me, but they’re forming. I don’t care about being skinny. I want to lose a couple of pants sizes and get my bad cholesterol numbers down. I want to get more sleep and exercise because grief has fucked up my brain chemistry, but running and hitting my seven-hour sleep goal almost makes me feel normal. I want to eat what I want, but maybe eat a little less of it a little slower. I want to stop staring at my profile in the mirror and determining the goodness of an outfit based on how big my stomach looks.

I want all of these things. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, is it?