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The Ozempic Question Nobody Wants To Answer
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Almost a year ago, when my doctor recommended I go on a weight-loss medication, she asked what my goal weight was. After having six babies in nine years, I had trouble remembering what number the scale sat at before I started having children in my mid-twenties. Pregnancy, nursing, and the years of raising young children had blurred together. I could remember clothing sizes and life stages, but I rarely stepped on the scale.
I settled on what seemed like an absurdly low number, one I hadn’t seen in many years and wasn’t convinced I could reach. The truth, though, is that my real goal wasn’t the number on the scale at all; it was one in my bloodwork. Diabetes runs in my family, and after watching relatives struggle with the disease and seeing my own markers moving in the wrong direction, I knew I needed to act. If the end result was also looking better in family photos, I considered that a welcome bonus.
Months ago, I hit that supposedly impossible number. Now I’m faced with a different question: How low can I go? And, more importantly, when should I stop?
Like many women who have spent years pregnant or recovering from pregnancy, I carry the physical evidence of those years. There is extra skin and a pouch around my middle that no amount of wishful thinking seems capable of eliminating. Six pregnancies leave their mark, and no medication can entirely erase them. Could and should I continue losing weight in an effort to get rid of those reminders? Would I actually want to? That was the question my doctor posed last week as we discussed what to do next.
When I reached my goal weight, we moved from weekly injections to every other week. As we debated whether to continue on that schedule or space them out even further, I joked, “I’m not interested in looking like Demi Moore, Ariana Grande, or Kelly Osbourne.”
My doctor immediately understood what I meant.
My bloodwork is dramatically improved, I have more energy than I did a year ago, and I am now well within the range of what any reasonable person would call a healthy weight. At a certain point, however, continuing to lose weight stops being about health and starts becoming about something else entirely: vanity. Our society has always struggled to recognize where the line between health and vanity lies, but it’s particularly bad now that medications have made it possible for millions of people to keep shrinking long after the health benefits have largely been achieved.
If you’re old enough, you remember the last time this happened. The 1990s gave us heroin chic, a look defined by hollow cheeks, protruding bones, and bodies that were alarmingly fragile. Fashion magazines celebrated women who looked exhausted and underfed, and our culture largely went along with it. Eventually, there was a backlash when Americans grew tired of pretending that obvious signs of ill health were aspirational, and the pendulum swung dramatically in the opposite direction, swaying violently too far in the other direction, embracing “fat positivity.”
The rise of body positivity brought with it some necessary corrections, but a great deal of our culture lost the ability to acknowledge the obvious reality that obesity carries genuine health risks, not to mention that there might be meaningful distinctions between acceptance and celebration. Any discussion of weight became suspect, and acknowledgment of health consequences was treated as cruelty.
Then came Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and the rest of the GLP-1 revolution, and almost overnight, the culture lurched in a different direction. Celebrities who had spent years insisting they were perfectly happy carrying extra weight no longer had to maintain the fiction. The pounds disappeared, and with them disappeared much of the rhetoric about body positivity that had dominated the previous decade. For many public figures, the process didn’t stop when they reached a healthy weight, and, for once, our culture is raising red flags.
Every night, Ariana Grande posts photographs from her performances while she’s on tour, and every night the reaction is remarkably similar: many of her fans seem genuinely, and rightfully, concerned. She is clearly terrifyingly thin, all sharp angles and jutting bones, and it is difficult to imagine anyone looking at those images and concluding that this could possibly be healthy.
What’s striking is not simply Grande’s appearance but the public reaction to it. For years, Americans have been lectured that noticing physical reality is judgmental, that commenting on obvious signs of poor health is cruel, and that discussing weight at all is beyond the bounds of polite society. Yet despite years of elites lecturing ordinary people about politeness, we have retained the ability to recognize when something appears off, and when celebrities appear in public looking like the victims of a starvation campaign, the comments light up with truth-telling.
The comments sections underneath celebrity photos may be one of the few places where cultural sanity still survives. Americans are looking at bodies that would have been celebrated on fashion runways 25 years ago and rejecting them. They are looking at collarbones that protrude dramatically and faces that appear increasingly gaunt, and they respond, rightfully, with discomfort. That discomfort is not evidence of cruelty; it is proof that most people still possess healthy instincts about what human flourishing looks like.
There is such a thing as too thin. That shouldn’t be controversial, yet increasingly it feels as though it needs to be repeated. Just as there is such a thing as carrying too much weight, there is also such a thing as carrying too little.
Weight-loss medications have transformed millions of lives, including mine. I am healthier today than I was a year ago, my risk factors are lower, and I am deeply grateful that modern medicine arrived at exactly the moment I needed it. But these drugs have also created a question that many Americans have never had to confront before. For decades, the challenge was figuring out how to lose the weight. Now, for the first time, millions of people are having to decide when enough is enough.
Sitting in my doctor’s office this week, I realized that I already knew the answer. The number on the scale had stopped mattering months ago. The victory wasn’t fitting into a smaller size or reaching some arbitrary number from my twenties; it was improving my health, and I achieved that.
The loose skin will remain — as a reminder that my body spent nearly a decade growing and nourishing six babies. That’s fine. Not every mark of a life well-lived is a flaw that needs to be corrected.
A year ago, I was trying to lose enough weight to avoid becoming diabetic. Today, I find myself resisting a different temptation; I’m not fighting the food noise anymore. I’m fighting an unhealthy aesthetic that has been in and out of fashion for most of my life. Medicine helped me lose the weight, but I’m grateful for the wisdom of knowing when to stop.
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Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author, with Karol Markowicz, of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” She writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
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