By Tigress Osborn, NAAFA’s Executive Director

Let me start by begging your pardon for exposing you to yet another headline about Ozempic.

I know you might be tired of the inescapable presence of Ozempic. I am! It’s everywhere, and it’s never ending. It’s so ubiquitous that, while I would normally start an article like this by explaining what Ozempic is, I feel confident I don’t even need to do that. You know what it is, at least in the way it’s often covered in the media. It’s the “miracle” weight loss drug everybody is constantly talking about these days. It’s the recognizable brand name that we’ve come to use as shorthand not just for semaglutide, but for all weight loss drugs. (FYI: Ozempic is actually the diabetes treatment drug, and when prescribed specifically for weight loss, the dosage changes and the brand name changes to Wegovy). Even when folks are actually talking about other drugs, they say Ozempic. Even when they’re talking about other drugs or supplements they think (or just hope) will lead to weight loss (I call those items “ozempish”), they say Ozempic.

The term “Ozempic Era” is being used by scholars, researchers, and journalists to talk about this moment in time when Ozempic seems to be a national obsession. As we ponder the era from a fat community standpoint, advocates, activists, and fat studies scholars analyze the impacts on fat folks already, with deep concern for what is to come. We raise questions about the long-term effects of the drugs, physically and in other ways, too. We draw comparisons to past “solutions” to fat, including previous “miracle” drugs that quite literally broke our hearts (although we tend not to use the term “era” to talk about Fen/Phen. We use words like “disaster” and “fiasco” to refer to that era. I prefer “debacle.”)

At NAAFA, we grapple with how much to talk to our community and to the media about Ozempic, as we do with many fat-related subjects. We don’t want to be just one more place where there is yet another o-word you have coming at you whether you want it or not. We evaluate media requests on a case-by-case basis, considering the publication, the journalist(s), and the initial questions we’re asked. We are a small organization with limited capacity. Which aspects of the Ozempic Era are important for us to weigh in on, and which are unrelated to our mission, our vision, our values?

The journalists who reach out to NAAFA for our thoughts on the Ozempic Era rarely come to us with fat liberation frameworks or even diet culture history as the starting point. Even those who are genuinely interested in doing better than the rest of their industry at seeking out a variety of fat voices often arrive in our inbox without a lot of context for why we contest the medical establishment’s approaches to ob*sity as a disease, or why fat people are wary of assurances that this time is different from all the other times our actual health was overlooked in the name of perceived health (and profit!) For example, it’s been stunning how many of the writers I’ve talked to about Ozempic had no knowledge whatsoever of Fen/Phen, which was pulled from the market for causing heart problems (if you have no knowledge, please know you are not being judged for what you don’t know. But a professional health writer on the diet coverage beat? I shouldn’t be the first person they’ve ever heard the term Fen/Phen from!)

We take requests from journalists on a case-by-case basis, weighing the pros of having voices from the fat rights movement represented in the media against the cons of contributing to yet another article about fat as related to weight loss. When we partnered last year with respected researcher Pamela Mejia of the Berkeley Media Studies group to examine how fat and anti-fatness are covered by the press, Ozempic was in the news but had not quite become the juggernaut it is today. Pamela found that over 18,000 articles in one year focused on fat in relation to health and weight loss, but fewer than 200 focused on fat rights. We know that when Pamela refreshes that research for 2024, the Ozempic overload is likely to push that health and weight loss number much higher. But what about the other number? And what about the quality of articles in that smaller sample?

Unfortunately, one of the main questions we are getting today from journalists who want to explore the socio-cultural implications of Ozempic is not about how fat people survive the discrimination that is ratcheted up by the Ozempic Era, or how fat people survive the drug itself if, once again, it turns out that all that allegedly glitters is not gold for anyone other than those who count the money. Rather, their question is about how body positivity survives the Ozempic Era. Isn’t it time we admit that body positivity was only useful when people thought they couldn’t lose weight, but now that they know they can, isn’t this the end?

Of course, those of us in fat rights advocacy know that claiming body positivity and working for fat equality are not necessarily the same thing. Body positivity, especially as it has left behind its radical roots and moved closer and closer to mainstream health and beauty standards, tends to focus on the personal. Fat liberation focuses on the systemic. And what’s missing in much of the Ozempic Era coverage is a meaningful discussion of what it means to try to treat systemic discrimination by “curing” the bodies that are being discriminated against rather than by obliterating the bias that is the basis for unjust treatment. Instead of talking about whether Ozempic proves body positivity wrong, the conversation we could be having is about how Ozempic proves fat activism right. The desire to be thin does not come from nowhere; whether motivated by wellness, vanity, or something else, people want to lose weight because they believe it will improve their lives. You know what else would do that? Eliminating anti-fatness! So why aren’t there more stories about that?

Here’s how our Board Chair, Amanda Cooper, put it to a journalist who wanted to know how fat people feel about celebrities losing weight with Ozempic. “The vast majority of our press inquiries right now are about weight loss drugs. This is despite the fact that our Executive Director was recently named to the Time100 Health list, our programming is top notch and features leading voices in fat rights such as Aubrey Gordon, and we have been working on legislation in a handful of states… So my answer to your question is actually a question back to you. Why do you think the media is most interested in how weight loss in other people affects us, rather than anti-fat bias?”

Eras run their courses, and who knows how long the Ozempic Era will actually last. For the foreseeable future, Ozempic stories are not slowing down. Where we can, NAAFA exerts our influence to insert other fat realities into the stories that are being told and to tell other stories altogether. Our fat lives deserve to be documented in all of their struggles and triumphs, in every era.

Other Articles from the June 2024 Newsletter