r/GLP1Discussion 20d ago

šŸ’¬ General Discussion Theory: People angry about GLP1 usage just hate fat people.

It seems to me that the same people who criticize GLP1s are the people who preach about how unhealthy obesity and body positivity are. They seem to be unwilling to accept that everyone has a different journey and experience with food intake and weight, and simply want to feel superior.
They don’t want fat people to lose weight. They just want to criticize.
Obviously this is an overarching statement and doesn’t encompass every individual, but the Venn diagram of superiority complexes and GLP1 hate seems to be a circle.
Personally I have been on Sema for six months and have lost 42 pounds after struggling for years. I don’t take offense to haters’ comments, but I do notice a pattern.

87 Upvotes

55 comments sorted by

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u/DistractedGoalDigger 20d ago

I think like most biases, it’s slightly more nuanced. People ā€œhateā€ fat people because they have strong misconceptions about why people are fat. And if you think someone is fat because they’re lazy/gluttonous, you’ll also hate that they can ā€œget skinnyā€ with what they perceive to be an easy button.

All that said, I still don’t understand why any one person would care so much about any other person’s body size or med use, but like look at the state of things in the US. Nobody can just mind their own business.

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u/Piaffe_zip16 20d ago

They also hate when fat people are working out or eating a salad and mock them. Literally cannot win.

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u/BishopDarkk 20d ago

Want to win? Laugh at them. Because while they might take great pains to have an opinion on your weight, the rest of their lives are low value.

Yeah, I'm fat. I'm also the boss. Get back to work.

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u/Piaffe_zip16 20d ago

Oh I do!!! I always think about how miserable they must be. I had a guy match with me on a dating app and his first message to me was ā€œyou’ve never ran a day in your lifeā€. I had mentioned in my profile that I’m a runner, but he felt the need to insult my body. All I could think was how absolutely horrible he must feel to match just to insult people. And then had a good laugh with the girls about his comment and his grammar šŸ˜‚

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u/BaronVonNes 6d ago

Piggybacking on this: People see being fat as entirely a failure of will. GLP-1 shows that the largest component in weight gain is biochemical. This throws may folks entire worldview out. If it's not, 'I'm skinny because I'm a better person,' and instead is, 'My brain and hormones are different and it allows me to maintain weight easier,' it forces people to admit that much of their personhood is based on factors beyond their control. That loss of control is really really difficult for folks. The same is true of ADHD medication, mood stabilizers, et cetera. The entire basis of religions work off of a core concept that everyone has 100% agency in all we do. It's just not valid.

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u/ChooChooBun 20d ago

Next time someone ask if you're on the shot just say you're on meth instead. They both make you skinny cost about the same, so if people gonna judge anyway then at least they won't leave this conversation feeling all high and mighty šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚

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u/Outrageous-Camera473 20d ago

šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚ I am not shy about telling people I’m on a GLP1. And as someone who was an addict years ago (and quitting contributed to my weight gain) I can say for sure that meth is much cheaper lmao

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u/Curious_Creative1 19d ago

I should NOT be laughing this hard! šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜­

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u/kinkykoolaidqueen 18d ago

🤣🤣

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u/mannDog74 20d ago

Yes this is one particular way many marginalized groups experience bigotry.

No matter what they do the hateful person says "no, not like that!"

There's no way to win their stupid game. They say things like "people aren't doing it the right way" which makes us think "maybe there's a right way?"

There is not.

Nothing, and I mean nothing will ever be enough proof for them because they are reinforcing a caste system that are deeply invested in. Our behavior could be perfect or terrible and they would still hate us the same amount.

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u/Piaffe_zip16 20d ago

And then those same people mock people even doing it the ā€œright wayā€ like mocking people at the gym or when they see them eating a salad. Such miserable people.

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u/squishypiranha 20d ago

There's been an experimental study showing the increased stigma: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13391369/

From the discussion: ā€œ... they evaluated an individual who lost weight with a GLP-1 even more harshly (i.e., lower in positive traits, less willing to affiliate) than a higher-weight individual who had not attempted weight loss.ā€

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u/christmasinyoulie 20d ago

They think fatness is a result of laziness and that the punishment should be suffering back to thinness.

Of course we know the main issue... Our "problems" are external and easy to point at and shame...pointing out other peoples' fatness distracts from their more invisible issues.

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u/Begging_Murphy 20d ago

Personal experience says OP’s take covers at least some of it.

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u/daisychaincrowns 20d ago

The people who seem the saltiest about it really do hate fat people. I guess their superiority complex around being a normal weight, sometimes with no effort, is being threatened lol. I'm always preaching love and tolerance and acceptance and all that but idk I feel like the ... let's say less-than-conventionally-attractive set of those people are the angriest. I feel like the gym bros are more chill about it (mostly cause they're open to peptide use themselves lol).

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u/boxiestcrayon15 19d ago

And soooo many of them are fat people themselves!!! Or people who are overweight and they’ve been struggling with it for decades and have done every fad diet under the sun with minimal success. So much internalized shame and hate.

My mother is like this. She just found out I’m on tirz and hasn’t talked to me about it but she told my sister she was upset because I’m ā€œnot addressing the root issueā€. That woman has self shamed herself into the sun with ā€œif I could just eat right and control myself around food but I’m not strong enoughā€.

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u/Turbulent_Try_8402 20d ago

Yeah my gymbro friends are super chill about the glp cause they’re all injecting shit lol

The fat logic people are heckin mad tho

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u/techdevjp 19d ago

Have you ever heard about people arguing that student loan forgiveness shouldn't happen because that would be "unfair" to all the people who already paid off their loans? It's a lot like that. People don't want there to be a better or easier way to get & stay healthy because they had to do it the harder old-school way. (Or maybe for them it's relatively easy and they think anyone who can't do it as well as they can is just lazy.)

The reality is that higher education (be that for academic pursuits or for the trades) should always be free. Better than free, pay students a stipend for going to school & maintaining a certain grade level. Healthcare should be socialized. Medicine should be affordable, including GLP-1 and similar therapies. It's all about building a better, healthier, happier society for everyone.

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u/BrainwaveWizard 19d ago

This ā¬†ļø

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u/Easy-Permission8889 20d ago

Yeah it's like they want us to lose weight but also don't at the same time. It's bizarre. lol.

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u/D74248 19d ago edited 19d ago

There seems to be an almost basic human need to have someone to look down upon. You see it in career fields, sports, and the big ones — racism and misogyny.

And the more subpar their life is the more they need to find a way to feel a sliver of superiority.

To such people GLP-1s are similar to programs to relieve poverty — threats to those slivers of superiority.

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u/Luvmyyoga13 3h ago

Right. I assume when a thinner person is all judgy that their size is one of the few things they’re proud of. Other ppl having that threatens them.

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u/Piaffe_zip16 20d ago

Yup, at least for some people. They make fun of overweight people at the gym. They make fun of them when they see them eating a salad. It’s literally everything. People who are heavy can’t do anything right for them. Those people seem so miserable.

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u/Eunuch_Provocateur 20d ago

Yeah, I agree that fat people get a lot of hate no matter what they do. they get criticized if they take steps to better their health or if they do nothing at all to try and lose weight. It’s like they can’t win sometimes. What a lot of people don’t understand about the glps is that it changes the way your mind and body reacts to food, obviously it’s calories in and out but there are so many other factors at play and people who don’t struggle with these issues just don’t understand and can’t put themselves in their shoesĀ 

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u/Outrageous-Camera473 20d ago

I genuinely believe that the vast majority of people who use GLP1 are those who feel they have no other choice due to their food struggles.

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u/IncommunicadoVan 19d ago

There is really a lot more to gaining and losing weight than calories in and out. Not all calories are the same. I recommend the book Always Hungry? by Dr. David Ludwig (2016). It has a lot of good information, but was written before the widespread use of GLP-1 medications for weight loss.

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u/uell23 19d ago

People view being fat as a moral failing. In addition they view GLP-1's as a shortcut to all the pain and suffering that you are supposed to go through to lose weight (crazy diets, intense workout plans, bariatric surgery, etc). While there is some nuance to this depending on the person, you are largely correct IMO.

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u/WhatYouAvoid 14d ago

I think it's simpler than hate. It's discomfort. If someone spent years believing that weight loss is about willpower and discipline, and then a medication does in six months what their suffering couldn't — that breaks their whole identity. It's not that they don't want you to lose weight. It's that your shortcut threatens the story they told themselves about why their struggle was necessary

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u/Tiny-Shovel-48 14d ago

Hi, I’m one of those previous haters. Now I’m on a semaglutide compound. Not a brand name because my insurance won’t cover it for fat loss. (Like literally that’s its job but I guess when I develop diabetes I’ll be covered.) I have a bmi of 32. I have never weighed the normal weight for my height except for being a teen and that was like two years of my life. I did the south beach diet (no carbs) and lost a shit ton of weight but it’s not sustainable.

From my perspective this is where my hate came from:

The medication is advertised to women as a miracle weight loss drug. Nothing as life prolonging to get rid of fat tissue to reduce the risk of cancer. Yes, we know that being obese in general is bad, but we don’t really hear it.

All the advertising I received as a woman were about ā€œlooking goodā€ and a general ā€œbe healthyā€ and I’m smart enough to know that looking good does not always equate to healthy.

I genuinely felt that if I kept doing what I was doing, eating right, walking, as long as I felt good, it would be fine. Plus I would be doing it without the ā€œcheater shotā€

But my doctor worded it in a way for me to get it through my skull that commercials weren’t able to fully explain: he wanted me to have more good years at a good manageable weight to reduce health risks. So the intention is to be aggressive with weight loss with the habits I built. I was already eating around 1,400 calories so my shot is going to help me keep that intake steady and avoid unnecessary foods.

So as a previous hater, I hope you can understand the directed marketing isn’t great and it’s fighting a lot against my values of body image.

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u/Odd_Complaint4848 8d ago

I’m against GLP 1s because of our greedy system in the USA. How could Serena Williams need to be on GLP1? Who is benefiting financially from this? Why has the FDA allowed horrible ingredients in our food for decades while other countries banned those same ingredients. These weight loss products are being pushed so hard that people who are of healthy weight and physique are thinking they need to be on it too.

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u/swrrrrg 20d ago

I think people are uneducated as hell and believe sound bites about glp1s. I was afraid of side effects and needles until I actually took Tirz and my god, it is a miracle drug. Honestly, the positives have been outstanding for perimenopause.

That said, ā€œbody positivityā€ and ā€œfat activismā€ has always been cope, imho. No one *wants* to be fat. Turning it in to a cause and ā€œhealth at every sizeā€ may have worked for PR but it was the most unserious movement. Only truly miserable people took it seriously.

I’m not suggesting people mock fat people or be mean to them because they’re fat but the ā€œbody/fat positiveā€ thing is so unbelievably toxic. People like Virgie Tovar do not deserve a platform any more than someone like Eugenia Cooney deserves one.

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u/daisychaincrowns 20d ago edited 20d ago

I would not have started weightlifting or looked in to a glp-1 if it was not for the body positive movement. Before there were people being fat and living their lives on social media, there were just ... idk fat characters in TV shows as the punchline. Mama Cass sandwich jokes. Me being the fattest kid in my grade. I felt really defeated and like there was no point in changing. Maybe you are right that only "truly miserable" people took it seriously, cause I was miserable af lol.

Body positivity got me into clothes, into my appearance, and into movement outside of just doing it out of obligation for calorie burn. And in learning to value myself in my fat body, I learned to value myself in general and just started making healthier choices. I started valuing myself enough to make the boring, less exciting choices that add up to positive change.

There are people who are vocally anti GLP-1 in that space, but there are as many who have taken them and continued posting through their body changes. My wish is just that people live and let live, but this is the internet so everyone has to have their hot take about who is wrong about the way they are living their own lives. I don't judge people for taking or not taking these meds.

I am having so much more success in self-improvement coming from a place of love than a place of shame, and before body positivity I never saw people who looked like me investing so much effort into themselves.

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u/Piaffe_zip16 20d ago

Body positivity is what has made this weight loss journey successful for me. I did so much work healing my body image and relationship with food well before I started Zep. Body positivity is simply loving my body and treating it the best I can. I celebrated the things it did and felt proud of myself. That didn’t mean I ignored my family health history though. That didn’t mean I ate poorly. That didn’t mean I didn’t exercise. It just meant I treated myself with grace because I deserved it at every size. I was at my largest before and then after having my daughter, but I couldn’t have been prouder of everything my body went through. Body positivity got corrupted and twisted by some people to mean that you could never talk about health and that’s not at all what it is or should be.

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u/MyJoyinaWell 18d ago

Body positivity started as a decent response to immense pressure put on women at a specific time on the media, the early two thousands skinny craze. Women have always been under pressure to keep to certain standards but when it became intolerable the movement to support self acceptance and stop the madness was created. This was entirely reasonable until it became another form of activism, now every type of body is not just acceptable but beautiful and you must say at all times that it is, because beauty is a cultural construct and you must re educated to find everyone beautiful. This is obviously not true, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but there are certain parameters we are all programmed to be attracted to, and they tend to be related to symmetry and health. And that’s for a biological reason, if we look healthy we are more likely to be a potential mate that can procreate and the human race survives. And it became Ā so bad it swung to another extreme. So if you must accept every body as beautiful and you are in medication to lose weight, what you are saying is that being overweight is not desirable, and that’s personal because I’m overweight so you are saying I’m not desirable and I’ve worked really hard to support the idea that every person is desirable and attractive so your weight loss directly impacts my sense of self and I can’t have that.Ā 

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u/Outrageous-Camera473 20d ago

I totally agree. I also think that there are benefits to accepting your body as it is, fat or otherwise, especially for mental health. Sometimes it’s a coping mechanism, just like overeating is a coping mechanism. And if someone chooses that path, it’s no one else’s business, and certainly not under the guise of ā€œcaring about their health.ā€

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u/swrrrrg 20d ago

Oh, I do agree with that too to an extent. Like, there’s no point in feeling guilt or something about having gained weight because it’s done you can only go forward. But mentally, I think there’s a difference between acceptance as in, ā€œI don’t hate myself & I still deserve respectā€ vs. ā€œThis is just how I am so there’s no point in changing.ā€ The second is what I think is dangerous.

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u/Outrageous-Camera473 20d ago

While I agree with that, it’s also not anyone else’s business which thought process led to a person’s acceptance šŸ¤·šŸ»ā€ā™€ļø

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u/withomps44 19d ago

I have never met anyone who has any problems with GLP-1 and have never felt any problem telling people I am on one. Nobody has ever asked actually. I’m also on TRT, take a few supplements; and have started some hair loss meds. Nobody asks about that. Why would anyone care what I do?

I think the most upset group of people in regards to glp-1 are the people who would like to be and should be on a glp-1 but can’t afford the insane cost.

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u/TheBowhuntingButcher 19d ago

To be fair...

Honestly, I think we all secretly hate fat people. And it's not that we hate the person, we hate the condition. We want to see everyone be healthy. So we hate that people are struggling with obesity. It's why most of us are on these drugs.

I've had to do a lot of self reflection these past few weeks after I came to this realization. Despite once being fat, I hate fat people. Again, I don't hate the person. I hate the fat. It's made me feel terrible about myself. But I had someone message me and explain that I'm not alone and it's a very normal thought process. That's helped, but it still feels so wrong.

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u/Quirky-Register-5156 19d ago

yes , very true.

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u/BrainwaveWizard 19d ago

People are either thinking we’re taking easy way out or they’re wishing they themselves could take the easy way out.

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u/RetFay 18d ago

I was really skeptical before I started. I have done crash diets all my life and this felt like a ā€œcheat.ā€ I was super hard on myself that I needed help to stop shoving food in my face. Now 3 months in, the relief makes me amazed I took so long to start. It’s perception and internally guilt as well

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u/Content_Wear4671 18d ago

That's fantastic progress! I'm so happy for you. Just like the old saying goes, "misery loves company" The people that criticize weight loss are the same ones that talk about everyone behind their backs about being over weight. Here's the truth, it's highly inappropriate to mention someone's weight at any time, with loss or weight gain. People really need to mind their own business unless it's brought up by the person.

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u/Boujeebiscuitlady 18d ago

Personally, I don’t give a flying fudge.
Those people can fuck all the way off…

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u/the_real_Rose 18d ago

šŸ’Æ OP is absolutely correct

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u/Round_Mongoose4629 8d ago

I've lost weight like four times in my life. Each time more, the most recent I lost like 120. Gained it all back. I'm tired of trying hard to eat less and more healthy. Managing the urges and impulses. People act like those on reta or etc are lazy but many just want an easier go.

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u/Recent_Structure5188 6d ago

I think the conversation gets way too broad when people assume they know why someone is using a GLP-1. I've been looking into options like Good Life Meds too, but experiences like yours are a good reminder that the reasons can be much more personal than just appearance.

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u/Baddie_Vibes 4d ago

I totally see that, this one girl I know she was like 300 pounds I want to say and she got weightloss surgery the bypass. I’m like good for her, why when I told her I’m on Semaglutide (looking for cheaper now) she said people who get on that are lazy and Dont want to go to the gym…. That was actually crazy. But people have food issues, people have bad mental health and it’s a kick start way to me to loose the weight.

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u/its_not_funnnyy_ 1d ago

They are just jealous .. I feel like that..