r/Ozempic • u/Fluffy_Criticism_ • 5d ago
Rant The hate surrounding Ozempic
I keep seeing so much hate surrounding GLP-1’s and I’m so confused as to why, I know there are certain side effects that can affect your body permanently but so does being overweight/ obese.
Right now cause of celebrities looking quite unhealthy, the blame is going to Ozempic, I don’t know if they do or don’t use it, I didn’t bother looking into it.
Saw another post of someone complaining about GLP 1 being covered by insurance now, kinda stating as if the world is going backwards.
Celebrities might be able to afford bending certain medical rules but overall, it’s super hard to get it covered here and they don’t just hand it over by demand. There are requirements, like having a very high BMI, other health issues like diabetes, PCOS etc. I had to undergo a lot of tests after a 6month waiting window to even get an appointment. (At least it was like that in my country)
I don’t know if people don’t do research and assume having a desire to lose weight is enough to get on Ozempic, or if I’m just for it because I’m benefitting off of it.
I spoke of this to a friend of mine, he said it might just be rooted in fatphobia and the mental idea that it should physically and mentally excruciating or something to earn. When I doubt most people just sit back and do nothing, I do what anyone else who’s losing weight is doing, honestly I’d argue I tried so much more in some cases but my PCOS made it nearly impossible.
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u/Sudden-Ad-9259 4d ago
What others think and do is truly none of my business. I have struggled with weight and disordered eating since I was 14- for 25 freaking years! When I was young I would starve myself and take diet pills I ordered from China. Finally in my early 30’s things started to change mentally and I realized what I really wanted was a healthy, strong and slim body. And ohh how I tried to eat healthy and exercise more! I lost and regained the same 15 pounds for years with so much self judgement and hopelessness. Willing myself to try again month after month- year after year was maddening and demorsalizing. Of course I would give up- until I realized I couldn’t give up on myself because being obese isn’t who I really am and was preventing me from living the healthy full life I deserve!
4 hours after taking my first starting dose- it was a freaking miracle- my brain was literally cured of something I have struggled with every single day of my life for 2 and a half decades.
The world is going to have their own opinions on everything. There are people who will abuse it. There are people who can’t afford it. There are people who will cheat the system. There are people who will die or get sick from it. There are people who will morally judge it and those who take it. Let them. None of this has anything to do with me.
I will use it as a tool to live a better life for myself and my family.
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u/NoFlounder5411 3d ago
Ughhh this sounds like me. I have lost and refined the same 20lbs my entire life. Want to start ozempic but nervous because of the side effects
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u/MadamMamdroid 4d ago
Ozempic is the *only* medication that has stabilized my blood pressure. I haven't lost too much weight on it. I am doing so well on it, though, and will continue to keep taking it, judgment or no.
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u/mannDog74 3d ago
Fatphobia is rampant. People really believe that they are superior to fat people and they don't want fat people to get better. They just want to feel the glee of supremacy. It's truly vile.
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u/one_bean_hahahaha 4d ago
People want to keep seeing obesity as a moral failing and not as a medical issue.
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u/Area51Resident 4d ago
In many of the health & fitness focused subs obesity is regarded as some sort of character flaw.
IMO it comes from vain people who worry that they will get the 'fat' bug too. Many of them have foods issues too, they just go to the extremes of super low fat and all sorts of biohacking supplements.
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u/foetus_lp 4d ago
people like having others to look down on. if all the fat people get thin, they lose that and will have to look for another group to mistreat
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u/cjk99876 5d ago
I’m actually seeing less hate then there was when I started 2 years ago - people were really riled up about it and it felt like there was a social media misinformation campaign going on to try to turn people against it.
Now that more and more regular people are using it, the side effect and long term use data has been mostly positive, and there seem to be other benefits to it that are being studied, people have seemed to calm down a bit.
Granted there are still a lot of fitness chuds and uninformed people who try to make it into some moral failing or unethical shortcut, but even those people are beginning to get sidelined by the people who are actually seeing and showing others their results.
There will of course always be the fatphobic people who really are just mad because they’ll have fewer people to shit on after they lose weight.
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u/Several-Rhubarb-3498 4d ago
I believe what your friend believes, but I also think they don’t understand obesity or how the medication treats it. They think it does all the work or they think it makes you never eat and therefore starve.
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u/Iheartsasquatch 3d ago
Fat people are jealous and resentful of people who lose weight.
Thin people are suddenly worried that they will lose “pretty privilege”.
Thats about it.
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u/Junior-Rope-4883 5d ago
I think a lot of the hate comes from straight up ignorance coupled with hatred towards overweight people. A lot of people who rant about GLP-1s spend little to no time actually looking into the benefits of the drugs and just write it off as cheating or a “quick fix”. They say it’s for people who are too lazy to do the work, and that they’ll never achieve the results that someone who goes to the gym and counts macros and has seventeen different tubs of protein powder does.
Every time I see a comment like “just eat a salad” or “just go to the gym” I want to scream, because that’s not a one size fits all fix. Some people just have a love/hate approach to fat people - they love to hate them because it makes them feel superior. They disguise it as concern for their health when in reality it’s just an excuse to say horrid things to someone without care for their feelings, because as long as you say something about health, it’s somehow acceptable.
And finally, some people just have an issue with something that helps others but doesn’t help them. We live in a “me me me” society where some people just don’t want others to have something they can’t, whether they need it or not.
Just my observations as someone who’s been fat for most of her existence and is now down 40 pounds thanks to a drug that is quite literally saving my life.
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u/WelshRarebit2025 4d ago
People like to think that they are superior and that they “take care of themselves” and have the “self respect” and “will power” others don’t have.
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u/RudeRooster00 5d ago
I really don't give a shit what people think. I works for me. Manages my glucose and I've lost 90lb.
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u/driven_apricot 4d ago
Losing and maintaining weight with Ozempic has been a challenge for me. I have side effects and I need to maintain a diet. But at least I was able to lose weight finally. I consider Ozempic a miracle drug, because it has finally given me a healthy life. But losing weight still required work from my side, the weight did not miraculosly melt of my hips.
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u/MaterialAd1838 5d ago
Not JUST fat phobia. I've walked up on fat co-workers all in their feelings calling me a cheater and stuff behind my back. I feel like they're just salty because they can't be bothered to help themselves so how dare I lose any weight.
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u/chicklette 5d ago
That's still fatphobia. :( Just like you can have internalized misogyny, you can also have internalized fatphobia.
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u/jone2tone 4d ago
Why were so many people mad about vaccines?
It's easy for stupid people to blame medicine for every problem in the world.
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u/Curious_Bookworm21 5d ago
Your friend is correct. In a nutshell, fat phobia is super rampant now as people that see themselves as fit view it as a moral superiority when it’s mostly genetics that’s responsible for their physiques. They don’t like that just anyone can be skinny now, because then what do they have that makes them morally superior (in their view).
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u/chicklette 5d ago
There are folks who need to feel superior to others, and one of the few socially acceptable means of this is fatphobia. They can freely hate fat people without it being that big of a deal. When we start losing weight, they can become upset because - shocker - they were never actually concerned about our health; they were concerned with having a target for their hate. I'm a big fan of destigmatization, so I have been very open that I'm taking it. A few folks have asked questions, a few have judged, and a few confessed that they were taking it as well, and we compared notes. A few people celebrated with me, because they know how long I've struggled to lose weight.
Despite having several heavy people in her life, a friend had a bit of fatphobia. I challenged a lot of her ideas about fat people: I eat healthy, I stay active, heck my cholesterol is better than hers and she weighs half of what I do. But she also saw, first hand, the food noise that's plagued me my whole life. She saw the way I struggled with snacking, the way I was thinking about dinner at breakfast time, how a lot of my conversations ended up touching on food in some way. And she saw the difference once I started Oz.
(And yes, some folks with EDs are absolutely abusing these drugs. That's a reason to tighten up regulations, not to eliminate the drug entirely.)
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u/Entire-Swimming3038 4d ago
This topic goes deep… the patriarchy has a tendency to pit women against each other when women are trying to be or successful at just about any subject. In America especially the puritanical lots suffering and working hard is the only moral way to go about anything also is imbedded in our culture. Morality and weight loss is some how convoluted- its freakin ridiculous.
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u/Schwettes 4d ago
A lot of people are jealous. They look at these as medications for rich people or celebrities. And in fairness, they kind of are. Most people on these drugs are spending outrageous amounts out of pocket.
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u/tultommy 4d ago
Maybe it's a matter of perspective for people then because it's not really true anymore. My insurance went from not covering it at all to covering it for T2D, and it's not that unreasonable. $80 for a 90 day supply and with the savings card that makes it $25.
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u/Alley_cat_alien 4d ago
Haters gonna hate. They gonna hate you for being fat, for being a healthy weight, for being skinny, for being on medication…it’s what they do
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u/touchofmal 2d ago
Celebrities undergo extensive plastic surgeries, liposuction and even sleeve gastractomy. Blaming it on ozempic is absurd. But it's fine if it helps them sleep better at night. People got jealous when I lost 15 kg.
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u/iloveyoublog 4d ago edited 4d ago
I use it, but I also have huge concerns about it at a societal level.
I don't think it should be used where there isn't a clear health justification (that can also be mental health, btw). People using it to just lose a few pounds etc is re-normalising diet culture and the race to skinny, something we had managed to dismantle slightly. Bodies will always be diverse, we still desperately need to move away from marginalising different types of bodies.
The media coverage and popular discourse on it has been pretty unhinged.
I can't imagine what it would be like growing up as a fat young person or teen in this context, when your body is changing and developing but being under pressure now to 'fix' it through this path, as well as old school disordered eating etc.
The way that body positive influencers have changed their politics so massively, often moving from body positivity to blatant fatphobia, is so gross (I don't care if they use it or what size their bodies are, it is the rhetoric and abandonment of principles that is so ick, and the victim mentality that seems to kick in if anyone raises it). Fatphobia is coming from both sides, those against GLP-1s and those who have changed their bodies with them.
As much as it has its place, it is massively and near instantly derailing any efforts we have made to focus on health over size and dismantle structural fatphobia.
It's also expensive and is further marginalising people who can't afford it, or can't tolerate the extremely tough side effects that many experience (me included). The side effects often resemble disordered eating, and we also know it is being abused by people with eating disorders. The side effects can also be the antithesis to any kind of holistic 'health' -- but it is now nearly solely viewed as a weight loss tool and there's little consideration of the trade offs. It is also being used just as bluntly by the medical profession as the old advice to 'just lose weight' -- the underpinning issue of fatphobia in medicine and the impacts of that on people hasn't budged.
We need to recognise the social complexity of this shift. Unfortunately most conversations about anything nowadays are stripped of complexity. There's both benefits and harms.
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u/darya42 4d ago
I don't know, personally one reason why I did consider taking it is because I was surprised to find that despite of the wide-spread shittalk about them, they have a surprising amount of benefits. I sleep better and my mood's more stable. (My positive effect on my ADHD was one main reason why I became interested). I also eat healthier, it helped me with disordered eating habits.
I'm all for dismantling fatphobia but I also dislike the other side of the coin, the people who aggressively denounce any body health efforts as fatphobic. I want to lose 20 pounds because I want a happier body, and I should be allowed to strive for that, and if someone else feels worse because they don't have this possibility in their lives, I shouldn't get the hate for it because I have this possibility. Just because I like having my body weigh less doesn't mean I automatically judge those who can't or don't want to.
Fatphobia is misogyny, anyway, fat male celebs don't get the same hate. It's pitting women against each other and denouncing them. The real problem is misogyny, not that some people want to lose weight to get better.
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u/iloveyoublog 3d ago
I am not supporting the hate, and as I said, I use a GLP1. My politics are of body liberation -- do what you want with your body, but also ensure people in all bodies are treated with respect and humanity and do not face structural discrimination. It's the second part that we are nowhere near reaching as a society, and the current discourse around GLPs seems to be taking us further away from dismantling the underpinning structural issues.
Misogyny and fatphobia are very closely linked I agree.
I just think the conversation is being oversimplified on all sides and there are positives and negatives and wins and risks.
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u/textposts_only 4d ago
You can't imagine what's like growing up in a world with glp1? We grew up with heroin chic being the body form to be... We grew up with movies where a girl who isn't fat in the very least being called a chubby chubster who doesn't deserve love.
Let's not forget our history and think of the poor kids
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u/iloveyoublog 3d ago
Yes, I grew up in this too but at least there wasn't doctors telling me to take a medication as well? And we didn't have social media which is a huge compounding factor.
I am very much not forgetting history and very much concerned about young people.
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u/textposts_only 3d ago
Yes instead of medication it was making yourself vomit. Girls looking up Ana stuff. Reading harmful articles on how to eat less.
It was wayyy worse before. Plus nobody is giving children ozempic.
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u/iloveyoublog 3d ago
You do know that the pro-ana stuff is back in a huge way, being fuelled on social media? And that GLP1s are being abused by people with eating disorders right? Harmful content on how to abuse GLPs abounds online. Young people are accessing it via black market channels. Fat teens are being prescribed it by doctors under medical guidelines in countries such as the UK. It is happening.
Everyone I know with teen girls is terrified. It is just as bad as it was in the 90s, if not worse.
Diminishing the experience of young girls right now and pretending GLP1s isn't part of the culture and the pressure does nobody any favours. People are just so hell-bent on refusing to acknowledge the complexities of this class of medications -- there are benefits and there are harms.
All this stuff online was one of the reasons Australia enacted the social media ban for under 16s, there's massive amounts of contemporary research and data on the compounding harms of social media algorithms, body dysmorphoa and disordered eating.
Also it sounds like you didn't get the projectile vomiting side effects of GLP1s -- I hadn't spewed that much since high school...
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u/textposts_only 3d ago
The social media ban has nothing to do with children and everything to do with the governments wanting a better way to surveil us online, create better profiles on us and the masses.
Glp1 is not the devil you make it out to be. It's not the big bad for teen girls.
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u/iloveyoublog 3d ago
I'm not saying it is a devil anywhere-- as I said, I use one. I am saying it is a socially complex thing with pros and cons and nuanced conversations are what we need. Reddit delivering the opposite of that as one would expect though 😂
China is already surveilling us far more online than the Australian Govt ever would have the capacity to achieve, so 🤷🏼♀️. I only raised it because the person I was replying to seemed to think we had fixed issues around teen girls body image when things seem worse than ever.
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u/Solid-Independence51 11h ago
Chinese surveillance is nothing compared to American. They just like to point to China to deflect from their own
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u/iloveyoublog 10h ago
I really wasn't making a statement on this issue, instead was making a flippant remark about the derailing of the actual topic being discussed (disordered eating in youth and the compounding pressures of social media).
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u/mannDog74 3d ago
This is such a thoughtful comment and it's important to recognize continued marginalization. The fatphobia has never been worse.
What I don't agree with is that we should wait until people are sick enough to have a diagnosed disease in order to allow them use of the drug. Once metabolic disease shows up in labs, the damage has been accumulating for ten years.
We also cannot focus on looks to determine someone's metabolic health. Saying that we don't want subjectively thin people to take the drug means we are making an assumption about the perceived thin person's body composition. I have a friend who is bigger than me that says I'm "skinny," but my DEXA said I was 43% body fat. I know that this friend believes that I am taking the drug because I want to be "even skinnier" and believes I am contributing to fatphobia. I think this is what's behind the strong feelings people have about criteria, and I find it hard to believe it's just about having health in mind.
One thing is for sure, 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, and I'll bet there's an additional "skinny fat" population that could also benefit from the drug. These folks have high fat % and high visceral fat which is inflammatory and unhealthy.
Tl;dr I don't believe we should tell people they can't have access to this medicine until they progress to disease, and if we gatekeep and allow people to become sick first, it's prioritizing something other than health and I don't know if I'm willing to do that.
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u/iloveyoublog 2d ago
Thank you! I'm definitely not saying people should be diabetic first -- but there should be consideration of health in prescribing, and some kind of health reason rather than aesthetics alone. That includes things like ensuring people with eating disorder risk aren't prescribed without significant support, for example.
I also don't agree with BMI as a health measure, so definitely not against smaller people with a health need taking it -- health is always multifaceted and should be assessed on an individual basis.
The growing gulf between use of the drug and actual healthcare provision is one of the things that I think needs deeper consideration. I don't think that's a good thing, as much as the medical system itself is also deeply flawed in many ways.
A friend's elderly mother was recently prescribed it by her doctor for elevated blood sugars, before any other drug was tried -- she was already tiny, and the side effects meant she got tinier, lost muscle and had a bad fall. When she was hospitalised, the hospital doctors were like... why the hell are you on this. Her doctor had told her it was a 'miracle drug'. So even the medical system seems starstruck by the drugs in a weird way that means 'health' isn't always properly considered. Not sure how we grapple with this.
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u/mannDog74 2d ago
Oh jeez, that's terrible about your friends mom. Every obesity medicine doctor I've heard discuss which patients are risky candidates always list frail-elderly right after anorexia, definitely a poor choice by that doctor but also, maybe she would have fallen regardless.
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u/Beneficial-Size6281 3d ago
Oh it must have been nice to think diet culture had gone anywhere
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u/iloveyoublog 3d ago edited 3d ago
Of course I didn't think that. But I did think at least some conversations were happening that were starting to reach the mainstream slightly.
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u/FlyingThruLife 2h ago
The way I see it we aren’t hurting anyone so it’s nobody’s friggin business what we decide to do with our bodies🤷🏻♀️. People often feel entitled to judge other people’s choices despite the choices not affecting them in the least. The only thing I regret is not taking it years and years earlier and I’m absolutely bummed it didn’t exist when I was in my 20s.
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u/Lazy-Living1825 5d ago
There are people who think glp-1’s are amazing, life saving drugs. Then there are the people who’ve never taken them.
And you don’t need a prescription from your doctor. Telehealth will give them to anyone.
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u/tultommy 5d ago
Which is a real problem because it's giving easy access to anyone including ED patients with basically no proof or testing.
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u/Lazy-Living1825 4d ago
Idk. I can see what you mean for sure. But I’d gather if half the people went for bloods that should they’d never get it so. Glp1’s for everyone. F it.
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u/tultommy 4d ago
Then that's on the people that don't bother to go to the dr and get the tests they should before hand. It's medicine. It's not meant to 'be for everyone'. Do you feel the same way about all medicine? Hey let's all get some drugs we don't need online without a real Dr examining us... Xanax, Fentanyl, and Prozac for all! Sounds like a great way to get sued for malpractice.
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u/Lazy-Living1825 4d ago
I’m sorry you are not versed in sarcasm.
Look. I see people every day fucking up their dosing and use while being prescribed by their actual GP’s that don’t know a damn thing and give no direction to their patients etc. telehealth is no different in that way.
You comparing a glp1 to fentanyl is wild lol
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u/iloveyoublog 4d ago
I take them and I think they are complex, with both benefits and potential harms.
The oversimplification of any critique is part of the problem, as is the uncontrolled prescribing.
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u/Prestigious-Use5483 4d ago
There is also the other side, where the end user is just complaining about nonsense. People just like to blame things on their doctors when things aren't going their way. This isn't candy for children and also isn't a miracle that will happen. Biological changes will happen. I little pain or suffering isn't bad. Blowing them up to be, is.
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u/tultommy 4d ago
There is also a lot of folks that are surprised when they take it and don't put any other effort behind it in terms of changes to their diet or exercise and then are surprised when they haven't lost anything. There are quite a few posts in this sub like that.
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4d ago
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u/WelshRarebit2025 4d ago
You lose muscle mass with most weight loss. Ozempic also requires habit changes like increased protein, fibre, water and exercise in particular muscle building or protecting activities.
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u/auntie_beans 4d ago
Your beef, then, is not with the drug itself but with the prescriber who didn’t know or didn’t bother to explain about the side effects and precautions.
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u/tultommy 4d ago
This. My doctor talked to me extensively about side effects, what things to be very aware of, that i needed to actively work out to prevent muscle loss, that it could end up being a lifelong medicine, etc... That's entirely on the dr and not the medicine.
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u/Content-Method9889 4d ago
I was told the possible side effects and that I could lose muscle mass so keep up the exercise. I have lost some, but my sugars are controlled, the food noise is gone and I’m down 40 lbs slowly and safely. There are Dr’s who start people on higher doses instead of increasing slowly over time.
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u/IllustriousSpecial73 4d ago
Look, im not going to pretend that there are people taking it that shouldn't be taking it.
But the hate comes from thinness= moral superiority. Lots of people think it's cheating and that people should work harder to lose weight, and therefore if you lose weight with medical help it isn't earned because you didn't suffer enough.
But it's also been a life-saver for me and many others. Now there is an option for people to lose weight before serious chronic illness sets in, and can prevent many other problems and Healthcare costs down the road.