Dear Ozempic: I Hate You. Here’s Why.

Celebrity endorsements! That Ozempic face! Easy weight loss! Yes, we’ve seen the ads, the Tik Tok videos and the People Magazine before and after’s. Evidently, Ozempic is “on trend” and it is clearly effective in terms of helping people lose weight. That much is not in question.

So then, what’s the problem? Isn’t rapid weight loss without all that dieting and exercising a good thing?

My answer is a resounding no.

As someone who has experienced an eating disorder, I see Ozempic all too clearly as the scam that it really is: just another way of deceiving women into thinking we aren’t good enough because we aren’t thin enough.

Just look at the ads, the enormous money put behind those ads and the enormous corporate profits – all due to the reframing of the sleepy diabetes drug Ozempic and its counterpart, Wegovy, as the way to obtain easy weight loss.

• A June 2023 NBC News report found more than 4,000 active U.S. Meta ad campaigns in the U.S. mentioning semaglutide, the drugs’ active ingredient, making the ads for this “miracle drug” even more ubiquitous than Viagra advertising.
• In September 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, overtook the iconic luxury brand, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, as Europe’s most valuable company … currently valued at $425.4 billion.

Novo Nordisk certainly found a sweet spot: the desire for people (overwhelmingly women) to be MORE – and they have capitalized on it. The problem is that we don’t need to be more. We are enough already.

If paying over $1,000 per month for something you don’t need because a company is banking on our society’s toxic view of women to shame you isn’t bad enough, well there’s more.

There are real, permanent health risks associated with the use of Ozempic and Wegovy and they aren’t pretty: excessive vomiting, nausea and even gastroparesis, which is paralysis of the digestive system.

Please, stop this insanity. If you have taken Ozempic or Wegovy for weight loss and become ill, we want to hear from you.

And consider spending that $1,000 per month on a Louis Vuitton purse instead. It’s much less costly.