I come from a long line of dieting women. I inherited my body as a project (a disappointing, crazy-making, unnecessary, time-sucking one at that). GLP-1s have been the most recent tool for trying to tame a wild body.
By the time I started to question why everyone expected a thin frame from me, something I had never had and felt deep down I had little control over, I’d already internalized too much. Thinness and fatness were shorthand, shaping who is seen as disciplined and virtuous and who is immediately viewed as lazy and subhuman.
From school recess and first dates to interviews and board rooms, the message was blaring and it got into my bones. Thinness served as a sorting mechanism, a prerequisite to receiving kindness, grace, and upward mobility. All I had to do to get it was spend every waking minute of my life thinking about it and trying to achieve it. That’s not so bad when you consider the alternative—a lifetime of fighting fat bias that shows up in job opportunities, pay equity, medical treatment. I learned the hard way that all the trying couldn’t save me from that alternative.
In recent years there’s been a lot more written about the origin of idealized thinness. The usual suspects are involved: white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy got the party started before passing on the torch to unchecked capitalism and religious moralism. As soon as you start to do any digging, it becomes immediately clear that this obsession wasn’t accidental, and its ability to shape-shift and evolve isn’t either.
I’ve now lived through a few iterations of anti-fat ideology. I came of age in the willpower era, watching Oprah wheel out a barrow of “lost fat” and Jillian Michaels scream at fat people that looked like me on The Biggest Loser. The wellness era led with a little more softness (one may even call it goopy), focusing more on clean eating, rejecting our previous world of Snackwell cookies and margarine in favor of RX bars and ghee. This current biohacking era has been ramping up nationally over the past decade: macros, collagen, keto. And also Oura rings and Apple watches. Data dressed as discipline—the emperor’s new clothes. Like technology and gen AI, diet culture is evolving exponentially in a way that isn’t being controlled or thoughtfully regulated. It absorbs critique, updates accordingly, and never relinquishes its hold; the tools evolve, the expectation of thinness as the right way to be stays the same.
Trying to correct my body’s “wrongness” through yo-yo dieting has been the backdrop of my entire life. I went to Weight Watchers with my mom at 8. I learned as a child to drink water to stave off hunger, and that eating bread was basically eating cake. I fell asleep imagining cutting off all my fat. I internalized that the only compliments I got were when I shrunk myself. My disordered eating was often explicitly encouraged and applauded, by doctors, by family, by culture at large. And the silence when it all inevitably came back again was deafening.
In my 20s, I lived with a thin friend and we did everything together, including having a very similar diet and exercise routine. During that particular down-drop of the yo-yo, I started grappling with why I always hit a weight-loss wall, and why that wall kept me visibly fat no matter what a good little dieter I was. I overachieved in every part of my life, but I had to live in a body that people read as lazy. It was unfair, and I was starting to get pissed.
The rise of online information gave me the proof I had always been looking for: I read Kate Harding, became more familiar with fat activism, dug into more history about nutrition and the politics around food and wellness, read studies that showed diets don’t work long-term most of the time. The math around “calories in, calories out” made no sense so I wanted to understand the science.
Why couldn’t I ever get thin? Why couldn’t I keep weight off in general? My body just wouldn’t cooperate, as if it had its own logic that diet culture refused to acknowledge. I felt like I was always explaining or defending it. But diet culture still won out, even in the face of facts, science, and lived experience, over and over again.
I got on the keto train very early, and listened to niche podcasts to try to understand what exactly was happening in my body. Down in the rabbit hole, I learned that John Kellogg was basically the first diet influencer and that a lot of what we believe and eat is based on old (wrong) information, government subsidies and corporate-sponsored studies, and a larger societal disconnect from personalized medicine that has led to a one-size-fits-all approach to an extremely varied species.
Doing keto long-term reminded me that I can restrict harder than most people I know, but remain fat—discipline was not the issue. The keto community had a high concentration of gym bros and a low concentration of Lindas so when I hit a wall again, I hit an information dead end too. Around that time I took a role heading up brand copy at a wellness startup founded by some aforementioned gym bros. I didn’t realize at the time that it was like an alcoholic taking a job at a bar (full of gym bros).
The company culture was obsessed with optimization—we were drinking bullet coffee, intermittent fasting, testing out all the biohacking trends. I say “we” but I was just the fat woman writing content. Despite my trying, I was never “one of [them]! one of [them]!” in their eyes, and I felt that every day of the two years I worked there.
Still, I thought I needed to be there. When writing about food, especially for a national audience, I didn’t want to add to the diet-culture din. I was the one editing “obesity epidemic” out of investor decks and trying to advertise a “healthy” food brand without centering weight loss. I took on too much of that responsibility while the pressure and bias I felt as a fat woman there continued to build.
When they laid me off and I sued them for discrimination, the weight of my experiences with anti-fat bias became too heavy for me to keep carrying, and I decided definitively to never diet for weight loss again. What was the point when being my smallest self couldn’t save me from the outside world? As expected, weight came back quickly, and for the first time in my life, the yo-yo was suspended in the air with no plan to swing back down. Soon I was larger than I had ever been, but unwilling to sacrifice my mental health again.
My blood work showed elevated A1C a few years later and the timing felt uncanny—GLP-1 drugs were emerging as a weight-loss tool along with being a diabetes miracle drug. Even though I told my doctor about my history of disordered eating and my recent recovery from a lifetime of dieting, she was more focused on potential weight loss than blood sugar. Still, she was finally acknowledging that weight loss is largely genetic and hormonal, and that I’d need to be on this medicine for life. Finally hearing a doctor say that was huge.
Mounjaro felt revelatory. It confirmed what I’d felt all along: something in my body wasn’t working as well as it could be, and fixing it through personal willpower was never on the table. It gave me food freedom. It gave me relief that I wouldn’t have to experience diabetes the way my grandma and dad had—I’ll never be on insulin, for example.
In the back of my mind—the way, way back—I let myself hope. What if this can actually change my body without the mental anguish? The lifelong shame, the constant bias, the need to prove my worth and humanity. Who wouldn’t want to live in a body that feels more accepted by everyone you encounter?
Mounjaro advertises up to 20-percent body-weight reduction. I lost close to that percentage in the first year or so. Then it stopped. Most has come back. Either way, with or without the max percentage loss, I was always visibly fat. After three years, it’s finally sunk in: If I’m not getting thin on this miracle drug, I’m not getting thin. It was the last and final realization/data/experience I needed to understand deep down that this is my body; I will no longer police it, I will no longer deprive it. It will change and fluctuate, and my job is to nourish and care for it.
In that same three years, the cultural meaning of (and discourse around) these drugs shifted quickly. At first it felt like taking them required justification in the fat acceptance world, along with broader sentiments leftover from the willpower era (drugs=easy copout). Online discourse moved toward optimization as more and more people had access: how to maximize its appetite suppression and lose as much weight as possible. I couldn’t find one Reddit thread that didn’t look like the same old diet rhetoric. Thin people I knew began both taking it and talking about it casually.
When it first blew up, I was hopeful GLP-1s would finally expose the biological complexity of weight regulation. I was naive to assume that diet culture would die a slow death, or fatphobia would face a reckoning. The thinness hierarchy isn’t getting dismantled, it’s just getting modernized. And if biotechnology increases proximity to thinness, thinness becomes less a biological wildcard and more a marker of access and privilege. (As we know, access has never been evenly distributed.) We’re learning the hard way that these kinds of optimization tools are just making our existing systems of oppression more efficient.
Similar to plastic surgery reforming what we view as expected upkeep, pharmaceutical thinness is now a first-line diet lever. The narrative has quickly shifted from “try harder” to “optimize toward perfection.” The underlying (and incorrect) ideology has gotten a facelift: with the right tools and capital, any body can be engineered into a worthy body, and the definition of what’s worthy is still as mercurial as it is unforgiving.
There are no tools or public judgments that are going to tame my body into submission and make me thin. Even at the pharmaceutical edge of intervention, my body defends a high weight range fiercely. (Which is probably why my family’s recent line of dieting women existed in the first place—I am pretty confident that the blueprint of my body, a shadow of my ancestors, survived the early days because of the ability to hold onto fat.)
I can now easily manage my blood sugar, build strength, live without obsessing about every bite of food I may or may not put in my mouth. GLP-1s have proved that fatness can coexist with metabolic health, as many of us knew and can now demonstrate through our labs and data.
If weight regulation can be pharmaceutical today, it may be preemptive tomorrow: the more hackable our bodies become, the higher the likelihood that we see any deviation from the ideal as personal failure. (I can’t let my mind wander too far into a world where the tools are sophisticated enough to genetically eradicate my body type altogether.) Powerful tools will continue to be developed, but what will they focus on eliminating first? If we remain feverishly committed to engineering fatness away, we’ll have more proof that the expectation of thinness was never a neutral health goal as much as a societal sorting mechanism.
Biotechnology proved fat activists have been right all along, but culture still refuses to accept the proof. Bodies have logic, limits, patterns, and each one is uniquely complicated; yet the expectation of thinness for all is only increasing. (“The ‘90s are BACK!”) There is no nuance in a thin/fat binary—you’re thin enough or you’re not thin enough. For those of us who have spent our lives pulling every lever to escape our fat bodies, it’s time to stop trying to reach for the halo of thinness. Diet culture continues to evolve by keeping it just out of reach.