There was a moment a couple of years ago, as weight-loss injections first erupted into popular consciousness, when it looked as though they couldn’t possibly endure. All right-thinking people were, it seemed, reflexively horrified by the suddenly rampant use and abuse of Ozempic and its compatriots by Hollywood elites. Disturbing side-effects, including increased risks of thyroid tumours and kidney damage were being reported, pharmaceutical companies were reporting shortages in the drugs for patients with diabetes, their originally-intended recipients. It was all “dystopian”, “a nightmare”, “like an episode of Black Mirror”. “Whatever happened to the body positivity movement?” we cried. Surely, we weren’t actually going to cross this frontier?
The answer, apparently, is yes we are – and with gusto. Over the last year, weight-loss jabs have been normalised to a previously inconceivable degree. The latest iteration of this came on Tuesday, when health secretary Wes Streeting wrote in a national newspaper that drugs like Ozempic or Mounjaro could be given to unemployed people to help them get back into work. Streeting said, rather crassly, that “widening waistbands” were placing a burden on the health service, and that nearly £300 million will be invested in trials for weight-loss jabs under a new partnership between the government and US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Thought to be the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, the money will also fund research into ways to tackle the UK’s obesity crisis.
Weight-loss injections are, of course, not necessarily inherently bad – when used safely, and by the appropriate recipients, they help people lose weight, can suppress alcoholism, reduce risks of heart attacks and improve overall health. And the UK certainly has a concerning, and very expensive, obesity problem. Novo Nordisk, the company which manufactures Ozempic, said last month that "patient safety is our top priority”.
Even more pernicious is the impact of all of this on the already noxious return of toxic diet culture
But there is something deeply uncomfortable about administering a drug which is essentially still in its infancy, to be mass test-run by the poorest in the country in order to make them more useful economic agents. The reasons that people are out of work are myriad and complex. Streeting’s unhelpful conflation of obesity with laziness is reminiscent of a punitive Noughties social milieu – the New Labour era of reality shows like Fat Families, Benefits Street, and the Jeremy Kyle Show which served to lump together the poor, the overweight and the out-of-work, into an underclass of “undesirables”.
But perhaps even more pernicious is the impact of all of this on the already noxious return of toxic diet culture. As access to these drugs becomes easier, it was inevitable that they would increasingly be marketed to, and used by, not just those struggling with obesity or diabetes, but everyone. A cadre of celebrities including Oprah, Kelly Clarkson, Whoopi Goldberg and Elon Musk have all espoused their benefits as a vanity project. They are available for anyone to buy in pharmacies like Superdrug, and stocked in the mini-bars of luxury hotel rooms. On TikTok, users wax lyrical about the drugs – #ozempic has more than 2.3 billion views on the site.
No woman I know – no matter how recovered, or how healthy our relationship to our bodies might be – can possibly be impervious to this constant noise. It infiltrates our subconscious, seeps in on a cellular level and warps our self-perception. When everyone around you suddenly seems to be dropping out of the battle against toxic skinny, it is easier just to give in too. It has happened to many of my friends – I can sometimes feel it happening to me. Even though the body positivity movement of the 2010s was far from a revolutionary rejection of unrealistic beauty standards, (I’m looking at you, BBLs) it did feel as though some gains were made. We were moving, albeit circuitously, in the right direction. With hindsight, it now looks like a transient blip in a relentless onslaught of torment.
I wonder, when the government gleefully signed off on this supposed panacea, if anyone considered how it might impact the between 1.25 million and 3.4 million people in the UK – and around 19 per cent of women – who are affected by an eating disorder? Or that anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness in the UK? If the concern is a crude one about resources, what about the £9.4 billion a year that eating disorders cost the NHS, a figure we never seem to hear about?
Weight-loss jabs might seem like an appealing quick fix for a cash strapped health service. They may bring more immediate gains than, say, investing in sports clubs or widening access to healthy foods in impoverished areas. But this is a ham-fisted and lazy approach, the long-term physical and psychological repercussions of which are unknown – and terrifying.
