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A year on Ozempic taught me we are thinking about obesity all wrong
Now is our chance to rethink the centuries-old stories we have told about obesity and weight loss.
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There are extraordinary benefits as well as disturbing risks associated with weight-loss drugs.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Johann Hari
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Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamt of shedding a lot of weight. So when I shrank from 92kg to 73kg in a year, I was baffled by my feelings. I was taking Ozempic, and I was haunted by the sense that I was cheating and doing something immoral.
I’m not the only one. In the US (where I now split my time), over 70 per cent of people are overweight or obese and, according to one poll, 47 per cent of respondents said they were willing to pay to take the new weight-loss drugs. It’s not hard to see why. They cause users to lose an average of 10 to 20 per cent of their body weight, and clinical trials suggest that the next generation of drugs (probably available soon) leads to a 24 per cent loss, on average. Yet as more and more people take drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, we get more confused as a culture, bombarding anyone in the public eye who takes them with brutal shaming.
