What it’s like being a thirtysomething on Ozempic

From an anonymous reader, a personal account.

A long-time reader of the newsletter reached out to me a few months ago wanting to share her perspective of being on the headline-making drug, Semaglutide, more commonly known as Ozempic, for weight reasons. Mostly to dispel some myths, and also to provide, well, a human voice to it, and to talk about the inner experience of it.

We chatted about the best way to do it — after some discussion, rather than a straight interview, we’ve shaped it into a personal account. After all, I had my own questions on her own experience!

This isn’t meant to be taken as medical advice, but purely a very tenderly written, personal take that she wanted to share.

Weight is complicated, which I love how she captured here — we know it’s meant to be just an arbitrary number, but there are still value judgements attached to it. And what do you do when your life has been burdened by such value judgements?

Please read this with love and kindness before commenting.

If this has encouraged you to take any steps about your health, please speak to a medical professional about it.

Buyenlarge ‘Weights’ by Johannes Vermeer

I can remember the first time I learned that weight wasn’t just a number, but something that could be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I was in early primary school, and someone in my class said ‘I bet you weigh XXkg.’ I can actually even tell you exactly where we were standing in the school grounds when she turned to say it. I remember being bewildered, because I had no idea what I weighed, and because scales weren’t a thing in my household. But despite my confusion, I knew from her tone that it was Bad with a capital ‘b’.

I’m not telling this story to blame the girl, because we all known if it hadn’t been that moment, it would have been another. As background, I was a young girl growing up in the 1990s-2000s in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. What my body looks like has always been made to feel like everyone’s business. And how it looks — that’s always been something which I have never felt I had any control over.

Around 2022 I had heard about Ozempic within my life. One of my oldest friends mentioned a diabetes drug her mum and brother were on. In turn, the mother had obtained it from Rose Bay via a recommendation from someone else. They were dropping kilograms speedily. Being the rulesiest rules follower that ever loved a rule, it didn’t even cross my mind that it might be something for me. In my book, weight loss was a gold star to be earned. It’s a reward for diligence. A prize for goodness.

A true Baader-Meinhof moment, I started to hear the whispers about this drug everywhere. And they were whispers. Even at the peak of the medical weight-loss media cycle, it was whispers. “Do you think she’s on it?’ ‘OMG shhh!!! But definitely! And her. She’s never looked like that.”

If you’re reading this, you don’t need me to tell you that body weight is an intensely personal and heavily loaded concept.

In the background of all of this, I had been working with my GP to find a way to manage my weight that made a difference physically, but that didn’t destroy me mentally. The holy grail.

Our appointments were once a month, and I’d be in tears to learn that despite my best efforts I had either not shifted down a single gram from where we started, or that, horror of horrors, I’d even gone up. When I say best efforts — I would show her my average step count: 12,000 a day at a minimum, even though I had a very high-profile [read: long hours] sit-down job. Through sobs I would tell her I was spending hundreds of dollars I didn’t have to spare on personal training sessions, because I knew the physics of it: it’s not just cardio, I needed to build muscle to burn more calories, and I needed to monitor every bite of food to make sure that was happening. I would prove this to her by showing her my notes app where I tracked what I ate. I was laying myself bare with the maths of weight loss, literally crying out for help.

For about six months, she would finish our appointments with a gentle “You know, there is a medicine we can try.” And every time I would completely close off. “No way. I couldn’t inject myself. That’s not for me. That’s for other people.” I was reading what we all had been reading — it was an experimental diabetes drug, and I was worried about the long-term side effects. I also didn’t want to see myself as someone who needed this kind of medication.

Then, one day, she challenged me. “If I were prescribing you any other medicine, you wouldn’t even question it. I am the doctor. You are the patient. I know this could help you. Forget the rest.”

You know how I feel about rules. That cracked it wide open for me.

I surrendered to the medical miracle. And now I’m a beautiful, perfect Barbie who hasn’t ever had a bad day since.

Lol. Not at all. But I do believe it’s a medical miracle. It’s been over two years since I’ve been on it and I plan to be on it for life.

When I started in March 2023, supply was low, and courtesy of those whispers, demand was high. You don’t need an economics degree to know that equals scarcity. That was mostly manageable, because my GP started me on the lowest dose, and we went really slowly with the increases. Those first magic pens lasted much longer at the beginning, even if I had to ring five or six chemists to find stock every time I needed another pen.

Cautiously we increased the dosage together. There were days when I felt like my stomach was trying to escape my body. And there were days when I had taken in so few calories, I thought I might faint. In news that surprises absolutely nobody, you can’t just stop eating. But you can’t eat a lot. And you definitely can’t overeat.

Eventually I began to learn the ebb and flow of my appetite as I moved through the week. Not injection day, but the two days after injection day — a coffee and a piece of toast would make me feel like I’d just finished Christmas lunch. Once, after a particularly stressful week, I ordered a pizza. Three pieces in, I was the fullest I’d been since I started taking it. Four pieces in, I was verging into self-harm territory. Five pieces… well. Not clever. That night and the next day… sincere apologies for the visual, but it was like I was auditioning for The Exorcist. My body said, “No, absolutely not, no way, get this out of me.”

Because my weight had yo-yoed so wildly since my teens, people noticed the weight loss, but just assumed I was ‘under control’ again.

There are people in my life who knew from the beginning, and there are people who I’ve told because I could see my own experience reflected in their struggles and frustrations. And there are people who I will never tell, because when I hear them talk about medicinal weight loss or weight in general, I know they will never understand. Some of these people are people I love endlessly. But weight is an intensely personal and loaded concept. My mum is one of those people. Because mother-daughter relationships… they’re complicated.

I can’t tell you how many kilos I’ve lost, because I don’t know. My ‘scale trauma’ has never dissipated, and it’s just not a piece of information my brain can deal with.

I do feel a lot better about my body now that I can have a level of confidence in the consistency this medicine has given me. And in my head? Being able to quiet over 20 years of persistent and unrelenting shame, panic and helplessness — I can’t tell you how that has changed how I move through the world.

I’m no longer terrified to ask for a specific size when I want to try something on. It was always a moment of panic. Just one of the many body-related micro panics I used to go through every day. Is that my size? How embarrassing if it doesn’t fit. How embarrassing if I, a fully- (or mostly) functioning adult, don’t even understand the bounds of my own body. Will I look deluded? Will I have to square my shoulders and breeze out of the change room with the tried-and-tested, “Not for me!”, unable to make eye contact with the effortlessly cool shop girlie who I just know will be wearing the too-small sympathy grimace.

What I can tell you is this medicine changed my life. When I read about how it might be able to help heroin users kick heroin, and alcoholics stay sober, I believe it with all my heart.

I am not a size zero. I’ve never wanted to be. But I am at relative peace with my body for the first time in my life — a state of mind I’d really never ever imagined would be possible.