I took my first dose of Wegovy on a warm Sunday morning in May 2024. I swabbed my stomach with an alcohol pad, pushed down on the autoinjector, and waited for the cataclysmic side effects I'd read about on social media: life-shattering nausea, vomiting myself inside out, biblical proportions of diarrhea. Nothing happened. I felt...good? No, I felt great. For the first time in 20 years, I had energy, and most importantly, no pain. I've been feeling great, mentally and physically, for the first time since I was a teen, and I feel like I can't share that joy because apparently Wegovy is a deal breaker. It's hard to find a space where someone isn't loudly sharing their non-medical opinion on GLP-1 weight loss while gleefully predicting (and sometimes wishing) long-lasting negative effects on its users. The last time I was this pain-free, I was on fentanyl in a recovery room after major abdominal surgery, although with the way people act about GLP-1s, I feel like they'd prefer I just kept taking the fentanyl.
In an April 20th essay for the Cut, writer Sophia Ortega shares that she ghosted a close friend upon discovering the friend was on a GLP-1 medication. Though the friend had hidden the prescription specifically to avoid upsetting her, the article focuses on Ortega unearthing the secret and cutting ties. I’m not the friend in Ortega’s "Losing My Friend Over Wegovy" article, but I might as well be.
One thing I learned as a chronically ill woman who grew up as a fat little girl is that my existence constantly triggers other people’s trauma. They don’t want to be fat like me. They don’t want to be sick like me (despite the latter influencing the former). I use two injectables: Enbrel (for my autoimmune diseases) and Wegovy (for my weight and inflammation control). I’ve been on Enbrel for over 20 years, and in those intervening decades I’ve stopped counting the number of people who have to immediately tell me they’re afraid of needles or can’t help but comment on me eating in public. Oh, you’re eating lunch early. Didn’t you just have a snack? I just can’t snack all day. Good for you, Linda. But if I don’t eat this yogurt right now, I’m going to barf undigested pills onto your desk.
Either way, I present my existence as a fat woman, or as an ill woman, or as a fat and ill woman, someone is commenting on my health, my body, and the choices I make to stay alive and healthy, offended that I’m not asking their opinion or holding space for their trauma first.
I have MAS (Multiple Autoimmune Syndrome) meaning I test positive for three or more autoimmune diseases. My lucky combination includes rheumatoid arthritis, polymyositis, and Hashimoto’s. All of these diagnoses include chronic pain, exhaustion, weight gain, and joint damage. All of the medications that treat them also have weight gain or increased appetite as a primary side effect.
Just one of these autoimmune diseases can reduce my lifespan by 10 years and have a serious impact on my ability to retain housing, a job, and medical coverage, not to mention my ability to maintain friendships and relationships. Being in constant chronic pain makes me seek out easy dopamine as part of pain management — for some people in my position that would be drugs or alcohol, for me it was binge eating and high-calorie food. Binge eating would cause me to spiral and then hurt myself working out. I'd crash diet and lose 40 pounds and then gain back 60.
I’m 41. I lost two decades to extreme fatigue, brain fog, and most of all, chronic, daily, debilitating pain in my joints and muscles. I do not have wild clubbing stories from my 20s, but I can tell you the best heating pad for what ails you at 50 paces.
It’s not a life I would have chosen for myself. It’s not a life I’d choose for anyone. While Ortega described the universal feeling women have about food, hunger, and an obsession to be smaller, be less, in my experience to be fat is to do nothing right ever: lose weight but not like that, and don’t do it around my boyfriend because I can tell you want to steal him, and for god’s sake, take everyone else’s trauma and eating disorder into account before you do lose weight.
The article highlights a bigger problem we have in America: the inability to let go of main character syndrome. Not everything is about you. It does not matter how hard you virtue signal, Batman is still fictional.
I didn’t tell anyone I was starting a GLP-1 for this exact reason. I didn’t want anyone’s non-medical opinions and unexamined fat-bias to cloud my judgment. Losing weight for me isn’t about having "Ozempic Allegations" or getting a revenge body or whatever word salad we use to accuse people of something nefarious even when we’re not sure what we’re accusing them of. I’m chronically ill. I have a revenge body. It’s been trying to get revenge on me for years.
GLP-1s are currently being studied as potential treatment options for patients with autoimmune disease. Within two weeks of starting Wegovy, I was able to swim at least three days a week. That was a far cry from barely being able to walk half a mile and then passing out on the couch for hours on end. I picked up hobbies I’d abandoned. We got a puppy. I thought I’d lose weight, not get my life back as I knew it. My hair is growing back thicker after years of medication and disease-induced loss. My dentist was very jazzed at how healthy my gums looked at my last dental appointment, which is uncomfortably telling.
It’s infuriating that medical fatphobia has fueled the overprescription of GLP-1s, causing shortages for those who need them. These are not good enough reasons to demand that consenting, informed adults explain their private medical decisions to make you feel better.
COVID showed us how quickly medical misinformation can spread and how that misinformation can prevent people from getting lifesaving care. Just as I wouldn’t advise someone to forgo treatment for mental illness, addiction, or reproductive health, it’s not my place to discourage anyone from having an informed discussion with a trusted healthcare provider about weight loss.
Allow me to answer some of the more burning GLP-1 questions I get...
Where’s Your Body Positivity? GLP-1s Trigger My Eating Disorder
GLP-1 Medications Have Horrible Side Effects That Will Make You Sick
You’re Just Being Lazy
You’ll Have to Take a GLP-1 for the Rest of Your Life
GLP-1s Have a Black Box Warning
GLP-1s Haven’t Been Studied Long Enough, They Only Just Discovered It
I still have days where I feel like a haunted marionette made out of razor wire and bad thoughts. Now with Wegovy as part of my treatment plan, flares and bad pain days are fewer and much more manageable. My side effects are minimal to none, and yes, I’m losing weight on my terms in a healthy way, monitored by medical professionals I trust.
We’re all getting too comfortable expecting the world to shape itself around our traumas, treating the people in our lives like dolls in a dollhouse instead of individuals with separate needs from our own. To the dumped friend on Wegovy, congrats on losing the dead weight. I love that for you.
