The Celebrity Ozempidemic (with Aubrey Gordon)

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I am so happy that you're here.

This is going to be thorny.

This is going to be a thorny one.

Is that how I want to start it?

Do I want to scare people away?

Not really.

Ozempic, the word that brings up a million and one feelings from everybody at this point.

It means something bigger than itself.

It's like the way that Google is to search and Kleenex is to tissue.

Ozempic means a whole number of things and it's weight loss, it's inequality, it's celebrity culture, it's capitalism.

Today I just want to jump into the deep end and see how we fare.

Quick content warning before we get into today's episode.

Today, we're going to be talking about obviously Ozempic.

We're going to be talking about weight loss drugs and body image image and diet culture and eating disorders.

And if that is something that for whatever reason is not safe for you to listen to an hour of content about, totally understand.

Take care of yourself.

We will see you at the next one.

There is nobody who I would rather talk about this with than the one and only Aubrey Gordon, who is here with us today.

I am so, so excited.

Aubrey is an author.

She has written two books.

One is called What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About About Fat, and the other is You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People.

She is very notably to me a podcaster at her show Maintenance Phase, the critically acclaimed maintenance phase.

Maintenance Phase is a podcast that if you've never listened to it before, I am jealous of you because you can go and listen to all the episodes for the first time.

It's a podcast about, you know, debunking diet culture, wellness, fads, and listening to maintenance phase, which I started doing a couple years ago, is really, and I have not told Aubrey this, but it's really like the reason that I wanted to make a podcast.

Oh my God.

I didn't know that a podcast could be so well done.

And to me, maintenance phase continues to be like the north star of this medium.

I'm so happy that you're here today.

I'm so delighted to be here and to be like lavished with praise.

That was incredible.

Thank you so much.

And yeah, I'm like over the moon to be here aubrey today we are talking about as i've mentioned the drug and cultural phenomenon of ozempic oh

ozempic

first and foremost when i say the word ozempic what first comes to mind to you on this afternoon in june of 2024 I mean, I would say less than coming to mind more coming to body is just like full body clinch.

The thing that comes to mind at this point, I would say a lot of like internet spats come to mind.

A lot of sort of body surveillance comes to mind.

There's a lot of speculation about who is and is not on Ozempic and whether that is or is not a virtuous way to lose weight.

And I think more than anything else, Ozempic, like any sort of like quote-unquote miracle weight loss drug or quote-unquote miracle diet or whatever, any sort of weight loss method just becomes a gigantic screen for all of us to project our assumptions and beliefs and judgments onto.

And I feel like that's the moment we're in right now is everyone's projecting hardcore and we haven't stepped back enough to say, oh, wait a minute.

Some of this might be my stuff.

We know this is a thorny topic.

I emailed Aubrey and I was like, I would like to do an episode about Ozempic and the celebrity Ozempic discourse.

And the first thing that she responded to me was, I will do it with you, but you have to know this will get a million and one reactions and you have to be prepared for it.

I think that I am.

I also think that, you know, I was thinking about how this podcast has come together.

And one of the first episodes that I did was about the politics of Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift is another person who

not to compare directly Taylor Swift to Ozempic, but like you mention Taylor Swift and it's just so charged and people similarly have a million and one opinions.

And I was so scared of approaching the politics and feminism of Taylor Swift with any sort of like firm point of view that I just did that episode.

It's the one episode that I regret.

Not

doing, but doing, in my opinion, kind of a disservice because it is fascinating.

And I think I was so scared of getting any sort of backlash about it that I just

listening back to that episode, I was like, damn, this was such an interesting topic.

And I wish I had the balls at the time to just like say how I felt about it and, you know, added something to the conversation.

And so that is, that's what we're going to try to do here.

I'm here for it.

I know you famously don't hold back.

I have been known for saying a lot of things and sometimes more than I maybe would have been well advised.

Before we enter the messiness of the celebrity discourse, I feel we must establish what is Ozempic, Wagovi, Manjaro, Semaglatide.

I think everybody knows that these are like code names for an injection that makes you lose weight.

But on like a basic scientific level, could you explain what is going on here?

Ozempic is a brand name.

It seems important to start out with sort of like real basics.

Ozempic is a brand name for one specific medication that is diagnosed for people with type 2 diabetes.

It was designed and first brought to market for people with type 2 to manage their blood sugar.

And the sort of findings around that initially were that for folks who had diabetes and sort of high blood sugar that was resistant to other forms of medication and treatment, this one actually really, really, really did the trick for folks.

So when folks talk about sort of a miracle drug on the diabetes front, they are not lying.

It's a humongous breakthrough in diabetes care.

The active sort of ingredient in each of these are what are called GLP-1s, glucagon-like peptide one, just to get real boring on the language real fast.

It's fine.

We're going to be talking about the Kardashians soon, but you have to sit tight for the science for one minute.

You have to hear me say glucagon.

Yeah.

So there are a number of these.

They're called GLP-1 agonists.

Ozempic is one.

We govie is the version that's sold for weight loss on that one.

Rebelsis, Manjaro, Victoza, there are lots and lots and lots of these.

But basically, if you're hearing about an injection for weight loss, it's probably one of these GLP-1 agonists, right?

Essentially, what they do

is

they adjust your hormones.

Sorry, let me take that again.

Oh, that's like the grinder notification sound.

Is there really?

Essentially, what GLP-1s are doing is they are addressing a hormonal shift for diabetic people, but also for people who are seeking to lose weight now that essentially prompts your brain to think you are full earlier than it would have prior.

It's a big shift in weight loss.

That weight loss, I think it's important to note, is a side effect of a treatment that was designed for diabetes.

I'm sure we'll get into that.

But yeah, that's essentially what they are.

And the thing to know is that since We Govi was introduced for weight loss and these GLP ones were sort of beginning to be acknowledged as weight loss drugs, they have been pretty consistently in shortage for people who have diabetes.

So the rush of people who are excited about weight loss led to selling out of Wegovi and the sort of on-label use versions of the drug.

And that started spilling into folks getting prescriptions off-label for Ozempic and for the versions that are approved for diabetic people.

It has been a big hullabaloo on a cultural level, on a sort of care provision level, and on a celebrity level.

Boy, oh boy, we get this like perfect storm, right?

Of sort of making medications available, the sort of excitement around a new pharmaceutical and around the dream of becoming eat whatever you want and still stay thin, right?

It's like every 80s infomercial.

all over again.

Right, which this isn't even that.

This isn't actually an eat whatever you want and continue to lose weight drug.

This is, as you mentioned, this is a drug that makes you less hungry.

And I think the other thing is, this is like a common misconception that persists around Ozempic is that folks, I think, think that you can take it, get down to your goal weight, and then stop taking it and stay at that goal weight.

Just to be really, really clear, if you would like to sustain weight loss on any of these sort of injectables, that means, according to all the research we've got for pretty much everybody, that means taking them forever.

That when you stop taking these drugs, the weight comes back.

And I think one of the other things that has been very sort of front and center in this conversation is that they are medications that are not without side effects, right?

That for folks who take these medications, the nausea, the vomiting, the sort of GI side effects can be really significant.

That combined with the cost can be real drivers for folks to drop off of these meds.

Okay, so I want to, let's just get into the fun stuff.

We don't have to like, let's do it.

We don't have to stay in science forever.

That never did anybody any good.

When do we get to talk about Kardashians?

Exactly.

Like, we all know why we're here.

No, Aubrey, you know I'm kidding.

Listen, I'm here to talk about Chloe Kardashian.

I'm not done exercising my feelings about revenge body.

So

the boom of Ozempic has yielded some pretty fucking wild claims, conclusions, advertising, discourse.

And so one of the things that I was like, all right, it's podcast time for this topic is I was scrolling.

Fuck me.

I was scrolling on Instagram.

And you know how sometimes like between Instagram stories, you'll get ads.

I get this one from, I guess, a gay-oriented men's health clinic here in New York advertising Ozempic.

And are you ready for this?

Probably not, but let's go.

It's a rainbow pride flag in front of a picture of a shirtless torso with with this man holding his stomach weekly ozempic shots be your leanest for the parade half off ozempic per injection during pride month gotta get that parade body

you know how in the community we're all talking about everyone's body at the parade yeah i'm like god can we get like can we just can we leave the parade alone

basically so yes there's the there's the pride discount for ozempic which I'm a 25-year-old gay man.

I have struggled with my body image and, you know, my relationship to all of these things for as long as I've been an adult and even before that.

And this just felt like the newest and most bizarre iteration of like, you're making me think about something I don't want to think about.

Happy Pride Month.

$90 injections.

I would absolutely take the like postmates bottom friendly menu over if we're going for pride promotions.

if if I knew two years ago when the postmates bottom-friendly menu came out for pride that two years later we'd have pride Ozempic, honey, I would have never complained about the bottom menu.

Totally, totally, totally.

That's right.

That's right.

That makes me sad and also feels like predictable.

I read an article for the show at one point, really surprisingly sort of fantastic reporting and analysis from Christianity Today.

And it was about sort of this tendency in contemporary evangelical spaces to have like Bod for God or like, what would Jesus eat?

or any of the sort of like workout and diet programs.

And the closing of this story was like, does this have anything to do with theology or your religious beliefs?

Or is it just a workout that somebody slapped a Jesus sticker on?

It really seems like just a workout that somebody slapped a Jesus sticker on.

And I feel that way about sort of like queer promos for Ozempic, where I'm like, yeah, they're trying to sell it everywhere all the time to everyone.

So just by the rules of probability, sometimes it will show up with a rainbow flag slapped on.

I hate that there are enough queer promos for Ozempic that you have a feeling about them.

If you're going to advertise Ozempic, just leave the gaze out of it.

Please.

Totally.

We didn't ask for this.

Actually, sorry, a lot of us did.

Whoops.

Oh, god damn it.

the meat of the episode i feel like as in many issues especially in america where we just have this fixation on celebrity because we don't have the royal family we have the kardashians i feel celebrities become these like fictional characters that we project our anxieties and all of our cultural tensions onto you know we're talking about lana del ray's body and we're talking about oprah's body and we're talking about the chloe kardashian's body instead of talking about our own and that's just one example, but it's like we talk about the world and how we feel about it through these like little chess pieces in Hollywood.

Never has that been more true than with the issue of Ozempic.

I feel really similarly about Ozempic or about any sort of like miracle weight loss quote unquote method is it just becomes this giant screen for people to project their conflicted feelings onto and their weird misunderstandings about weight loss onto and their judgments about fat people onto and their judgments about thin people onto, right?

That it just becomes like Project Fest 2024 is where it feels like we are right now.

Between the sort of amount of projecting that happens through weight loss discourse and the amount of projecting that happens through celebrity discourse.

It's a real situation we're in.

We're in a real little pressure cooker over here.

I think a lot about the 2000s.

I mean, that was such a heightened, aggressive time for like celebrity media culture with the advent of like Perez Hilton and the paparazzi and Britney Spears.

And like, I think all the time about how like someone like Britney Spears' body or Jessica Simpson's body and the mom jeans was discussed.

And it's, we look on that as a culture with so much disdain now.

And we're also

doing the exact same thing in real time over and over again to like every woman.

It's Renee Zellweger getting hounded for her looks for years and then allegedly getting plastic surgery and now getting hounded for people's belief that she got plastic surgery, right?

Like it is the sort of colossal no win that like anybody who's not a gender conforming cis dude gets.

And honestly, frankly, plenty of gender conforming cis dudes get that garbage too.

Even then, Travis Kelsey is getting body shamed.

I mean, if Taylor Swift's hot football player cis white dude boyfriend is getting body shamed, what does that leave for the rest of us?

We're going to organize the following conversation into into a few different micro case studies with different celebrities and their experiences with people discussing them and Ozempic at great length.

I was like doing research for this episode and there's like so many listicles about like

everything every celebrity has said about Ozempic.

This is not going to be that.

Like I don't care what every celebrity has said about Ozempic.

I read a couple of those in advance of this.

I was like, oh shit.

I have not been paying attention to the celebrity side of this.

So I should like look into the celebrity side of it.

And what came up was like page after page after page of these listicles of just like Gabrielle Union being like, I don't take it.

And then Sharon Osborne being like, I took it too much.

And then like

Mark Wahlberg being like, it's fine, but get in the gym.

And you're like, so everyone's just saying the thing that they always say?

Okay, got it.

I'm glad Mark Wahlberg's position on Ozimpic has been clarified.

The episode is over.

Roll the credits.

It would have been confusing.

You would have been like, wait a minute, does he think you should get in the gym or not?

It is a pretty well understood and unfortunate fact at this point that if you are using the internet, your data is going somewhere that you are not aware of.

That newsletter or discount opportunity that you signed up for with your email, honey, your email was being sold to 100 different companies when you did that.

And that is why you are getting spam emails forever until you die.

But what if you could get a friend who would go to all of those different companies and data brokers and ask each of them to remove your information from their system, which is something that you have the right to do, but if you tried to do it on your own, would take like the rest of your life to attempt?

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And they reached out to me and sold me scammy health insurance.

There is a much longer story there that I have considered making a whole episode about.

Long story short, I gave 500 of my dollars that I will never get back to a homophobic Christian health share ministry.

To this day, I am both embarrassed and angered about this.

But you know what could have prevented it?

If I had had Incogni.

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I signed up for Incogni and within 48 hours they had sent out like over 100 different letters to all of these data brokers and they keep me updated on how the requests for each one of those data removal processes are going.

It is shockingly easy to use in my experience.

I just signed up with my email and Incogni got to work on making sure that I do not fall for another health insurance scam, which yes, maybe part of it was my fault, but part of it wasn't.

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Thank you so much to Incogni for sponsoring today's episode.

And now let's get back to the show.

So just a couple months ago in April, Lana Del Rey headlined Coachella.

She wore this like beautiful sequin blue dress.

She entered on a motorcycle, which was so fucking cunt.

She she played this like iconic greatest hits performance.

Billie Eilish had a cameo.

It went totally viral a million times over.

She sounded great.

She looked beautiful.

Almost all of the discourse around this performance was about her weight.

Lana DeRay, like any woman who's been in the public eye for more than a few years, which she has been for over a decade now, her body has changed a number of times.

There is always attention drawn to that.

And whatever, the point is, she came out at this performance and she was thin, thinner than she has been in previous years, looked similar to how she did when she came into the public, when she was in her early 20s, whatever.

Who cares?

A lot of people.

There were immediately all of these tweets, which I don't know, this probably surprises nobody who's been on the internet ever, but there were immediately all these tweets who were like,

this is a quote from one particularly viral tweet.

Lana is skinny again.

We are so back.

That's a normal amount of pressure to put on the appearance of one person's body.

And there were also just a lot of, like a lot of commentary of like, she looks great again.

You know, she looks, Lana looks beautiful again.

And it's like, okay, Lana Del Rey has looked the same the whole time.

The one variable here is her weight.

So it's like, what are we talking about, really?

Yeah, I mean, the degree to which and the readiness with which people tell on themselves around weight loss stuff is really through the roof where you're like, yeah, there's one difference.

We can all see the one difference.

It's not, this is not sort of like, you're not covering your ass the way that you think you might be covering your ass.

The conversation, though, immediately, as with any celebrity, weight loss over the last like two years has been, it immediately becomes like, well, is she or isn't she on Ozempic?

And it becomes this like really weird witch hunt that we've all seen.

If you're listening to this podcast, you've seen this play out in some way or another, whether it's with friends in real life or on Twitter or Instagram in the comments.

Everybody's talking about, well, is she on Ozempic?

As this discourse is happening around her body for no reason, Lana Del Rey posts, you know, like a photo dump on Instagram, as the kids say.

She posts a bunch of unrelated pictures.

And one of those pictures is a selfie where she's wearing a sweatshirt and it has the dog pound logo on it.

Dog pound is like, it's just a workout class, basically.

It's like a chain of workout, like luxury workout classes.

The fact that she was wearing a sweatshirt with the workout class logo on it sparked discourse of its own that then like people online and also like people were writing articles like Lana Del Rey clarifies how she lost all that weight.

Boy, oh boy, oh boy.

I want to send you a tweet.

I just opened another thing that I thought was you, and it's not.

It's an ad for flavored oxygen.

Not me, but we could talk about that in the next episode.

It's apparently pink grapefruit flavored.

I am looking at what appears to be an Instagram post from Lana Del Rey's Instagram account and her torso in a sweatshirt that says dog pound on it.

Just an aggressively normal outfit that anyone might throw on on any given day.

Along with that picture, there's a tweet that says, she's shutting down the Ozempic allegations.

She said, no, bitch, I did that.

And then there are three flexing emojis.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'm tired.

What's your reaction to this?

Well, this isn't a person shutting down anything.

It's a person wearing a shirt.

We're in this really weird sort of moment where it feels like people are watching celebrities like Instagram posts and they're watching tabloid coverage like they're watching like, I don't know what, stranger things and they're looking for like Easter eggs or something where they're like, someone must have planted something in here for me to find that will unlock the whole mystery.

And I'm like, no, no, Lana Del Rey is a human person.

who hasn't answered a question because you haven't asked it of her.

Maybe if you had a direct conversation, you could get things sorted out.

And also, don't have a fucking direct conversation.

Her body just is what it is.

Leave people alone.

This is an intense amount of pressure to put on one person's appearance, outfit choices, all of that sort of stuff.

What do you make of this like...

congratulatory tone though because the idea and i'm sure you've seen this with like a bunch of celebrity ozempic discourse maybe is that there's this like this idea of like beating the ozempic allegations because you did it the real way.

Yeah, it's the same reason that the biggest loser became a big hit for such a long time, right?

Which is you're literally beating me at my own outline.

I have oh no, is it in your outline?

It is in my no, Aubrey, you're so intuitive.

Go, go.

Uh,

the distinguishing characteristic between losing weight, quote unquote, the right way, and losing weight, quote unquote, the wrong way, is just how much do people see you suffering?

Yeah, that's it.

That's literally the only distinguishing characteristic.

And people get very resentful of the idea that anyone, but particularly fat people, could become thin or could lose weight, or frankly, could not lose weight and could not become thin and could do all of that without performing for thin people.

And that is like a thing that people who are not fat are used to is being sort of the audience for a performance from fatter people and thinner people alike about how our bodies came to be, about how much suffering and work went into it.

We wait for a bunch of beats around people's Protestant work ethic.

We wait for a bunch of beats around people's sort of like wearing a hair shirt, right, and suffering for their weight loss.

And if that doesn't happen, we treat it like it doesn't count,

right?

Because in our sort of cultural imagination, weight loss isn't a measure of what your body looks like or how much it weighs.

It's a measure of how tenacious are you?

Is your work ethic what we think it ought to be?

All of that sort of stuff.

We're constantly sort of heaping character judgments onto just looking at someone else's body.

And when we don't see that person ordering salads, apologizing for what they're eating, constantly working out to the point of physical exhaustion or collapse, we assume that they have sort of skirted their responsibility to torture themselves on some level for other folks' benefit.

Yeah, I mean, it's, that's literally what I wrote down.

So fuck me.

But

it's like the moralizing of suffering itself.

It's the no pain, no gain mentality, which, yeah, I've talked about it in like, in different episodes of this podcast of like queer people's anger towards other queer people about like having easier coming out processes and whatever.

And, you know, in this case, it's like, well, did you lose weight, you know, by suffering for it or did you lose weight by an injection that your doctor gave you?

And it's just like, there's nothing inherently noble or moral about suffering.

It's just a bad thing that happens.

Well, and also, listen, just to cast the cultural memory back a little bit, the discourse that we're having about Ozempic right now is almost indistinguishable from the discourse that we had around weight loss surgery and gastric sleeves and gastric bands in the sort of early to mid 2000s, right?

Star Jones, who was a personality on the view, was hounded, hounded

about how she lost weight or whether or not she lost, I mean, she was like the cover of tabloids for like months and months and months of people just speculating on like, did she have surgery or did she quote unquote do it the right way?

And it was this absolutely astonishing sort of pop culture moment that is like not surprising, but deeply demoralizing every time it happens.

Where you're like, oh, neat, you found a fat black woman and you decided to make her body the headline and speculation about her body the headline for months, for months and months and months and months and months, right?

So in a lot of ways, it really does feel like an everything old is new again.

Because again, people just need to feel like someone else is hurting for whatever reason.

That is like a mandatory part of our discourse around weight loss.

Speaking of this like moralizing of, you know, different ways to lose weight, Chloe Kardashian, ah, she's arrived.

If you were listening for Kardashian discourse, we're here.

Chloe.

Chloe Kardashian.

Chloe Kardashian.

She of the revenge body.

She of the revenge body.

Her body has always been the subject of discussion in a way that I'm not envious of at all.

And, you know, she's a complicated person, occupies a complicated place in public life.

But she, you know, had the Ozempic allegations levied against her.

And she said, quote, let's not discredit my years of working out.

I get up five days a week at 6 a.m.

to train.

Please stop with your assumptions.

I guess New Year still means mean people.

Just sounds so similar to what Oprah said on her Ozempic TV special that she did, which was just like,

are we getting there?

We're just getting.

I mean, I get it.

Okay.

Why did I even outline Aubrey?

Why did I even outline it?

It sounds so much like that same kind of framing that Oprah used in her special because we are in what our shared friend Michael Hobbes calls a transitional moment in our discourse around weight and weight loss.

We sort of know and have established that diets don't really lead to long-term weight loss.

We sort of know and have established that exercise isn't a major driver of weight loss, but we're still still really attached to those two things being the vehicles for not just weight loss, but for a character worth having, a work ethic worth having, all of that sort of stuff, right?

So we're in this weird moment where people are pushing back against the idea that any of these sort of drugs or more medicalized treatments are like quote-unquote taking the easy way out, which is like bullshit.

Don't talk about people that way.

That's not.

cool.

But people still feel compelled because the sort of cultural conversation part hasn't shifted to catch up with the science part of this.

People still feel compelled to say,

but also I run five miles a day and also I count my macros and also I do all of this stuff that we know doesn't really do much,

right?

So it just feels like what we're seeing in moments like this is just like public figures getting caught in the tensions that exist more broadly in our culture around weight and weight loss.

And we're weirdly looking to like Chloe Kardashian to resolve those tensions, which is, boy, that's a mission that is going to not pay off.

You know?

My feelings about celebrities and Ozempic have really ebbed and flowed.

A lot of that ebb and flow has been a result of like what the general public has to say about it, because sometimes I feel it goes too far in one direction or another.

And I'm just like, okay, I don't know.

I just feel like so many famous women have been shamed for their entire careers about their bodies and about needing to get thinner.

And then they take Ozempic and they get shamed for taking Ozempic.

And I think there are valid reasons, like you were discussing about like shortages, access to the drug who really needs it.

When taking this and then advertising it engenders fat phobia to the general public.

But then there's just the like, well, she took the easy way out.

And like, I think that's what a lot of people are actually angry about.

That like radicalized me in the other direction where I was like, oh, now I don't care what Chloe Kardashian, like now I don't care if Chloe Kardashian takes Ozempic because like everyone's being too annoying about it in the first place.

Listen, annoying is the word, right?

Like I think this feels like a big, weighty, important conversation.

No pun intended.

Sure, but you know, pun intended.

You know, it feels like a really important conversation to get right.

And I think that means that a lot of us end up sort of tripping over our words and getting really careful to really nail every moment of it.

And that means that it can start to feel petty to say the true thing, which is everyone is being their most annoying around this discourse.

Do you know what I mean?

Including me.

Including me.

Everyone is being their most annoying.

I think the celebrity stuff is like a really good example of that, right?

Where you're just like, oh, neat.

We went right back to the like body surveillance panopticon that sort of like took a couple years off there or at least sort of cloaked itself in something else, right?

But like we're right back to everyone's paying attention to everyone else's bodies.

Whether or not Chloe Kardashian or Oprah or Lana Del Rey sees your comments about their size, other people you know will.

And they will feel a real intense pressure to meet whatever standards you set forth in your comments.

So like, just like everybody, me included, let's all just be less annoying.

You don't have to be not annoying, just less annoying.

We can can have these bigger conversations about like the cultural effect that like a popular weight loss drug can have without being like the problem here is deciding whether or not Lana Del Rey is taking it.

Totally.

I think it's about, and something that I've learned from you is like challenging institutions versus individuals.

It's all the shit that came out about, I'm swearing so much.

Excuse me.

Oh my God.

You can, I don't even turn on the monetization thing on YouTube anymore.

You can say whatever you want.

Bless you.

Thank you.

It happens.

It does.

I mean, it feels so similar to the Adele stuff from a few years ago, right?

That is sort of like this idea that if you're a public figure, you signed on to whatever anybody has to say about you at all times, which, first of all, it's not the greatest crisis of our time.

And it's not the biggest way that we're dehumanizing people, but that is a way that we are dehumanizing people is when you decide to like stop caring about people's boundaries and their needs and their human experiences.

So like pump the brakes on that one, team.

Part of it is that people think that like every public figure's body and especially public figures that aren't men have bodies that are sort of up for public discussion at all times.

But also what that does, part of what doing that accomplishes is it invites folks back into commenting on other people's bodies as well, right?

It gets folks back in the habit, Sister Act II, back in the habit of commenting on other people's weight loss and speculating about how big they are and how big they should be.

And did they actually get too skinny or are they too fat now?

How much longer should they stay on this drug?

All of that kind of stuff, when it's aimed at other people or when it's aimed at ourselves, really does end up meaningfully contributing to a culture of anti-fatness that hurts and harms fat people all the time.

So like that stuff is all worth paying attention to.

And even if you don't care about all that stuff, don't be the jerk who's telling Lana Del Rey or Adele or Kelly Osbourne or Star Jones or anybody what they should or should not do or have done with their bodies.

Well, speaking of Kelly Osborne, we are doing a, like, I want like a cool sound effect here.

Bewam, beam, bew.

Kelly Osborne interlude.

Woo!

Not really, but okay.

Yeah, not really.

I mean,

lower, everyone, lower your excitement because it's about to get really fucking weird.

Kelly Osborne loves famously,

you know, you thought you ate that kind of moment.

You know, if you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?

Oh, that's in the sense that no, you know what I mean?

Like, what I'm saying, there's more, there's more jobs to be in LA.

They always love.

She often thinks she eats, and unfortunately, she has given us another Kelly Osbourne moment.

Oh lord.

Let me play it and then we'll discuss.

What's interesting is she so she's on a red carpet with purple hair and she actually looks kind of like an AI generated Lana Del Rey.

She looks in this video like if someone tried to draw Lana Del Rey from memory.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

This is the image.

She does look like Lana Del Rey, right?

She really looks strikingly like purple hair Lana Del Rey.

She was asked here basically just what she thought about Ozempic and people taking it and celebrities in particular taking it.

And here is what she had to say: I think it's amazing, and I think it's great for them.

There are a million ways to lose weight.

Why not do it through something that isn't as boring as working out?

People hate on it because they want to do it.

And the people who hate it on the most, the people who are secretly doing it or pissed off that they can't afford it.

She had me in the first half.

Totally.

When she said, why not lose weight in a way that's less boring than working out?

I'm like, that

points were made.

All right.

Points were made.

Fine.

Absolutely.

Fine.

I think that that is kind of the antidote attitude to everything we were talking about about moralizing suffering.

Like she ate in the first half and then she kept talking, which tends to be the issue with Kelly Osborne.

It's so tricky.

My memories of Kelly Osborne are now intrinsically tied to her comments about her ex's ex's trans woman that she was cheated on with.

Do you know about this?

No.

Oh,

no.

Maybe

it's really peak.

You really thought you had something there, but you for sure did not.

It's so, it's bad.

Yeah, I mean, sure, take Ozempic, do whatever you want.

The second, okay, so.

Oh my god.

No, Aubrey, I don't mean to be a single person.

I just feel so sort of pre-exhausted by all of this.

By the Kelly Osborne of it and by the Ozepic of it.

Do you know what I mean?

Like it's a real, it's a real bleach and ammonia combo we got going here.

Can I, can I tee you up here?

Because I tell me.

My reaction, this went like really viral online and people were like, fuck Kelly Osborne for saying that.

So she says, the only people who are mad about it are the people who are secretly taking it or who can't afford it, which is obviously a really grotesque thing to say on so many levels.

But I've included it here because I think it's also like how a lot of people think about it.

And

I just think that most people have more tact than Kelly Osborne.

And most people know not to say that.

But I do think that it's like a prevailing thought of like, well, anyone who could afford to take this would.

Yes, absolutely.

That the rational thing, right?

That people are embarrassed about their own desires, but these are the rational desires to have, right?

I also think this is like a weird Jedi mind trick thing that people do when they are in positions of privilege, where they'll do like sort of very strange emotional jiu-jitsu of figuring out how to blame a marginalized community

for their own circumstances, right?

That's like any critiques from predominantly fat people, from predominantly feminists, from predominantly like SJWs, whatever.

all get chalked up to you're just jealous you're just a hater you're just a hater and you're just jealous and it feels to to me very much like the like mid-2000s, like Larry Craig, Ted Haggard sort of discourse that was like,

the biggest homophobes are actually queer themselves.

Where I'm like, how did you manage to blame gay people for homophobia?

How did we get here?

How do we get here?

Right.

And like, this feels a little bit like that, right?

Which is like, I don't have to listen to anything you're saying now because actually

you are just a hater.

You are just jealous.

You just wish this was your life and this was your body and all of that sort of stuff.

Truly MerylStreep.gif, groundbreaking

to say fat people are jealous of thin, wealthy people.

Flaming valid critique on haters for spring, groundbreaking.

But can I ask you in this vein, though, because what do you make of the idea that like anybody who could take this would?

I think that's not true.

I am a person who could take it and is not taking it.

There are lots of people who could take it and who are not taking it, right?

I think that what that is ultimately actually saying is we all know that thinness is the right choice.

Thinness is a choice that's always available to you, and anyone would, anyone in their right mind would choose it.

And anyone who's not is just justifying their own bad behavior, their own binge eating, their own lack of self-control, right?

It all sort of comes back to this like set of character judgments sort of thing.

A cultural discourse, especially a cultural discourse around fatness, really loves to act like there is one correct choice for everyone to make.

And like, that should get your hackles up, everybody.

Like that should, you should be suspicious.

If someone goes, yeah, man, everyone would want this, right?

It just feels like just straightforwardly an articulation of like a cultural mandate to be thin.

And that feels like, again, nothing new.

Nothing new.

So we've arrived in the outline.

We've arrived at Oprah.

Goodbye, Kelly Osborne.

And hello, Oprah.

Is this torture?

No.

Am I torturing you with like the greatest hits of cultural figures and weight loss?

No, it's listen, Oprah.

I grew up on Oprah.

I've got four decades worth of Oprah.

to talk about here.

I'm ready to go.

Your loins are girded.

Yeah, that's right.

I I would like to take a quick, quick break from the show to give a shout out to the sponsor of today's episode, Rocket Money.

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Now, let's get back to the show.

Aubrey and I just took a bathroom break because we needed to collect ourselves before we talk about Oprah.

So for decades, Oprah has,

as everyone knows, Oprah has been a fixture in the national conversation about weight loss.

Oprah has been very publicly a victim of the same diet culture and weight loss culture that she has contributed to.

She's also profited heavily from it as the spokesperson for and longtime board member of Weight Watchers.

In 2015, she acquired a 10% stake in Weight Watchers.

So she was like on a personal and professional level has like long and a public level long been like embedded in this conversation, in this industry.

I know that you have extensive thoughts and feelings about Oprah and her place in all of this, which has become even more complicated over the last few months.

But before we even get to the Ozempic stuff, like what have your, what, what are your high-level feelings about Oprah leading up to the year 2024?

I would say top lines about about Oprah.

One and a really important place to start is there is no part of me that envies the position that she has been put in culturally.

Her body has been the subject of headlines, talk shows, all manner of things.

I think anybody with a body feels like that body is being scrutinized at one point or another.

But like, even as a public figure, like if I'm honest with myself, if any of us are honest with ourselves, we have not faced what Oprah has faced, right?

We have not faced the full court press of people being like magazine covers saying that her partner is going to leave her because she's so fat and so on and so forth, right?

Like it's a real meat grinder that she has been put through around her size and it's garbage.

And I think there are a couple of things that happen when people experience that sort of level and kind of abuse in public.

One is that, of course, it creates like a profound wound, a great deal of trauma trauma to deal with, all of that sort of stuff.

And the other thing that happens is that you get really good at doing it to other people.

And both of those things, right?

Inside you, there are two wolves, right?

These are the two wolves that all of us have.

If you have experienced weight stigma, you have both learned the lesson of how much that's terrible, how much it hurts, and how many harms it can cause.

And you have also picked up some pointers along the way.

And I think Oprah is a real interesting, distilled case study of both of those things, you know, that she not only sort of made it her mission to become thin, she also sort of made it her mission and one of her profit centers to tell other people how to also become thin.

It felt like a real, if you can't beat them, join them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is.

I've waited my whole life to say, circling back to Chloe Kardashian.

But Chloe Kardashian, I feel similarly about.

Yeah.

It's one of these many such cases, cases, right?

Where, I mean, it does feel like there's a kind of class of celebrity who experiences body shaming and body scrutiny that I wouldn't dream of or wish upon my worst enemy.

And then they, you know, jump to the other side of the equation.

There is sort of this well-known and well-discussed trope in fat spaces.

And I think it comes from very real experience from folks that weight loss is only part of how you sort of attain the privilege of being a thin person.

The other way that you do that is by socially distancing yourself as much as possible from fat people.

And you do that by outwardly judging fat people, right?

Making public comments,

saying that you would never do what they're doing, talk about the mistakes that they're making in their workout form,

or talk about the mistakes that they're making in what they're eating, or all of that sort of stuff.

And I think, again, Oprah has really, really learned that lesson that, like, the size of your body is only part of it.

The other part is you align yourself real hard with thin people and you distance yourself real hard from fat people.

And it should be noted, this feels like another moment of like, aha, we figured out how to blame fat people for anti-fatness.

And I just want to be super real.

That pressure does not originate with fat people, right?

That pressure originates with a culture and a media that thinks that people's bodies are up for sort of public discussion.

That pressure originates from, I would argue, predominantly thin people who do not know what it actually takes to lose a large amount of weight and assume that their own quote-unquote normal and therefore invisible to themselves decisions are the quote unquote right decisions to make in order to be a thin person, rather than recognizing that this might be a case of being born on third and thinking you hit a triple, right?

Just feels like Oprah is a really interesting and distilled example of like all of that.

Right, exactly.

Because the kind of confluence of like the personal and social impulse to like distance yourself from fat people and then the professional impulse to like, how much can I profit off of this machine?

It's just kind of a nasty concoction.

Totally.

And again, that doesn't take anything away from Oprah's personal experience.

That doesn't, you know, mitigate like the many, many, many things that have been said about her that should not have been said or done about her.

And boy, oh boy, what a tangled web she weaves.

What a tangled web she weaves all the way to the bank.

All the way to the bank.

Correct.

All the way to the bank.

I mean, she is, you know, a billionaire, which I don't know.

I feel like

I talk about billionaires enough on this podcast and I complain about them enough in the same way every time I talk about them that I feel like I just need like a billionaire siren or like a billionaire like sound effect.

Like wee woo, wee woo.

We're talking about billionaires now.

I think it should just be a recording of you going, wee-woo, wee-woo,

just saying those words.

Billionaire alert, billionaire alert.

We should say, Oprah, whatever.

People know this.

Oprah's body has fluctuated over the decades, as literally anyone with a body who lives for decades, that happens.

She has had some pretty stunning moments, including the red wagon.

Would you like to describe the wagon?

You know, I'm 25.

I did not know about the red wagon of fat until I heard you talk about it, actually.

Yeah.

So in the 80s, Oprah went through very, very, very public weight loss, which she has since discussed as, I think, A, being pretty profoundly unhealthy for her,

mostly achieved through what's called a VLCD, a very low calorie diet, which usually means under 600 calories a day is usually about the threshold that folks are talking about.

Yeah, it's been described as a starvation diet, basically.

Yeah, it's a third of what a toddler needs yeah

just

let that sink in just let that one sink in a third of what a toddler needs but because the pressure was so relentless for her to lose weight she sort of went to whatever lengths she needed to go to to lose that weight and that for her meant this sort of quote-unquote starvation diet she was also a person who was on tv and as any stand-up will tell you you don't get to go on stage looking different without saying something about how you look different now.

And she did a whole episode on her major weight loss that opened with her walking out on stage in a tight black turtleneck tucked into Calvin Klein jeans.

And she was dragging a red radio flyer wagon full of, I believe it was beef and pork fat, just like raw white meat fat.

The sort of intended effect was to gross people out about how much fat had previously been on her body.

And she has sort of revisited that story in recent months to say, essentially, like, even on the day that I did that show, I was already gaining weight back.

Yeah.

But it was just like instantaneous.

And this we know and have known from research for a long time, right?

That this is sort of the cycle of weight loss is that for many, many, many methods of weight loss, pretty much anything involving diet or exercise, folks can lose weight in the short term.

They lose less weight in the midterm, and then they usually gain that weight back and often more in the long term.

So she was going through like a very predictable cycle that has been observed and documented many times.

But yeah, the wagon of fat, listen, for

me, as a fat kid and as someone whose parents watched Oprah, you know, would have Oprah on at home and all of that sort of stuff, it was a figure that really loomed large.

And I think it was less about the wagon and more about seeing the people in your life respond to the wagon with such overt and sort of proud disgust.

Yeah.

It was a bad time.

What's so interesting too is like, again, I was like drafting up notes for this episode and I wanted to revisit a picture of the fat wagon.

And so I googled it and the first things that came up were like, Oprah's top 25 moments.

Like it's still in all of these listicles as like times Oprah made history.

Like, it's, I don't know, there's like still

lingering cultural appreciation for the fact that she did this.

Yeah, totally.

And I think this is another place where we're in like a transitional moment, right?

Around talking about this stuff, where you will find things that are like, she really did that.

She pulled that wagon of fat out.

And you will also find write-ups of it that are people being like, this was a real inflection point of horror show body stuff

for many, many people.

And Oprah is expected to hold space for all of those things just because it's her body that's being talked about, which I'm like, oh, team.

Oh, team.

Right.

I mean, it's what I was saying at the top of the episode about celebrities becoming fictional, like, book characters onto whom we can project all of our messy feelings about this stuff.

Like, I don't, yeah, I don't think there's anyone who has had more projected onto her than Oprah.

I think with this celebrity discourse stuff, part of the projection that is happening is that we are seeing ourselves in these sort of the discourse around celebrities' bodies as well.

So people get involved in this as if with the sort of like emotional intensity as if it is their body and it is actually someone else's body.

We must talk about the Ozempic of it all.

We must.

Oprah revealed in December 2023 that she was taking a weight loss drug.

I don't think she named which one she was taking, but it is presumably Ozempic, Wagovi, Manjaro.

And along with this, because people were like, well, wait, what about like everything that you spent decades advertising for Weight Watchers?

She was like, oh, and I'm not running for re-election to the Weight Watchers board.

So that's over.

She rebranded along with this her position in the weight loss space to like wanting to end the stigma around taking weight loss drugs.

Like you mentioned, she hosted an ABC special a few months later called Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution, where she said notably in the intro, for 25 years, making fun of my weight was a national sport.

And so she really talked candidly at points about kind of like retrospective reflection she has, having been the center of the national weight loss conversation for decades.

The special's main theme was kind of just like, it's okay to take Ozempic.

And, you know, we need to shed the shame and the stigma and all this stuff around weight loss drugs, which I think we've talked a little bit about that, like is true.

She really, interestingly, she had two doctors on the special to talk about Ozempic.

Neither of them were in the least bit critical of, like, who is this for?

How expensive is it?

The side effects.

Well, both of them acknowledged on the show that they're paid for.

They are on the payroll as consultants of Novo Nordisk and possibly also Eli Lilly, who are the biggest manufacturers.

Yes.

Yes.

They were, they were, they were both paid consultants for the drug companies who make Ozempic.

And it's like,

okay, Oprah, we're doing this.

Totally.

And like, listen,

our sort of pharmaceutical industry in the U.S.

is broken in a lot of different ways, such that it's really not uncommon for researchers to be paid by big pharma companies.

That's a thing we ought to change.

We ought to change that.

Ideally.

So it doesn't necessarily mean that everything that they said was like false or suspect or whatever, but it was a truly wild moment to like have this sort of play out on screen and have oprah ask the most perfunctory and sort of hollow version of a conflict of interest question which is just like hey so you're on the payroll with these guys what does that mean and i one of the doctors said something to the effect of well they're looking for our expert opinion on how to provide the highest quality care and i was like

that is an answer devoid of of substance.

That doesn't mean anything.

That means moving right along.

I appreciate your word salad.

It was delicious, but did not satisfy.

You know, most salads.

She kind of ended this special.

I'm going to read a quote that I pieced together.

She said, for people who feel happy and healthy and celebrating life in a bigger body and don't want the medications, I say, bless you.

And for all people who believe diet and exercise is the best and only way to lose excess weight, bless you too, if that works for you.

And for the people who think that this could be the relief and support of freedom that you've been looking for your whole life, bless you, because there is a space for all points of view.

I'm just curious about your thoughts on the whole special and her kind of like new position as like breaking down the stigma of taking these drugs.

Well, two things.

One, I would say there's not a specific stigma or system of oppression

set up around people losing weight, right?

That's like, so like, just to be super duper clear, when we're talking about the stigma that people face for taking Ozempic, I would argue it's not stigma per se, it's essentially runoff anti-fatness.

It's because you are not suffering in the way that folks want to see fat people suffer in order to lose weight, right?

And I think, you know, it's a nice thing to say, hey, there's space for everyone.

It's a very different thing to say when that's embedded in what is functionally like an infomercial for weight loss drugs, right?

That like you're sort of saying like, hey, everyone is welcome here as long as you buy this one product, right?

And like all of these different sort of opinions are welcome.

I mean, I think one of the other things that really, really stood out to me about the special that I found really, really disheartening is that they sort of flip back and forth in this special between social and interpersonal quote unquote benefits of weight loss and medical quote unquote benefits of weight loss.

So they talk to a teenager at one point and they're like, her blood sugar's down and she went to prom.

And you're like, so one of those is medical, guys.

I think that, though, is so much of Ozempic discourse in general.

I think so much of when people talk about Ozempic, it's their, it's their anti-fatness couched in like, but isn't this a medical miracle?

It's like, how often do you see people truly thrilled about like medical breakthroughs?

It's just, I find it hard to believe that that people's excitement, especially thin people's excitement about Ozempic, is entirely because they're just like thrilled about the medical benefits of this drug.

It just seems a lot more likely to me that they're like, this idea that we can end fatness now.

Yes.

I mean, like, listen, part of the reason that I have that full body clench that we were talking about earlier is that the discourse that I feel like I'm experiencing right now as a fat person is on another planet from the discourse that I feel like a lot of people who are not fat think that they're contributing to, which is, I think people are thinking genuinely, scientific miracle.

I'm on the side of science.

This is great.

Yay, look at all this stuff.

We don't have to have all these healthcare problems.

I would say a couple of things.

One, that's born of decades of scapegoating fat people for the cost of private insurance, right?

That's born of news stories that really, really decontextualize a bunch of what we know about fat people's health and well-being and all of that sort of stuff.

And I think for the last, you know, 10 or 15 years, we sort of had this moment where people who weren't fat could see themselves as maybe being, whether or not they intended to, maybe being part of the villain in a fat person's story, right?

And carrying around some guilt around that or wanting to exercise that guilt in some way or what have you.

And what feels like it's happening right now is all of that feeling of like, however fleeting it was, that feeling of accountability to fat people just really seems to be melting away.

And people are just openly celebrating their belief that we're about to live in a world where they don't have to look at fat people so often.

Yeah, I mean, I read these pieces about like, is Ozempic the end of obesity?

No.

It's not for so many reasons.

But the thing that jumps out to me about them, the hand ringing about like body positivity, is body positivity like null and void now and it's just like okay so you can stop pretending like you ever cared totally and again this is a real all of the stuff that's like oh no was body positivity all a lie to me really reads as like oh nobody asked a fat person

oh no nobody asked a fat person because if you like as a fat person i could tell you people changed the way that they couched their feelings but their feelings about fatness and fat people didn't change right like there wasn't a point at which it was like super cool to be the fattest person in the room.

There wasn't a point at which there were simply too many people thin people rushing to the defense of fat people.

None of that materialized for fat people in like a meaningful way.

I think in a lot of ways, the sort of discourse around body positivity was much more a self-soothing story that people who weren't fat told themselves about their role in anti-fatness, right?

That sort of allowed them to think that there had been a bigger and more meaningful shift than there had.

And if you ask fat people, you know, same day, same stuff, you know, here we are again.

Natalie Contrapoints, who I've had on the show a couple of times and who I reference often, she made a comment.

It was in a completely different context, but she said something in one of her YouTube videos where she was basically like, shallow understanding creates shallow acceptance.

And I think that's true in the body positivity conversation.

I think it's also been true.

I think about about that a lot in the context of like the last 10-ish years of queer rights, which are so rapidly being eroded.

Because it's like when you change what you're allowed to say, but never actually interrogate what you feel deep down.

And, you know, definitely not changing, you know, like laws and institutions that marginalize these groups of people.

You're just making it so for the second that it is no longer fashionable to be like quote unquote more polite to fat people, queer people, people of color, then we just stopped doing that and nothing meaningful ever changed, which is something that people who belong to these groups knew the whole time.

Yeah, totally.

And I also feel like in this sort of moment around Ozempic, I feel like what I'm observing more often than not is both a sort of, thank God we don't have to think about that anymore is one of the one of the sort of underpinnings that happens here, right?

The other one that feels like it's sort of at play here is that folks are trying to hang on to their deep desire for thinness, which is rooted in wild and pretty terrible judgments about fat people.

Those two things are linked in a way that you can't really disentangle.

So folks are trying to hang on to their deep and long-standing desire to be as thin as possible because of the ways that we judge thin people differently than fat people.

That means that they want to hang on to their anti-fatness, but they've also recognized now that fat people have a negative experience of the world, often at the hands of thin people.

So, people are like really trying to have it both ways, right?

They really want to hang on to their anti-fatness, but they also really want to be sort of the heroes in fat people's stories.

And I think that all of this sort of stuff around like it's actually a scientific breakthrough and it's really good for people's health becomes just like a return to I'm just concerned with your health, sort of concern trolling as a fig leaf for folks pretty deep and pretty uninterrogated.

Anti-fatness, right?

One of the things that we know for sure and for real is that when folks are in pursuit of a thinner body and they engage in what are called body checking tendencies, they're checking their own bodies and specific features against other folks, that those folks report a great deal of relief at seeing someone my size

because they think, at least I'm not that fat, at least it hasn't gotten that bad.

So, if folks are not doing that kind of plumbing the depths of where they're at and what's motivating their weight loss, like that uninterrogated stuff is just going to keep replicating itself.

And usually the place that it's going to keep replicating itself is in folks' treatment, whether they clock it or not, of people who are fatter than them.

It feels like a really tricky moment where in the absence of thinner people being able to hold space for and plumb their own sort of psychological depths on this issue, that work sort of falls to fat people in order to just like get through our day, right?

Do you think the booming popularity of these drugs and the ensuing discourse that plays out on the celebrity level and also on a personal level, do you think it has made fat phobia worse?

Listen, I think anti-fatness is a super multifaceted thing.

In doctors' offices, no question.

There's just no question that as a fat person, I now have to steal myself for a whole new layer of conversations about like, why am I not going to take the drug that makes you throw up all the time, right?

For people, for people for whom it does that, I have to like come up with a PowerPoint about like, why I don't want to vomit five times a day, right?

Radical.

I would say on a cultural level, to me, it just feels like it's brought it back to the surface, which it was slightly beneath for a short time.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, it doesn't feel like a meaningful change in in people's attitudes.

It just feels like a change in how loudly they're willing to shout them.

That people were like using their inside voices for a while and now they're just shouting it from the rooftops.

Speaking of, I was reading this article that I thought was great

called Ozempic Can't Fix What Our Culture Has Broken by Tressie McMillan Cotton.

So yeah, she was writing this article about basically how, I mean, it's said in the title, Ozempic Can't Fix What Our Culture Has Broken,

how, you know, these conversations of Ozempic and fat phobia can't be untangled, and we can't expect Ozempic to fix the problem of fat phobia for it to go anywhere for a whole number of reasons, you know, cost, health insurance, but also just like the framework of fat phobia in every, you know, part of our society.

She wrote specifically about an interesting experience where she went to the doctor and her doctor took her blood work because the thing with health insurance is that it will tend to cover drugs like Ozempic if you are diabetic, but not for weight loss if you're not diabetic.

And so the doctor took her blood work.

She was totally healthy.

And the doctor was like, well, we could run it again to try to see if you're diabetic so that we could get health insurance to pay for this for you.

And Tressie was like, no, what?

I'm healthy.

I don't need this.

My version of this was having a tech attempt to take my blood pressure.

It was either three or four times in a row because they just couldn't believe that it was like in a normal range.

And they thought that something was wrong with with the cuff.

So they went to go get another cuff and then they ba-da-da-da, right?

That this is like a very, very common thing that fat folks experience, which is even when our sort of like blood work is where doctors want to see it, even when our health is sort of in range by all other measures, even healthcare providers can't really bring themselves to believe that we might actually just be okay and just be fat, right?

It is a, it's a heartbreakingly common scenario, I will say.

In surveys of fat people, they find that the two most common sources of anti-fatness,

first of all, an overwhelming majority of fat people experience profound anti-fatness on a daily basis, right?

And the two most common sources are our family and friends.

That's source number one.

And source number two is healthcare providers are the top places where stuff like this comes up.

And those are not things like saying, hey, you ought to pay attention to your blood work or, hey, I have a doctorly thing to say to you as a doctor.

That's things like saying, if you don't lose weight, no one's going to want to marry you.

And that's things like saying, you know what I mean?

Like really

hefty steps outside of any kind of professional role.

Boy, boy.

One of the things Tressie wrote at the end of this article, which I'm just going to read a quick quote, she wrote, The mere existence of Ozempic and the like encourages millions of people to self-diagnose in a way that stigmatizes.

If they walk into doctors' offices begging to be classified as medically vulnerable, it's not for some provision from the state like housing or food.

They want a drug that can help them manage an environment that works against their aspirations.

That is a condemnation of our culture.

Yeah.

Yep.

It's a real weird time to be fat.

So many people are trying to get classified as fat in order to sort of access a bunch of drugs to make them less fat.

It's super weird.

Tressie nailed it.

Sometimes I feel like we, you know, in the hunger games, have you seen the hunger games or read the hunger games?

I sure have and read all the books.

Woof.

You know, and like how Katniss goes to like one of the first like capital parties, I think it's before her first hunger games.

And she's like, they would drink poison to make them throw up so that they could eat more.

Do you ever have those moments where you're like, oh, we're just in the capital?

Right.

This is Roman vomitoriums.

No joke, right?

Like, this is like the classic tale as old as time.

Barf and then eat more food.

Oops, sorry, it's an eating disorder.

But, like, yes, we're totally in that sort of realm right now.

Again, it's just the promise of the 80s infomercial swearing up and down.

You can eat whatever you want and never gain a pound.

We're just living that right now, and it's very odd.

Nothing changes, we just see it on smaller screens.

That's

I think that was the slogan for Quibby.

Ugh, well, that's all we have time for now.

I don't know where this leaves us.

Do we have any positive parting words for people?

That's a great one.

Sorry.

Oh, my God.

I'm making Aubrey Gordon end this on a refrigerator magnet.

I'm like, come up with something.

Come up with something for like a hallmark card.

That's what makes you beautiful.

That's right.

That's right.

Be yourself because everybody else is already taken.

Did you know when you say something's gay like that, you're saying it's bad?

Coming next week to a bit pretty.

Hillary Duff.

When you say that so gay, do you realize what you say?

Knock it off.

Here's the thing.

This is all incredibly complex.

It's incredibly layered.

There are big feelings at play, and that can make it feel really hard to figure out how to move forward in any meaningful way in the conversation.

But there are really simple things that we already know how to do that we can do.

One, if someone's speculating on someone else's body changing and how that change came to be, tell them to knock it off.

It's weird.

It's rude.

It's being a mean person.

Tell them to stop it.

Honestly, if anybody's commenting on anybody else's body, period, even just observations about weight fluctuations, think about how you feel and how long you carry it with you when you hear someone else say something about the size or shape of your body.

Think about the half-life of how long that lives within you, right?

And work on not only not being that for someone else, but also heading that nonsense off at the pass when it shows up, right?

I think there's real meaningful work to do here in just committing to saying, this is behavior that's out of bounds and I'm not going to stand for it.

And I think with the Ozempic discourse, we have so much behavior that is so out of bounds.

My mom is peeking in confusion.

Hi, Mrs.

Gordon.

Yes, yeah.

Hi, she's waving.

So there you go.

A mom cameo to end on.

Yeah, I guess the thesis is: um, we should all shut the fuck up.

I say on my podcast,

aubrey gordon i feel like i've done so much promo for you but where can people find more of you support you i i want people to find more of you like you all need to just listen to what this woman has to say please it is in your best interest This is so kind of you.

You can listen to maintenance phase wherever you get podcasts.

You can read my couple of books wherever you get books.

You can watch a documentary about me and the mom who just cameoed at yourfatfriendfilm.com.

There you have it.

This is such a joy.

I feel like it's been months in the making.

And I'm so happy to actually be here and talking to you.

What a treat.

I know, I know.

And you, your voice and your laugh have been living just like, I don't know.

I've been building a parasocial relationship with you for years.

And for the parasocial relationship to be jumping into actual social relationship is so surreal for me.

I feel like I'm having an out-of-body experience.

And I just, I love, I love you so much.

Can I confess my love for you in podcasts?

Is that weird?

Let's do it because I feel the same way about you.

What a joy.

Oh my gosh, it's Mary 2024 confessing love on a podcast.

If you

addressing the listener now, if you have made it this far in the episode, I love you so much.

I'm so happy that you could be here today.

I am truly, eternally grateful.

I hope, you know, shed some new insights.

Maybe you were challenged.

Maybe you think this is worth sending to a friend.

Maybe you want to go take a nap.

I support any of those things.

If you would, I should have said this at the top of the episode.

Very bad at promoting myself.

Very good at promoting other people.

If you would like to support the show, if you would like more of the show, you can do that over on Patreon.

The link will be in the description.

Currently working on a multi-part series over there about the legacy of the James Charles Tati Westbrook vitamin homophobia bi sister scandal, which is my personal Roman Empire.

I could never stop talking about it, which is why I don't ever stop talking about it.

Yeah,

I need a life is basically what I'm trying to get at.

I'm subscribing to your Patreon right now.

If there's a multi-part series on James on Bisister, I got the Aubrey Gordon endorsement.

Yeah, it's happening.

This is my next step.

And with that, wow, I have nothing else to say.

And with that, I love you so much.

I will see you next time.

And until then, stay fruity.