The Ozempic Obsession with Jia Tolentino [VIDEO]

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Learn more at AudiUSA.com Always pay careful attention to the road and do not drive while distracted. Christiana, nice to see you in person.
Good to see you. This is so much fun, a friend.
I haven't seen you in't seen you in so like this I know In the flesh We used to do this every day Yeah Remember We used to make a show every day Every single day of our lives I was like I loved it You liked it so much you quit And left us Oh man I'm excited to have this conversation today Because i mean i'm excited for all conversations but like this conversation is is one that i don't even think we'll be able to complete today which i think all good conversations are strangely enough and this one in particular intrigues me because everybody's talking about ozempic right and we're not talking about ozempic the product today today. I think that's going to be important for everyone to understand.
We're just going to use that as a name for, you know, these weight loss drugs. Because Ozempic, Monjaro, Zepbound, Wegovy, you name it, you know.
The point is we're talking about inject, lose weight, apparently feel great. This is the, That's my catchphrase, by the way, if they want to buy it from me.
I'm available, Eli Lilly. I'm available at Novo Dorsk.
I never know how to say their name. Yeah, I can't say it either.
But yeah, I feel like we were at an interesting inflection point in society where there was a point when this would have just been, would have been shunned completely. Do mean people would be like this is trash you're cheating yeah and then now it's slowly we're like you know yeah it's like republican democrat it's like 50 50 now yeah where do you stand on this oh my god trevor you can't ask me that at the beginning of the thing.
That's exactly where you start, at the beginning. I am pro-choice when it comes to ZenPig.
Oh, I like this. Well played.
I am pro-choice. I'm pro-choice.
That's what I am. Yeah.
So you have no moral judgment or opinion on it? No. I have seen friends and family members on the drug and seen how it seen how it's changed their life okay and so this is what i'd love to know change their lives in what way um beyond the weight they seem more comfortable in their body some of them had like back and knee issues you know some of some people it was just like yeah they were struggling some people it's like it's kind their appetite.
They're drinking less. So when you see it from that perspective, it's been like, oh, wow.
So I'm pro the choice, but I'm not pro the societal pressure that I think some people feel to take. Okay, okay, okay.
Well, let's bring in our special guest today. I wanted to bring in a writer, a cultural critic, and somebody who I think has some of the most informed and then fantastic personal opinions on this topic because she has written about it.
You know her work, probably from The New Yorker, if you read. If you don't read, then maybe you don't know her, and this will be your introduction to her.
Gia Tolentino, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.
Are you kidding me? Thank you for joining us.

I'm going to apologize in advance for all the ignorance I'm going to bring to this conversation. But I feel like it's my purpose.
As my mother used to say when I was young, be of service. Be of service.
So if I'm surrounded by two brilliant, smart people, I have to now balance the conversation the other way around. I think you heard the question I asked Christiana.
So let's start from your personal, just like purely personal, no scientific, no nothing point of view. Where do you stand when it comes to these Ozempic type drugs? I think I think about Ozempic the way I think about a lot of cultural phenomena, which is I have a lot of thoughts about it at a sort of macro level.
And then in terms of anyone's individual use or not use of it, other than I have a group chat where my friends sometimes send pictures of celebrities and like to make fun of the fact that I never know who it is because everyone looks so different. But yeah, I mean, I'm pro-choice too, you know, like it's none of my damn business what anyone's doing with their own body.
You know's it's interesting you bring up the thing about celebrities because like i've noticed now there's a there's a you know we talk about the shame game and the blame there's like there's this game now where people see someone and they're like oh that's ozempic oh that's i've noticed with me depending on like how someone takes a picture of me someone be like you're no zem like i've never lost weight but then sometimes i go like

it it seems like it's become um in in a way it's almost become a bit of a like a slur or like an insult it's like oh i see you're on ozempic ah you're one of them yeah trump is the only one that you really need to because the republican party doesn't have an opinion everyone calling him wait what they're saying ozempic trump they're calling him ozempic trump donald trump Allegedly.

Please, Maga, don't come for me.

Please.

Allegedly.

What? Everyone calling him, they're saying Ozempic Trump. They're calling him Ozempic Trump.
Donald Trump on Ozempic? Allegedly. Please, MAGA, don't come for me.
Please. Allegedly.
Wow. He looks different.
I believe it. Damn.
I can see him now. Oh, oh, oh, oh.
Ozempic. Well, I, you know, this I do have thoughts on.
You know, I think that one of the things that our whole fascination with Ozempic is based on is, and it's interesting, you know, Christiana, I wonder if you have thoughts with little kids, right?

part of beauty is thinness, as it's taught to you from a really early age. Fatness, queerness,

darkness, all of these things are coded as signs of deviance. You learn as a really young child in Disney movies, in anything, beauty is really coded as morality and there's this Protestant work ethic thing, right? It's something that you should achieve through hard and punitive work and discipline, right? And when people use Ozempic, it's like, you cheated.
You skipped the hard work part. And so you got the thing we demanded of you, but now we find this a vaguely immoral thinness.
Like you worked hard to achieve the right thing. Okay, I hear what you're saying.
It's funny because I don't know how it was for you growing up. But so I've had an interesting journey with weight and how I perceive it and fatness, et cetera, because I grew up in South Africa, genuinely growing up.
This is such a weird thing to try and explain to people. In South Africa, you did not get made as much fun of if you were fat.
Like a fat person, you'd just be like, I mean, I don't even remember if we had that many names, but I remember all the ones for skinny people was Stixmanzanza. That was my favorite one.
Stixman Zanza, Skinny Manili. It was like, there were all these names where it was just like, you're a twig, you're thin.
And it was a sign there of a lack of having. If you got married and you didn't gain weight, people would say that your marriage is not going well.
Literally, they'd be like, is your wife not treating you well? Ay, man, look at you. If I would come home from the States, and like many times I would, I'd come back from America and I'd gain weight.
And so whenever I'd go home, people would be like, ah, you're looking good, man. You're looking good.
America's treating you well. You're looking, Trevor, no, man, you're looking good.
Look at your cheeks. You're looking good.
And so where I grew up, fatness was considered sort of a choice.

And then being skinny was like, well, your life is not going well and you're not making the right choices.

For sure.

So it's interesting how it flips.

And I'm sure it's time as well.

But in both cases, it's about wealth, right?

I mean, in both cases, the thing that is valued is always the thing that's correlated with wealth.

And I feel like that's been the case.

You look through art history, right?

So, let's go ahead and cases, the thing that is valued is always the thing that's correlated with wealth. And I feel like that's been the case.
You look through art history, right? The fuller figures are valued at a time when it's, you know, the wealthy signifying plenty. And now it's signifying, you know, I got a trainer, I got a cook, I got a, you know.
I mean, it's funny that you mentioned the childhood stuff that it brings up because recently it was approved for children oh it was yeah and there are parents who are making the decision i don't know about that i mean trevor that's your instance it's like very visceral you're like giving it to kids but i'll tell you why i'll tell you why i do not think that these types of drugs should be approved for children. I personally believe that there are still a whole host of things that you can do to get that child.
Like if you're giving them this drug, I'm assuming it's because their weight is really detrimental to their health. Otherwise it's weird.
Like you're just trying to make like a sexy kid or something. That's weird.
It's so crazy, but I meet mothers, a lot of older girls who are like preteens and teenagers, and they'll show you pictures of their daughter and be like, oh, but this one needs to lose weight. You know, like mothers, it's so encoded in our culture that there are mothers out there and fathers out there.
You need to lose weight. I mean, most people's relationship with food don't come from themselves.
They often come from their parents and their families. It's so interesting that all of this concern about what creates health for kids always comes down to food and weight, right? And it's like, there's so much other stuff.
It's like, it's housing policy. It's like, it's food stamp policy, right? It's all of these things.
And it's like funding for recess and, you know, and for like physical activities and for all these things, because, you know, there are levers you can pull to change your body, certainly during childhood. And that, you know, like it's not to say that lifestyle and what you eat doesn't affect it.
But, you know, I talk to doctors that are, you know, the patients are, their kids are in food deserts and they have nobody that can take them outside and it's not safe to be outside where they are. So they are just kind of sitting in a room, you know, all day because of, you know, this myriad of structural factors.
And so the only lever to pull for these complicating conditions is a drug like this. And this is everywhere in the world, but America in particular is very, very good at treating the symptoms and not the cause.

Like very, very, very, very good. You know what I mean? Like America will find a lot of money to like imprison homeless people, but then won't find ways to stop people from becoming homeless.
You know what I mean? How else would you enrich the private prison? Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

So this feels like one of those situations again

where it's like we are going to now approve a drug for children

but not ask ourselves why these children would need that drug

in the first place.

Because, I don't know, was Nigeria the same?

What was weight like in Nigeria?

It's really interesting.

There is this cultural, the body that's idealized is quite hard to get so it's like yes big hips tiny waist and big boobs and a big bum which is pretty impossible to get right most people don't have it naturally and you're not probably going to have that after you have kids um i was always considered a bit too skinny like my grandma was like i remember she saying to me once she was crying and my mom was like why are you crying she was just like she calls me by the name Amma she was just like who's gonna marry Amma she's got bones you know you know if you actually go to West Africa in particular you see a lot of body diversity yeah so you see like really tall women really muscular women and like in Nigeria I think the most the biggest indicator about how bodies naturally are is that does your tribe have a fattening room? Which is like before a woman gets married, she has to go to a room. You said a fattening room.
They call it a fattening room. Where you have to become fat.
Because the girls are just naturally quite muscular, especially in the Southeast, quite muscular and live. You know what I mean? So you know what that means.
Fatness is supposed to be good, a sign of fertility. But then then again how long do you stay in the room till you get fat i love this yeah oh i don't know i don't know about that oh wait okay depends on how they're making you fat is it like they're just giving you yams and thick thick food carbohydrates yes and lots of meat to make you bigger they're not like force feeding you you're just eating i mean the girls didn't want to get fat or get married so it's kind of all right like once again a fun christiana story i'm sorry guys it always gets dark it always gets dark well i want to know like when did you when and why did you start writing about ozempic because you were one of the first people writing about this you know before it became the wave before it became the trend i remember there was a moment pre-Ozempic.
It just wasn't a thing. And then there were whispers.
And then all of a sudden you heard Elon Musk was on it. And you're like, wait, what's happening here? Well, I kind of think of the Kardashians as the sort of weather vane for what the winds of sort of capital.
Hilarious. And deeply punitive, technologically based beauty standards, you can literally see written upon their bodies, what women all across the country are going to then do, you know, in this really kind of amazing, terrifying way.
And so, you know, I, I think I, it was, it was like that no one had ever heard of it then, you know, I started to hear about there was this shot that was intended for treating chronic conditions caused by type 2 diabetes that women in Hollywood, like, you know, some women in Hollywood were taking and their bodies were suddenly visibly changing. And it was interesting to me to begin with because, you know, like I grew up in, you know, the 90s, the early 2000s in sort of very conservative Houston, Texas, like deep within this hegemonic, like white dominated the age of sort of the only people that are beautiful are like Paris Hilton, you know, and Britney Spears.
and that was the body prescribed. And then we had this sort of Obama era,

you know, grand democratization of culture,

which included, you know, people started to have open dialogue about how you could be healthy at every size, which you can write and that all sorts of bodies are beautiful. And I always felt a little skeptical of the sort of dove ad body positivity thing for reasons we can get into later.
But I said, okay, finally, like we have reached a new era. Maybe we'll unlock the sort of hold that white diet culture has had on America since the 20s, basically.
And then this happened and it was like, oh, no. Oh, no, we're swinging.
I mean, that was my initial interest. I was like, I thought we had already changed that we were going to stay on this train of, of, you know, openness and I don't know.
And, and, and the sharp swing back, um, and what that meant for the way people talked and thought about beauty, I thought was extremely interesting. And then, so I just started tracking it.
So here's the thing I wonder though, do you, do that utopia can ever exist? And, you know, because I mean, like, I don't know, sometimes I'm a little simple in this thinking in that I go, we're still animals. And animals also judge each other based on some physical aspect.
And we're no different. I just think what happens to us that's particularly different is there are tastemakers that exist in different spheres who sort of like pull the levers to decide like how we define where the, you know, the Overton window of beauty actually exists and where the one of health is.
Do you think that our conversations these days lie in beauty or do they lie in health or is it people using health to masquerade their views on what they think beautiful is? Yeah, I think it's like the latter, right? And I think even if we were in this utopia where we accepted everyone's bodies, like I think The Economist did a piece about talking about the fact that like women's salaries are pegged to what they weigh. And if you learn, if you lose a certain amount of weight, your salary goes up yeah so it's just like the market forces for whatever reason we know the reasons reward being skinny and by the way did you see the opposite is true for men interesting the more a woman gains in weight the more her salary goes down and with men the bigger they get like the rounder i guess it's like because you look like King Richard or those vibes.
He's just like, the more like Henry, yeah. It's like those vibes like, to all my subjects, the more like bulbous you become the, your money actually, like people don't penalize you at all.
They're just like, yeah, this dude knows what he's talking about. He ate a pig that had an apple in his mouth.
Yeah. And I think for women, it's always going to be, you are.
That connection between morality and beauty and health, I think people just collapse it into one. They don't see them as different things, even if they use a language like, don't you want to be healthy? But they're saying to someone, don't you want to lose weight? And I think it's going to be harder for women to escape that, unfortunately.
So, okay, let me ask this question now is there a moral way for people to engage in conversations about weight weight loss health and how it pertains to people like gia you

know you've done a lot of research in this christiana i know you've talked about this for

for years but like where do you think we find the the where do you think we find the sweet spots

i think it exists and i think probably the people that are the best at it are fat people you know i think that there are a lot of people that have been that have spent you know that it's been like this cultural discursive work in the last 15 years to establish a whole vocabulary for how we could be talking about these things right and it's incredibly difficult in reporting this piece, even in talking to people. Like, I think that the fear of fat and the bias against it is it would come out quite casually.
I'm sure it's built into me in some way, you know, in the way that I think about it. But I think that there is a way to get some basic facts on the table, right? That BMI is based on, you know, like BMI is like a racist, kind of eugenicist standard.
And there can be serious conditions that correlate with obesity, but that doesn't mean that, you know, obesity or excess weight is in itself harmful, you know? And so much of this is really arguably down to physician bias as well, right? Like they're OBGYNs that won't treat women over a certain BMI. There's so many, so many, like statistically doctors self-report, you know, beliefs about patients that are quote-unquote overweight or obese.
And, you know, they treat them differently. They underdiagnose, they undertreat, they attribute all health problems to you need to lose weight in ways that are never sort of suspected about people of different sizes.
And, you know, there's like. Yeah, I think there was a story I read.
It might have been one of your stories, actually, where there was a woman who was struggling to breathe. Yeah.
Yeah. With blood.
Yes. Yeah.
That was. Oh, you like, your lungs are simply fat.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And she actually had, what did she have lung cancer? Blood clots.
Oh, she had blood clots. Yeah.
Yeah. But I think, you know, you're, you mostly find the healthy way of talking about it in people who have had to like advocate for themselves against all of these things for a long time.
I also think fundamentally, probably the healthiest way to talk about health is to kind of set weight aside altogether, right? And talk about other metrics like VO2 max and... Yeah, I don't know what that means.
No, no, no, really. No, I hear VO2 max is the gold standard.
That's actually, they say VO2... What is that? So VO2 max is your body's ability to withdraw or to extract oxygen from every breath.
There you go. I love Apparently that's actually they say vo2 so vo2 max is your body's ability to withdraw or to extract

oxygen from every breath there you go i love that apparently that's it there are so many other

metrics to talk about health that have nothing to do with weight and and probably that would be the

healthiest way of talking about weight is having it be just sort of a incidental byproduct of all

these other lifestyle factors we're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful. Let's talk a little bit about the drugs themselves, like the actual way that the drugs work.
I was lucky. I had a conversation with the CEO of Eli Lilly and some of the scientists who work there because I wanted to understand what what is this thing so I'll break it down and G I know you're the expert so please jump in a few decades ago there was a scientist who discovered that there was a essentially a hormone that was released into your body that told your body you were full right and they wanted to study what this this thing was GLP-1 they called it because they never call it easy things like Patrick which they should because then it would help us if scientists were just like we're going to call this patrick then we all know what patrick is but anyway scientists found glp1 this is something that makes your body feel full makes you feel satisfied i think is a more important word and they wanted to study it but they couldn't they're like all right how do we figure it out they found a lizard they always find a lizard and they're like we can reproduce this you fast forward they realize that this drug can help people who have diabetes then they're like okay this is for diabetes this is for diabetes but then someone goes wait a minute it's not just diabetes people are losing weight yeah and they're like huh and then like all drug companies the same way they did with viagra they were like we're trying people with their blood pressure.
And they're like, have you noticed that all these people are getting erections? And they're like, everyone stop. We don't give a shit about blood pressure.
We've just struck gold. But what I found most fascinating about this is to what you said, Christiana, when we started the conversation.
If we have the conversation about weight loss i feel like we're

missing something bigger that we're discovering right now and these drugs are helping us understand something about self-control and how it has been robbed from us because people take ozempic zeppa whatever right the first thing they do is they don't eat as much we knew that would happen okay fine it, fine, it's working. But then people go, oh, I don't drink alcohol the same way anymore.
I don't watch as much TV. I don't use social media.
I'm not even on my phone as much. I don't gamble as much.
And you're just like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Compulsive shopping.
I read about that. Someone has stopped them in compulsive shopping.
And so, you know, i almost wonder if in discovering this solution have we now exposed all of the poisonous problems that society has unleashed upon itself does this make sense yeah we don't judge gambling or drinking or online shopping in the same way that we do weight so that was what the person was fixated on i got on Ozempic to lose weight, but they discovered all these other parts of themselves or they were awakened to like, I actually spend too much money. Like a woman said she was going through Target and she wasn't putting things in her car in the same way.
And I found that so interesting. We don't see like excessive shopping the same way we see excessive eating.
And I think that's the most interesting part of the drug. Well, this is taking it in a slightly different direction.
But what this part of the conversation makes me think of and what I think this thing that was in the back of my head when I was writing and thinking about it was that like one of the reasons that I, you know, on a macro level, find it really sad when people who are extremely thin take it to take this to become much thinner. Right.
Is that like what it is to be human? Like we're made up of our appetites. Right.
Like that. That's one of the defining.

I like that.

Things of what we seek and what we literally physically hunger for and, you know, like our desire for pleasure and relief and excitement.

Right.

These things are important and they make us human. And back to the conversation about kids, it's like so much of the rise of obesity in children seems directly related to the fact that people are so afraid of fat children in the first place, right? Like that children are taught to fear their appetites and fear the snack drawer.
Like the idea of just kind of natural pleasure in our appetite seems to be the thing that might possibly lead to the healthiest relationship with them in all cases, right? To not need to like indulge and have guilty pleasures and sort of secret little things, right that that if that appetites, if we could sort of treat them normally in all respects, and it seems like American consumerist culture just blows all of these kind of compulsions sky high because of this fear we have of appetite, right? I think my slight pushback to that is like being a Brit in America is that it's actually very hard to have a regulated relationship with the pleasure of food when there are very few pleasures. So food is like a very easy and cheap pleasure.
Like it's, I think that's okay if you're like in a country where it's like, there's a park down the road, I can play tennis for free. Like, it's just like you get pleasure and that's humanity everywhere.
It is like one of the dopamine hits. But in this country, I feel like food and alcohol are the only cheap, accessible pleasures.
But like, if we were in a more balanced, I guess, culture, then I'd be like, sure, enjoy the pleasure of food because then you can regulate that pleasure because you're getting pleasure everywhere. But people don't get touched.
That's a really interesting idea. They don't have community.
They don't have any other pleasures. But that's what I mean, right? If we could like honor our need, like what we were saying, outside time and safety.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like the whole labor market being organized differently so that it's not like you have to squeeze all your pleasure into like two minute micro installments, like, you know, six times a day, right? Like I think we would have a very different relationship to compulsion and appetite and pleasure and relief if, you know, if American society were set up in such a way that would, like, honor people as, like, beings that need these things, right? Also, this isn't unique to America.
I don't want to, because, like, England, like, it's pretty tough right now. Yeah, yeah.
So we're seeing similar things there, too. I think something we also have to consider is this.
One of my biggest beefs is that corporations have found ways to create messaging that tricks people into making the corporations problem their problem.

In the same way, oil companies scammed us into thinking that recycling was our job Right and they make it about individuals. Yeah, you need to recycle.
Yeah, no, no, no, no Let me tell you something recycling is not our job The job is to not make the thing in the first place We take for granted how many times and we ignore how many times we get tricked into believing that it's us And I think the same thing has happened with food And indulgence in America and in the rest of the world Is where you know to your point Gia Is like people have been made to feel guilty About their appetites And about their indulgence And then we create this world where we now fight with each other Why are you letting your kid eat so much It's my child it's their appetite I don't want to stop I don't want to make them guilty and no one seems to be asked not no one but like i think sometimes we forget to ask the question like wait why is it impossible for your child to stop eating those chips if we live in a society where we blame people for the addiction catching them but don't ask who's imposing the addiction upon them then i feel like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole telling everybody in society that they need to be better when in fact we're ignoring the fact that you know yeah for sure these ozempic type drugs as much as we're focusing on them as the conversation i feel like they've exposed this underbelly of addiction that we've all allowed yeah i think trevor what you're getting at is that we've always thought all of these things are just a question of willpower. Yes, and responsibility.
And G, I think your piece touches on that as well. It's not about, it's not willpower.
Like the system is basically working against all of us and some of us are able to resist better than others. And resist some of it, by the way.
And some of it, but I think it's caught all of us in a way. Yeah, i feel like that's the whole story of of the entire conversation around weight right like it's who is making the money off of them and who's making the money off of the cure always follow the money yeah yeah yeah so let's so let's talk a little bit about about um you know if we move beyond appetites per se and we we come back to the the world of these drugs what they're doing and and how people are are using them have we now entered a new world you know g it's what you're saying where this will become another instance of the haves being able to escape another ill in society it's almost like we've put a price on people being able to evade this thing this net of addiction that has been cast upon everybody also i think gia just to hop in it's like we're talking about a zempic so much because people lose weight and we think losing weight is the better thing to do and now it means that there'll be a class of people that can do that and not have to go through the cruelty of fat phobia.
And it's going to be the people with money that can perhaps escape that everyday cruelty. And the people that don't can't do that.
Well, yeah, I think one of the things that does seem maybe meaningfully new about this is that the beauty standards of the last decade seem to me to be this really kind of insidious arms race between digital enhancement and then technological alteration to match digital enhancement. And then you digitally enhance more and then use technology to further sort of shape, inject, discipline, whatever.
The thing that really scares me is the idea that an unaltered body or face is aberrant or deviant and sort of unacceptable that like that's the thing that i find um really like existentially terrifying damn yeah it's almost like um in those um you know when you watch those cyberpunk future movies where like people are judged because they don't have cybernetics now you know so everyone has yeah and that's that's an interesting way you've just put it now it becomes judgment because like well why aren't you making yourself better yeah and i think plenty of people who are fat and healthy and perfectly happy in their lives are are now hit with this sort of unbearable wave of like well why don't you just get the little jab you know because now it seems like you're actively making a choice to not be healthy or why wouldn't you can why wouldn't you conform right like it's so here's a question i do have i'm going to throw a few things at you and everybody go for it trigger warnings everybody trigger warning every jr trigger warning and feel free to plead the fifth no one needs to speak i don't wish to bring anybody down with me all. I'm the pilot who will tell you to jump out of the plane before I take it on this dive.
So let's get messy with a few of these moments and these conversations. Sometimes it feels, and I'm speaking for people, because I generally don't think I'd struggle with this as much myself.
But I do know that there's a little inconsistency or what people perceive as a flipping of of a narrative when a celebrity let's just deal with celebrities celebrities will come out they go i love my body my body's great they build fans based on that body and that body being great fans are like we love your body your body's great we're all with you and then the celebrity pops out like after six months they've just disappeared and they come back and they've got a completely new body and then they're like hey i've got a new body yeah and then people are like yo what the wait what just happened here and they're like no i love this body because actually i wasn't healthy and i wasn't happy and my knees were hurting me whatever it might be and then they get a level of backlash from the people that were body positive who are now sort of anti-body positive because now their body's gone a different way. Does this make sense? And it almost feels like in the same way everything else in society has become like a cult, it's like it sometimes feels like we are not working towards a place where people can be the way they wish to be.
We're working to a place where people can be the way we wish them to be. And then if they deviate from that, we kick them out.
You get what I'm saying? Like, look at how many people were angry at Adele for losing weight. Angry at her.
Jennifer Hudson, angry at her. For sure.
Do you know what I mean? You know, not to speak on behalf of fat people or fat women at all but I think there's so so little imagery of women that had perhaps Adele's old body or Jennifer Hudson's old body there was something very comforting for people to see a fat woman who's thriving and have this incredible career right um and there's like this disappointment or resentment when that celebrity then changes their body. I speculate some of that.
I mean, I mentioned earlier like the little dove, every, you know, everyone is beautiful, like the beginning of the sort of corporatized body positivity movement. It seemed dangerous to me immediately because it seemed like, no, like actually beauty is this sort of arbitrary assignation based on people's conformity to market forces.
It's not like a spiritual, moral good. Like it was this whole thing that was really important to say that everyone was beautiful, as if to say everyone is good.
And it was like, no, no, no, everyone is good and worthy. But perhaps that has nothing to do with beauty oh wow that's fascinating yeah and it seemed to me like perhaps it is just much more important to say like everyone is worthy and beauty is not as important as we ever thought it was at all like it's just this thing right to dumb that down in a way it's almost like what you're saying is it's body neutrality yeah i like that as a that's i never i never thought of that actually and it just like oh this is a thing that people are going to make a lot of money off of now we're trying to get to we're still trying to get to beauty okay hold on there's this click hole article from 2016 that the headline is this plus size model was inspiring but then she lost 100 pounds which was also inspiring even though she was already perfect before but she's also perfect now? know and it was like like it's it's like this very like like and it's like this is the sort of circular hamster wheel that you get into when it's like everyone's beautiful but also health is good but also we love you no matter what you do but also some choices are socially weighted and it's just so so yeah okay i just wanted to throw tressie in.
Oh, definitely. Tressie McMillan-Cottom, brilliant sociologist.
She talks about structural ugliness, right? The thing about how beauty is this structural concept. Even though you can feel beautiful on an individual level, structurally, if you are dark-skinned, fat, and body-setting ideas, you are seen as ugly.
And I think what a Zen pick is getting at is just like, it's this cure to that structural ugliness of weight. That's interesting.
And that's what a lot of thinkers are trying to resist. That like, why have we made being bigger structurally ugly? So, you know, I, so there's two things.
Okay. First of all, I think we shouldn't forget.
And this is why it's hard to have these conversations in society, I believe, because people weaponize certain parts of conversations and use it as a cudgel against others. Let's take it to like athletes.
LeBron James had to lose a lot of weight, or he decided rather. LeBron James decided to lose a lot of weight.
LeBron said, if I want my knees to take the pounding that they're going to take, me jumping, it is easier if I carry less weight. It is easier for me to run across a court if I carry less weight.
I think the thing we shouldn't take for granted is, is like, I almost wish there was a world where we could all go into good faith conversation land. Yeah.
You know, where we can talk about health, but it not be used against somebody else in like a shitty way. Yeah.
A doctor can say, hey, you do want to try and work out as much as possible because it's good for your heart. But then someone's not going to point to someone and go like, you see, you piece of trash.
But it is important for people to know like the lifting of weights, just like resistance training has been shown to be one of the most important factors in longevity. And I'm not saying living long.
I'm saying living as a functional person for as long possible so that's that's like the one side okay so i agree with you but i think and gia you probably understand what i say here as a woman in those spaces sometimes it is so hard to disconnect the pursuit of longevity and health for the pursuit of a body that especially in a city like la new york or london i'm with you completely won't disapprove trust me with men it's not exactly the same yeah but we also and i i'm

not saying it's exactly the same because we don't get judged the same but i know as guys there's

also a diff there's also a difficulty you're standing in the gym and you're going i'm here

to look healthy but also man i'm so far from man body yeah i'm so i'm so far from that i don't look

like chris evans i'm so far from america i think back to the lebron thing though it's like you know

Thank you. So, man, I'm so far from...
Marvel body. Yeah, I'm so far from that body.
I don't look like Chris Evans in Captain America. I think back to the LeBron thing, though, it's like, you know, he has very specific needs for physical performance for his body that all of us do not.
But I think it's an interesting thing to bring up because the question is, how does he need to live in and or change his body to do the things that he wants to do with it? Yes. Even that as a way that people would talk, even that would be just a really nice way for people to talk about.
It would be amazing, right? Like for people, if weight was incidental to that, it was like, can you do the things in your life that you want to do? Do you feel good? I love that. I actually love that.
And it's like, that is probably the foundation that could be the start of whatever healthier conversation. That's amazing.
We need to get that somewhere. Because I feel like that could make a meaningful difference.
It's like, hey, can you do? Can you lift your overhead luggage in the plane comfortably? Can you lift your child comfortably? Can you move a couch? But it's only the things you do. Can you live your life the way you would like to? Yeah.
And like, do you feel good? Do you feel good in your body? Right. I think that's what I was thinking about the like appetite and pleasure thing.
Right. Like if that was valued.
Right. Like people just feeling good.
Oh, man. I really love that idea.
Like it seems extremely health conducive. Right.
We need to get we need to get D'Angelo to come back and do a remix and this one will be like how do you feel that's what it will be don't go anywhere because we got more what now after this you know what you know what i also realize as we're speaking about this whether we like to admit it or not humans are generally judgmental right we hold and cast judgments upon other people because it either makes us feel like we are doing well or it makes us whatever it is there's reasons we do it right i think we shouldn't ever take for granted the fact that fatness is one of the few things that somebody can see on you that tells them something about you in some way shape or form you don't know what it's telling you but you can see it yeah but like think of it this way if somebody has a has a gambling problem Or likes gambling Or Whichever way you want to put it That person

You can't tell.

If somebody drinks a lot of alcohol, is addicted to alcohol or likes alcohol, drinks at a cage, you can't tell.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And I think what's strange about fatness is it is one of the few things where people from far can just assume many things about you because they can sort of see it from the outside.

And not just make judgments but express those judgments.

Yes.

Thank you. And she's's like I'm just on a ride like why do you feel this need to like encourage me the people trying to be nice but like what's under that is like you're someone that should be pitied and needs my encouragement in a way that's kind of infantilizing you um and I think that's the thing about fatphobia.
We just feel like we can say anything to people who are fat. And it's often really cruel.
That's actually a really good point. There was a thing, there's like Harvard does this implicit bias study.
And I think I mentioned it in that piece that I think it was, I'm going to get the dates wildly wrong, but it was maybe sort of from a point in the mid 2000s to a point in recent years, they analyzed sort of 10 vectors of bias about age, about skin color, about like gender, about, you know, like these various things. Every single implicit and explicit expression of bias went down in that sort of like Obama era period, except for bias weight and that went up I believe both implicit and explicit.
Wait so everything went down except that? Yeah I was quite surprised by that. Yeah everything went down.
Everything went down of the 10 things tested in this particular Harvard study. Yeah.
Well that's really fascinating. Yeah.
Look I think I think know, as we said in the beginning of this conversation, this feels like an inflection point and a moment where the conversations we have going forward are going to continuously evolve because now there's been a new agent that's been introduced. I feel like we're at that point now with these Ozempic type drugs is they're now making us ask questions that go far beyond the questions that we've sort of been comfortable living in for a while.
And those questions are, what is health? Are we trying to promote health or are we trying to promote our moral superiority upon other human beings? Are we trying to run around shaming people because it makes us feel better? Why do we even feel, as you said, Christiana, that we have the right to do these things? And then with children, what does it mean for the future? Because again, the big thing I think we also have to include in this is we don't know what the very long-term effects of these drugs are because they're so new. I mean, if you think about mass adoption for a long period of time for people who haven't had insulin issues, for people who don't have diabetes, we don't know.
And I think that's something people always have to be careful of is realizing that we don't know. What we do know is how we can treat people today.

And so, Gia, what now from your perspective?

I'll break it down in two parts.

What do you think we're going to see now?

And then what would you hope we would see now that maybe we wouldn't and maybe we will?

What I thought originally about the best case sort of cultural effect of this, you know, the fact that this technology exists could be is that we could kind of remove the moral valences from every part of this conversation possible, right? That we could understand that metabolism and the hormonal preset that leads your body to be a certain weight and that all of it is much more sort of arbitrary and kind of morally neutral. And like you said, Christiana, like a sign of just all of the other things environmentally that you're swimming in.
Like, I think that is the best thing that something like Ozempic can do is just is lead people to the understanding that if you can radically change people's relationship to fullness by one injection, then maybe it wasn't something that everyone should have been judging. Then very clearly, it's not something that deserved decades of moral, a century, like a full century of moral condemnation by the entire beauty industry, right? Of course, it doesn't seem to have led there at all.
And I think, I mean, I have no real predictions other than the fact that, you know, one thing about GLP-1 drugs is you, in the vast majority of cases, as soon as you stop taking them, your body reverts to how it was before. So the weight loss lasts as long as you take them, basically.
And you gain more fat. You gain it back, yeah.
So this is something we've learned about bodies. I think from the starvation experiments back in the day, the only ones we really have on weight is...
Right, dieting slows your metabolism. And that's one of the reasons that fat phobia leads to obesity very directly.
And so I think we have yet to see the wave of what happens when people come off of this and reckon with the sort of exit plan, if there is one, or the sort of lifetime use for the sort of like beauty use case, you know? And I don't know what that'll look like. I don't know how people will talk about it or how open it'll be.
It still doesn't seem like this is something that people talk about, frankly, when it comes to their own use of it. And I don't know, it'll be interesting to see if and when and how people ever do.
Yeah, that's really, I think, a very honest way to look at all the potential outcomes for what it could or might or should be as we move forward. I will throw in like a random prediction okay i think and this is a crazy thing to say i think at some point the american government is going to shut these drugs down because these drugs if they get to like a point where they are extremely effective because right now they don't work for some people yeah but when they get to the point where like these drugs are just nailing it and i mean just nailing it i think they might get shut down interesting because what is america if people are not addicted to social media people are not addicted to fast food people are not addicted to junk food a lot of america has been built on corporations getting people addicted not giving them something but getting them addicted to things and i wonder if and i know it's like almost conspiracy theory level but i go like i wonder if at some point these corporations and these ceos are going to phone people in congress and go like hey this one drug is shutting down a lot of how american companies make their money you need to shut it down and i don't think that that's impossible to be honest with you i agree with you i have a working theory i think that like as there is this kind of like anti-wokeness thing happening and people are swinging to the right I think the obsession with thinness is also an expression of that and as long as we're kind of

in this kind of right-wing-ish populist conservative era people are gonna long to be

thin because I think that when people talk about when people like use woke as a slur

they'll mention people they'll mention movements interesting mention DEI they'll mention body

I'm sorry. talk about when people like use woke as a slur they'll mention people they'll mention movements interesting mention dei they'll mention body positivity they'll mention transness all of these things that for a brief moment for about two to seven years were coming into mainstream almost acceptance they weren't quite accepted they were coming into it and i think that this thin white blonde ideal barbie movie guys it's not a coincidence it's not a coincidence that like mattel made an ad and we were like oh we should get an oscar but it's just like all of that being ascendant and like the kardashians did you say rejecting like the curvy body as long as that's the case people are going to want to be thin damn and i think the kardashians remembering their women and being white and even dating white men something's happening and then like until it swings and people are like we don't mind curvy bodies we don't mind brown skin and full lips and people that the politics feel different i think the thinness and the ozempic is here to stay well as they say at the end of every great epic movie that's about to begin, really, end of part one.
Gia, thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you for joining us.
And I hope we see you again. Thank you, Gia.
Thank you so much. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions and Fullwell 73.

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