Fat people don’t need medical care for who they are

Bullying of an overweight woman depicted in a 1942 advertisement for a dietary supplement. (Wiki)

Even Jia Tolentino, with her seemingly infinite capacity for nuance and tact, can’t get it right. Ozempic is evidently a Fermat’s theorem of social existence. We will need a new kind of mind to make sense of it. 

Ozempic is, of course, the new diabetes drug. Like other diabetes drugs, Ozempic improves blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes. That’s great. But it has fairly extreme side effects. One of those side effects is that it causes patients to lose their appetites. 

In any other era, and nearly everywhere on earth, losing an appetite is very bad. Loss of interest in eating and drinking is a form of accidental suicidality. This is why animals who lose their appetites are considered profoundly unwell. This is why babies who won’t eat are rushed to the doctor. A “healthy appetite” is a big appetite.

But in the rich precincts of the US, as everybody knows, we consider our appetites for food a grave social liability, and our inability to browbeat our biology into food-refusal as a moral or at least pathological shortcoming. 

So Ozempic’s capacity to drain our interest in food, to turn life-sustaining nourishment into a matter of cold indifference, is somehow a reason for rejoicing. Why? Because we have found yet another highly aggressive way that medical doctors can temporarily shrink our bodies to sizes that might make other people like us more, or at least hate us less.