By John Loftus
Fat activists are big mad over big people getting a little smaller.
Obesity rates in America are high and climbing fast — in fact, they’re way too high and climbing way too quickly. According to the CDC, 40% of American adults between August 2021–August 2023 were clinically obese. For adults ages 40 to 59, the obesity rate was a whopping 46.4%. (Subscribe to MR. RIGHT, a free weekly newsletter about modern masculinity)
Enter weight loss drugs. Though their long-term side effects remain unclear, at least in the short term, GLP-1s are helping obese Americans shed extra baggage. If you don’t have the willpower to eat less and walk more, you still have an option to trim your waistline before your best friend’s wedding.
But for so-called scholars and activists associated with the “Fat Studies” field, the recent surge in popularity of drugs like Ozempic is becoming a cause for concern that is threatening their entire grift, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday.
“Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us,” Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, told WSJ. “It’s created an even louder public narrative that you could just solve all your problems by taking this magical drug, and if you don’t take it, well then, you deserve what you get.”
Marilyn Wann, a Bay Area fat activist suspicious of long-term side effects stemming from weight loss drugs, lamented that they “creat[e] more work for fat activists.”
“People think that if everyone can just take this expensive, dangerous drug, we can get rid of fat people,” she told the WSJ. “These drugs are going through the same excitement-and-disappointment cycle we’ve seen with every method of intentional weight loss. It just creates more work for fat activists.”
Mann has a point. Weight loss drugs are expensive. For people paying out-of-pocket or whose insurance will not cover the drugs, Big Pharma still charges a steep monthly price, even after recent efforts to reduce costs. And they could also be dangerous. Ten years of shooting Wegovy into a thunder thigh may lead to unforeseen consequences that doctors and researchers cannot predict.
But fat activists are equally as shameless as the Big Pharma companies. Instead of peddling drugs, they peddle self-deceptive lies. The more humane message is this: Being obese is bad for your health, and although you should not be treated as less of a human because you weigh 300 pounds, you also should not be enabled.
