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GLP-1s and the Limits of Knowing Better

I agreed with every political argument against weight-loss drugs. I took them anyway.

Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette (1875–80).

Strega Nona is an illustrated children’s book about an Italian witch with a magic pasta pot. One day, a young neighborhood deviant named Big Anthony learns the spells required to turn on the pot and accidentally makes so much pasta that he floods and destroys the village. His punishment is being forced to eat it all, which is supposed to be a terrible curse. Both then and now, however, this story just makes me jealous.

I first read Strega Nona when I was 9 years old, and unlimited spaghetti was the thing I wanted most, as well as the thing I most needed to avoid. I love pasta to a ridiculous extent—I love how much bite it has, how it’s inherently rich and sweet and delicious and hefty even when served plain. It is impossible to know, though, whether I love it for its extraordinary taste and texture or if it’s a love born out of scarcity. I can never remember eating pasta without feeling as though I were doing something wrong.

When I was a kid, my parents were terrified that I was fat and made their concerns clear. Food obsession runs in the family. My parents’ parents—both pairs—are also fixated on weight: I have never seen my maternal grandmother eat dinner, and her sister died of anorexia in her 50s. My dad’s parents drink only low-sugar wine. My parents always said their concern was for my health or, in my teens, my “body image”—a curious phrase, since worrying about someone else’s body image implies they must already be ashamed of it.

And I was definitely a chubby kid. I’ve been approximately 30 percent fatter than I should have been—according to a handful of doctors, pseudoscientific BMI calculators, and the imprinting of modern Western culture—since I was 9. Still, it was obvious that my parents were terrified not about my diet, or my “body image,” but about my fatness. My sister, on the other hand, has always had extremely low (11 percent) body fat and eats 3,600 calories a day—1,200 of which are usually, say, Gushers—but instead of giving her the “eat less and slower” look in front of family friends at the dinner table, humiliating her as they did me, they would just laugh. But no one laughed when I ate sugar. My babysitter once pried my jaws open to see if I had any chocolate chips in there.

It should be obvious by now that I have never had an intuitive, “natural” relationship to food, hunger, and fullness. My desire to eat always begot restriction, which begot desire, which begot more restriction. In the darkness of my parents’ kitchen, I made pasta for myself like Big Anthony—secretly, late at night. I was so paranoid they would find out that I made stove-popped popcorn directly afterward just to mask the smell, even though plain pasta is, for all intents and purposes, odorless.

When your metabolism doesn’t operate at lightning speed, and your first understanding of your body is that it is somehow wrong and that what you eat should be carefully considered so as not to exacerbate your fatness, and you’ve begun to learn explicitly and implicitly that thin equals pretty, and you are an adolescent girl who wants to be pretty, because it’s the most important thing in the world—when all of this is true, food and exercise become all you think about. My general sexual invisibility for a lot of my teen and young-adult life was verifiable evidence that any whiff of fatness was enough to render me undesirable. I couldn’t, and still can’t, shake off the fact that skinny girls with plain faces and so-so personalities will almost always get male attention more easily than fat girls who are gorgeous and interesting.

I never learned how to like, or even feel neutral about, my body. I have been in a constant war with it my entire life, squinting and posing and contorting in front of the mirror to avoid confronting the reality that I was a little fatter than I wanted to be, and I couldn’t think my way to feeling sexy the way all of the think pieces in women’s magazines told me I could or should be able to do. I couldn’t attempt weight loss without driving myself to insanity, unable to even go for a walk without thinking about how one mile would be 100 calories burned.

That changed a little over a year ago.

In January of 2025, I started using an off-brand compound of semaglutide, a GLP-1—cheap........

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