More fallout from Ozempic. Plus, Don’t be Gene Hackman

It’s hard to tell who’s losing weight faster, people on Ozempic or the federal government.

President Elon Musk is in the middle of both. He’s cutting government fat while also reducing his own excess weight with Mounjaro.

A lot of Americans are obsessed with the new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound. According to the nonprofit organization KFF, 1 in 8 Americans has tried one. The drugs may even be able to treat dozens of other issues, including Alzheimer’s or drug addiction.

The drugs are so popular that our new health czar, RFK Jr, has been critical of the manufacturers behind them, believing obesity can be cured with a proper diet.

In December, I wrote about the way Ozempic may be affecting eating habits heading into the holidays. The story got more traction than I expected. Maybe I was onto something.

But someone’s gain (or loss in this case) is always someone else’s pain.

Here are two examples.

“You don’t have to go in for injections all the time.”

Bariatric surgeries are down, according to JAMA. One study says they dropped almost 26% in a year. Bad time to choose this as your medical specialty.

But what about the people who shelled out thousands of dollars for the procedures? Do they wish they’d known what was coming down the drug pipeline and waited for a GLP-1?

Not Jennifer Jones.

Jennifer is a dear friend of mine, a woman who brightens any room she walks into. We started working together years ago at KFI radio in Los Angeles. I remember seeing her several months after she’d had lap band surgery. She was literally half the woman she used to be.

So I called her a few weeks ago.

“I have friends who are on Ozempic — or different brands of (GLP-1s) — their lives have changed,” Jennifer tells me. “But the one thing that they have commented to me was, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky. You don’t have to go in for the injections all the time.’”

Jennifer tells me the surgery was part of a long journey she started eight years ago. “The big thing I needed to do was get my sobriety under control.” (We were actually speaking on the day after her 8th anniversary being sober.) “I thought that if I could make it to the five-year mark, my ‘birthday’ present to myself would be having weight loss surgery.”

After exploring her options — a balloon or a sleeve — Jennifer chose the sleeve. “I started losing weight right away.” She also started eating better and going to the gym.

Jennifer has since lost 142 pounds. She no longer needs blood pressure medication. “It’s been awesome.”

Here’s Jennifer before the surgery:

And after:

Jennifer says she went through some counseling to help retrain her mind. She might want four pieces of pizza, but she could only eat one. Otherwise she’d get sick. She learned it’s important to avoid sugar for the same reason. KFI listeners advised her to have extra clothing on hand at work, “because you will have diarrhea at the craziest times.” When she first heard that, she thought, “No freaking way.”

Way.

When I asked Jennifer if she wishes she’d waited a few years and opted for Ozempic over surgery, she answers, “Absolutely.”

Well, that’s how she felt at first. But the more she thought about it, Jennifer realized that the surgery and sobriety were parts of a larger recovery. “I’m not doing Botox anymore. I’m not putting stuff in my body. I tried to get off the prescription drugs I was on.” The idea of injecting something on a regular basis didn’t seem healthy.

“Why would I do that? It defeats half the purpose of why I did this in the first place,” she says.

Virgie Tovar was another person I wanted to talk to.

“The news media has turned completely on the body positivity movement.”

Remember when inclusiveness and body positivity and fat-friendly policies were all the rage? Those days were brief, and they may be over.

Look, not everyone wants to lose weight. Not everyone thinks it’s healthy to diet. But the growth of GLP-1s has made it harder than ever to convince people that being fat is okay.

Virgie is a long-time body positivity activist who has a large following of plus-sized fans. I’ve known Virgie since our days writing for Bulletin, a short-lived project at Meta that was created to compete with Substack. (The project failed, but it paid well!)

Here’s my favorite photo of Virgie.

I asked Virgie if she ever considered taking a GLP-1 drug. “No,” she tells me, rather firmly.

People seem to be less sympathetic to her decision these days.

Virgie thinks public opinion began turning against body positivity even before Ozempic made headlines. She believes it started with the multi-million dollar initiative by Old Navy to expand its clothing line to accommodate larger people. The campaign failed miserably, forcing out the company’s CEO. The stock plunged. There were shareholder lawsuits. Virgie says, “The headline became, ‘Plus size fashion doesn’t work.’” Fat people were seen an expendable. “The straight-sized customer never gets treated like this.”

And then came GLP-1s.

What has shocked Virgie is the way drugmakers are promoting the products to people like her. Virgie spent years trying to diet. It was painful. She ended up with anorexia. So she was stunned when third-party marketing firms approached her about taking one of the drugs and sharing her weight loss journey with her followers. They would even pay her. One offered to send her to a “very, very, very fancy med spa in Malibu.” She didn’t even return their emails. “I don’t believe in a weight loss journey.”

But she thought it was weird that the companies would even approach her. It showed a complete lack of understanding of the fat activist community. Most people want to lose weight, she says, “so why go after the 5% of the population that doesn’t want to?” Many of her followers have had disastrous dieting experiences similar to Virgie’s. “I’m speaking about the most vulnerable people, people at the intersection of weight stigma and eating disorders,” she says. “These are people who should not touch GLP-1s with a 10-foot pole.”

So was fat positivity, body inclusiveness, anti-weight bias — whatever you wanna call it — ever really … real? “It’s such a good question,” Virgie answers. It’s something she’s been thinking about. A lot. “I think there is a sense of grief for me.”

I’d love to know your thoughts. Also, are these new drugs changing your lifestyle? Leave a comment!

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Meantime, for something completely different…

OMG Gene Hackman!!

Please, dear Lord, let me stay in regular contact with people so that when I’m 95 years old, and no one hears from me for over a week — even with a much younger spouse — they think, “Maybe I oughtta check in on Jane.”

My mother, the late Mercille Wells, used to send me a daily email in her widowhood with the subject line, “All’s Well.” (Don’t ask me about the provenance of the name Mercille, it’s a mystery.) I was supposed to be concerned if I didn’t receive the email every morning. Occasionally, there would be no email, and I’d get a frantic note from her in the afternoon saying that the internet had been out “and I hope you weren’t worried.” I’d feel bad because, of course, I hadn’t noticed.

The best part of her daily missives was that she wasn’t content to write a simple, “I’m still alive.” Mercille always had something to say.

A couple of brief examples:

From August 2012:

”Good morning. Just read about the man in Tenn. being sent to prison after his 7th DUI; the last time he was caught he was driving a John Deere mower.“

In August, 2011, there was big news in her senior living complex:

“A white-haired man who has a black medium-to-large dog took his dog to the dog park. A woman and her dog were there, the woman's dog attacked the man's dog and the man sprayed the woman's dog with mace with some of the mace hitting the woman. The woman called police, and is pressing charges against the man.”

In January 2011, she invited friends over to watch a movie, including “L”:

“As for the movie, I realized that You Don't Know Jack (about Kevorkian) was not suitable for L because she's scheduled for serious heart surgery at Cedars-Sinai on Jan. 11, so I checked out The Devil Wore Prada.”

I have hundreds of them. Re-reading them always makes me smile, and they served an important purpose. One of her greatest fears was that she’d die and no one would discover her for days.

But when my mother passed away in 2015, I was at her beside. She was not alone.