GLP-1 medications change the entire landscape of how we think about food, weight, our bodies and our health. Even more relevant to this blog, eating disorders are now perceived differently as well.
Any one person’s opinion about the benefits or risks of these medications is conjecture and largely irrelevant, including mine. We are all going through a cultural transformation that extends well beyond health. The tectonic shift in perception about our bodies is more to the point.
Thinness is back in. Any sense of body positivity or a generous understanding of the variability of the human body is out.
The pressure to be thin is stronger than ever, and the cost to do so irrelevant. Since GLP-1’s are available for a few hundred bucks per month, anyone inclined to take them can have them. And if anyone has any personal sense of what is best for one’s health, the current cultural trend demands you take them. What else could be more important?
Also the medical establishment is lying by acting as if we are predominantly taking these drugs to improve our health. Of course, some people do have meaningful health benefits: lowered blood sugar, decreased inflammation, lower alcohol cravings and improved cardiac risk, to name a few.
However, the true customers finding the medications are the healthy people who want to lose weight, pure and simple. That’s where the true profit comes from. That’s what is changing our cultural landscape because GLP-1’s have become the newest addition to medicine-adjacent, “healthy” treatments like Botox, plastic surgery, IV vitamin treatments and now GLP-1’s.
We all need to accept that the collective obsession with thinness landed us here. Experimenting with medications often prescribed by clinicians online who barely know the patent and have little justification to do so except for financial gain is risky business. Our health care system for actual illness has many inherent problems, but the self-care industry is thriving.
People with eating disorders will now include those with little or no treatment who choose instead to take these medications. They may seek help once the medications don’t work well. They may experiment with the drugs to try to manage their eating disorder. They may develop an eating disorder by using the drugs.
No matter how it plays out, GLP-1’s are part of the American zeitgeist and will affect all parts of life and continue to alter how eating disorders exist in our world. The first step is to accept this reality and move forward. I certainly have in ways I incorporate these drugs into my practice, work with people on them and find new ways to help navigate a world dominated by weight loss drugs, for better or for worse.
