The Wild World of Weight Loss and the Lure of Aspiration
From vibrating pills to injectable unknown substances, all promising a New You
Sigh. It’s that time of year. The time that so many people are prevailed upon to try to shrink themselves—which almost always fails in the long term—for capitalist profit. Some 20% of New Year’s Resolutions are explicitly to lose weight; another 23% are to get healthier, which is often code for… you guessed it, weight loss. (And with nearly 40% of Americans destined to make New Year’s Resolutions, and around 80% slated to break them, that’s an awful lot of people headed for self-perceived failure.)
As someone about to publish a book on fatphobia, I have to keep an eye on weight loss trends and fads and schemes and sundry. Friends, this year is a doozy. I can’t help but wonder whether the breathless excitement over Ozempic and Wegovy—with their manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, now the most profitable company in Europe—is encouraging even more shameless profiteering than usual on the part of the relevant companies. And, in truth, it was all pretty shameless to begin with.
Here’s a brief rundown of some of the more eyebrow-raising news in weight loss just this week:
A vibrating pill, ominously yet aptly called “Vibes”—short for Vibrating Ingestible Bioelectronic Stimulator—is being investigated for use as an appetite suppressant. So far, the pill has only been tested on pigs, who consumed an average of almost 40% less food 30 minutes after the pill had been administered. The theory is, they felt fuller. If they in fact felt sicker and more disoriented by the inexplicable vibrations in their stomachs, they unfortunately couldn’t tell us. The pill is slated for testing in humans—along with, wait for it, permanent vibrating stomach implants. One of the supposed benefits of the pill-cum-implant is that it will cost a lot less than Ozempic. Novo Nordisk is one of the backers for the vibrating pill, having perhaps not yet sufficiently cornered the weight loss market?
Speaking of Novo Nordisk, people taking Ozempic and Wegovy now have to contend with a new threat: counterfeit Ozempic, which has flooded the market, causing symptoms in line with the drug’s usual effects but worse—nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain, and so on. It’s also unclear whether the needles themselves are sterile. This is in addition to reports of calls to poison control for these drugs being up by nearly 1500% this year—likely partly due to the fact that people are turning, in desperation and sticker shock, to cheaper versions of semaglutides supplied by compounding pharmacies. They may then administer the wrong dose, and end up hospitalized for severe gastrointestinal symptoms, dehydration, rapid heart rate, confusion, and delirium. One of the news stories on these cases noted that “overdoses are not likely to be fatal, but experts clarified that in very rare scenarios, they could lead to pancreatitis, which is life-threatening in severe cases.” Reassuring!
Videos espousing “Lemon Bottle”—whose main claim to fame is dissolving bacon fat—as an injectable treatment for weight loss have proliferated on TikTok. The original videos, which show the neon yellow liquid being injected into raw bacon rashers, which begin to disintegrate a few minutes later, have since been debunked. It’s also unclear what precisely is in Lemon Bottle, a South Korean product which claims to have all-natural ingredients, including bromelain, riboflavin, and lecithin. This hasn’t stopped people from seeking out aestheticians and cosmetic surgeons who will inject Lemon Bottle into their “problem areas,” or “stubborn fat,” hoping the fat dissolves and then gets flushed away as a waste product. And because Lemon Bottle is classified as a cosmetic product, it has not undergone the safety testing required for drugs and medical devices. Nor do people have to be medically licensed to administer it, at least in the UK. Nearly a hundred complaints about Lemon Bottle have been registered in the last year, and included patients who suffered from prolonged bruising, swelling, abscesses, infections, and, in one case, necrosis (tissue death).
Then there’s the old weight loss standby: mostly not eating. One man, who catalogued his “health journey” on Newsweek this week, resorted to eating one meal a day (OMAD) while continuing to work out vigorously and parent three children. He now plans to go further, and limit his “eating window” even more, and avoid the ten “cheat days” during the past year on which he went wild and… ate breakfast. No shade to this particular individual, who is welcome to do what he likes, of course, and who I just hope is OK. (I have been down the OMAD road before myself, and it was a short one to not eating for days at a time.) But the way Newsweek presents this as a success story, without commentary or warning, is incredibly depressing. (The headline reads: “I Did the OMAD Diet for a Year and Learned to Control My Hunger.”) As Virginia Sole-Smith has observed in her brilliant book Fat Talk, when straight white men go on extreme diets, it’s often not perceived as a problem; rather, he’s seen as hacking his biomarkers and ensuring his longevity. Or something. Of course, girls and women do suffer disproportionately from disordered eating and full-blown eating disorders, as I explore in my forthcoming book Unshrinking. But I’m tempted to say: it’s not disordered eating if it’s not from a woman, it’s sparkling masculinity. Gallows humor, admittedly.
All of these stories—and I could list several more—should remind us of a simple fact: many people are desperate to lose weight, and it is all too easy to prey on them, to the tune of over 200 billion dollars annually. That there is this level of desperation is both sad and entirely understandable: in a deeply fatphobic society, your life is often hampered and hamstrung in fundamental ways by the size of your body. And this cannot be changed simply by changing your attitude, or learning to love yourself, or similar. Still, there are real limits to what people can do to change their size and shape without risking doing themselves grave harm in the process. Ironically, a person’s quest for health—or rather, what gets called health, and is really often again code for thinness—may compromise their health significantly, and even mortally in some cases.
Let’s be careful to place the blame for this sorry state of affairs squarely where it belongs: both on the industries which exploit our fears of fatness, and on the society which punishes fatness so severely that it can sometimes even be rational to try to fight your fat body. But some of the things we do to fight our bodies thus are, in reality, shockingly violent.
There’s a question which remains pressing in light of this exploitation and violence: why do we keep doing this to ourselves, when we know better—or ought to? A large part of the answer, I think, and as I argue in Unshrinking, is gaslighting: the way we are made to feel gross, greedy, and foolish for simply having the bodies we have, and for having normal human appetites. But part of it is also surely the lure of aspiration: the way the ideal of thinness keeps us working toward an ultimately impossible goal and, with it, the promise of transformation.
I’ve been asking myself hard questions lately about whether my deep suspicion of these concepts—aspiration and transformation—are merely rooted in prejudice against their cultural baggage. Aspiration often sounds drearily middle-class to me, the sort of thing that involves striving after status, including the status of having certain values, rather than trying to live authentically according to the values we actually have. (Of course, the notion of authenticity comes with its own cultural baggage.) And transformation strikes me as a deeply religious, specifically Christian, concept. It may encourage us to believe that we don’t know ourselves well enough to make big decisions, since they would supposedly involve transformative experiences (or, in other words, epiphanies). In the case of parenthood, for example, the idea that it would be a transformative experience speaks against the rationality of having an abortion. (How can you know you don’t want a child if you don’t know what it would be like to have one?) And that strikes me as a reductio, since having an abortion can be rational. (Indeed, I would argue that it always is, if you simply don’t want to have a child or be pregnant. I say this as someone who has shouted my own abortion in that spirit, as my very first post on this platform.)
There are big questions about whether these concepts are salvageable, separable from their cultural baggage, which I hope to start thinking through in the new year. (I know “aspiration” in particular has very different associations for people in different social positions, a point I was rightly taken to task for in the comments on this post recently.) In the meantime, let me just say this: the idea of aspiring to have a body your body does not want to be is both alluring and pernicious. It’s alluring because it promises a transformation that itself promises upward social mobility—who hasn’t been transfixed by a weight loss “transformation” video, with its stark bifurcation into The Before and The After? Who hasn’t been drawn in by the specter of someone who, in the space of a minute’s montage, slides orders of magnitude up the scale of respectability, credibility, marriageability, fuckability? It’s pernicious partly because the scales themselves are garbage; also, most bodies rebel against dramatic weight loss in ways that fundamentally damage people’s health and well-being. Moreover, that bifurcation masks a better, more humane way of thinking about change that often goes missing in these discussions: growth, maturation, development. The way we can get better at something without becoming a different person, or even having a distinctively new experience of ourselves and the world in the process.
Me? I am getting better at accepting the body I have. It wasn’t a mental before and an after. It was a gradual yet important shift in the way I look at all bodies, my own body included. I think I’ve grown up. I am still the same person I always was. I have always been someone who doesn’t believe, deep down, in radical cosmetic solutions to bodily non-problems. I am someone who, in a state of restlessness and insecurity and vulnerability, likely could have been prevailed upon to try goddamn Lemon Bottle.
I am wishing you peace in the new year, friends, and a reprieve from this wild set of weight loss practices. Are there any alarming fads or trends you’ve noticed lately that I’m missing here?
I just read a book by Swedish author Isabella Nilsson, "En bok för ingen: brev från en underpresterande övermänniska" (roughly: A book for no one: letters from an underacheiving übermench").
She's got anorexia and sits in her apartment reading philosophy (mostly Nietzsche) and fiction, writing down various thoughts and observations, ranging from silly puns to astute observations to very dark snippets of autobiography (great book which I recommend to everyone if it ever gets translated into English...). She says about the anorexia that yes, it's terrible and destructive and she once checked herself into mental hospital because of it (and was then horrified to find out that she had been registered under coercive care even though she went there on her own initiative, voluntarily seeking help, because apparently "anorexics always change their minds and bolt again"). But it also fills and have filled many different psychological functions over the years, and clinging to it has paradoxically functioned as a survival mechanism during dark and terrible times.
She recognizes her own anorexic experiences in lots of "great men" who stopped eating or ate very little for periods of time. But society, researchers and scholars, want to draw this sharp line between male and female experiences of self-starvation. For men, it's supposedly ALL about what functions this behaviour fills - even when it's seen as destructive rather than some cool "biohacking", as when scholars look at self-starving great poets of the past, it's all about artistry and creativity and GRAND psychological stuff. For women, it's all about going mental because you're obsessed with being thin, or maybe because of blabla genetics blabla neurology and hormones. Nothing more than that, nothing grander or more interesting.
Thanks for the sane discourse on this! I have been so much more at ease in being aware of all this stuff...I feel less guilty, I even went to the gym just wanting to swim for the floating feeling, which was great, ...not to go for any other reason felt like heaven! thank you!!! I look forward to reading your book!