Notes From an Ozempic Body
Bodies, Babs, and why we never win.
Hello! This is Loose Leash, a newsletter you probably forgot you subscribed to several years ago, from writer/director Alicia Lutes. In the wake of a Twitter ban and a unquenchable thirst for attention, we’re back (for now!) on a semi-irregular basis. Please stick around! We’ve redecorated! Isn’t it nice?
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Before We Begin…
Please compliment me on my Canva skills: I’ve created a wee logo for this here Substack. Check it out! Do you like it? I tried so hard to make it nice, so let me know!
Okay, now onto what you’re here for—some words and thoughts that are, per usual, deeply personally connected to the cultural happenings of the week. For me, this means discussing weight, body issues, semaglutides, Melissa McCarthy, and Barbra Streisand.
As you probably know, I love Barbra Streisand. But even our heroes make mistakes—especially when they are, say, older and a bit less clued into how social media works. Which is exactly what happened when Babs made a comment on a now-deleted photo on Melissa McCarthy’s Instagram of her and Adam Shankman at an event honoring director and choreographer Matthew Bourne. "Give him my regards did you take Ozempic?" the comment said. Comments came flowing in admonishing the singer. She explained with an OMG-led Instagram Story that she thought Melissa “looked fantastic! I just wanted to pay her a compliment. I forgot the world was reading!” Melissa made a very gracious and adorable response video being excited about Barbra knowing who she is (which would probably be my biggest takeaway, too, to be honest).
Barbra did not really apologize, nor did she explain how asking someone if they’re on a diabetes drug recently used for weight loss purposes is a compliment. This, of course, continued the debate on social media about weight and fat and how we talk about this stuff. And, as a woman whose weight has been a central focus for most of the people in her life, for a large portion of her life, I had a lot to say.
Something something The Streisand Effect. Anyway, enough of all that. Onto the post. It’s a biggun, folks. So strap in!
Notes From an Ozempic Body
There’s a home video I remember being replayed occasionally at family gatherings when people needed a nostalgic laugh. It was a series of silly snippets from the early ’90s featuring a host of cousins, aunts, and uncles doing this, that, and the other around my grandparents’ house where I grew up. The scene that exists in my mind of us watching it involves my cousins and grandparents, aunts and uncles, mother and siblings (and myself), gathered around the TV watching my grandfather’s old Super 8 movies. A video of my cousin Erin and I appears on screen, seemingly taken by my father. It’s snowing and we’re tiny—no more than 6 and 4, respectively—decked out in our winter gear, looking like absolutely adorable sausages in our ’80s neon snowsuits. Precious-ass shit.
“Get your big body up there, Leash!” my father says in a goofy voice as my tiny, chunky, baby child’s body tries, and purposefully fails, to maneuver its way up a large pile of snow to make everyone laugh (I’ve always been a performer). The phrase became a running joke in my family, repeated with fits of giggles. Get your big body up there, Leash! Get your big body up there, Leash! Because isn’t it funny how I have always been big and fat? And isn’t it fun for us to all laugh about it? Ha ha ha.
I tried to laugh along with it, but I never found it fun. Most fat people don’t really find it fun.
I was sent to Weight Watchers when I was 8 with a forged doctor’s note; I reached 200 pounds by the time I was 12 (6th grade), and my body only continued to grow and went through puberty. So, my nurse mother (concerned about my health) kicked her mission to make me thin into high gear. I went to a nutritionist. I took classes on what to eat. I was even taken to an endocrinologist who thought I might have Cushing’s Disease. And though my pituitary gland seems to maybe have an adenoma (non-cancerous tumor) that I have to monitor with the occasional brain scan, the tests were ultimately inconclusive.
For a moment, I saw relief in such a diagnosis: it never felt like my weight was my doing. Sure, it would be scary to maybe have to have brain surgery to fix this, and take hormone replacement therapy for the rest of my life, but still! To not be fat! I dreamed about being perceived as a real girl after years of people telling me how great my life prospects would be—as a singer, as a writer, as a performer, as a budding young woman—if only I were thin. But without a diagnosis (which would require a second opinion and a surgical test that would involve attaching catheters to my pituitary gland, and a subsequent two week recovery period—very scary and expensive), the blame for my weight came back to me.
Food I consumed was frequently observed and commented upon, to the point that I developed a hyper-vigilance about eating that’s had a profoundly wide-spanning effect on me. I would go to the gym after school every day, and for a brief moment my mother even paid for a personal trainer, a huge expense that really put the pressure on me to try to make this weight loss thing work. But nothing did. I didn’t lose a pound or an inch. No muscle gains or body changes. The trainer felt bad and was genuinely stumped—he read my food journals, saw how hard I worked. He offered to refund my mother some of her money but she wouldn’t accept it. He had tried, but my body remained fat and getting fatter. And I couldn’t help but internalize that it was all my fault. My mother’s frustrations, my doctors’ suspicions about how honest I really was being about my food intake, I doubted if I was really trying like I promised them I was. I felt so much shame and guilt. Maybe I was lying to myself and everyone else. And when puberty hit, it all got so much worse—as did my attempts to eradicate the fat.
I stole diet pills, tried every restrictive diet my mother suggested. I day dreamed of getting into an accident so horrible that it would force them to wire my mouth shut. For a year in college I lived on phentermine and protein shakes. That last one worked for a bit—I lost 50 pounds—but I felt like I was high on speed and my heart was hurting, so I stopped without telling my mother…until I started gaining the weight back. I felt like I was disappointing her. I’ve always felt like I was disappointing her, with every choice I made. The weight stuff always just carried the exrtra weight of whether or not I would ever be loved—by my mother or anyone else.
God, I just wanted my body to feel normal. I just wanted to feel normal. My mother and society’s outward disdain and disgust for fat people has been embedded in my mind since I was a child and it’s never left. And, to be honest, it’s always felt like there was something wrong, or not working right, inside of me. But there was nothing anyone was saying that made that option make sense. None of the doctors could see how that was possible. I was just…fat.
I knew I had to accept who I was, at whatever size I was. And that became the new journey. Which is around the time I met Melissa McCarthy.
Melissa had been wearing the most gorgeous-looking suit I’d ever seen at a work event. A drop-dead gorgeous green, watercolor paint-looking striped white and plaid design. I was desperate to know who made it. I was also, admittedly, a huge fan of hers. I looked up to her, as a writer/director/performer who was paving her own way in a fickle industry that was notoriously cruel to fat people. An industry I was desperate to be involved in. This meant I was absolutely too terrified to talk to her.
I admitted as much to the women I was talking to at the time. My friend Natalie encouraged me to talk to her—that’s what these work events were for, after all. Maybe a good story would come out of it. So I gathered all my courage and went up to her.
“Melissa, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I just had to tell you that I am obsessed with your suit.” Her eyes flashed with joy and a deep appreciation that surprised me. She had designed the suit, she said—it was from a collection of plus-size clothes she was trying to sell but none of the stores would pick it up. They told her there wasn’t a market for it, which of course made me enraged because I knew it was untrue. I said as much, and Melissa and I got into a long and deeply engaged conversation about bodies and weight and dressing as a woman in these fat bodies. We talked about body acceptance and how hard society makes it when, for example, the plus size section is miles away from the rest of the “regular” clothes—down in a dusty basement corner by the housewares, featuring three variations on the same button down shirts, practical business pants, and mother of the bride dresses every other store had. A constant reminder of how much society hates and loves to ostracize you.
Melissa also mentioned her fears about passing down her own issues around bodies and food to her kids. She wanted things to be different for them than they were for her and her mother. We both got a bit emotional discussing it, as I divulged a bit of my own history with maternal fatphobia and the number of directors and musical producers who told me I would be “so successful” with my talents…if only I lost weight.
Since I was a literal child, people have told me how much of a problem my fat was—and I could see it and feel it, too. My mother’s anorexia in the late ’90s/early ’00s had been aspirational to me: look at all the control she had. Why couldn’t I just not eat until pounds came off? I just wanted to not feel so lazy and incompetent and my inability to lose weight, regardless of everything I tried, made me feel broken, bad, delusional, gluttonous, and gross. I felt like I must be a nefarious, evil person, either because I was fat or because I was lying about how and why I was fat. Every single stereotype and hateful thing people say about fatness and fat people, I took so deeply to heart. And Melissa seemed to get that, too. She gave me a hug and connected me with her publicist so we could talk again (we never did—I did email her publicist, but Melissa’s a busy woman!—though I’ve always wished we could have continued that conversation).
Did you know a pandemic where you’re stuck inside and too broke to afford food is the perfect breeding ground for disordered eating? I was doing dance classes daily with Ryan Heffington thanks to Instagram, and eating a single meal a day (in the evening). I lost 50 pounds and got down to 202 pounds—the lowest I had been since 6th grade. I was elated and felt myself coming into my body for the first time…if also exhausted and deeply, mentally unwell.
(Who wasn’t? It was 2020.)
After the dissolution of a situationship that triggered some real big revelations about how very much I did not have my C-PTSD in control, I became extremely depressed. I didn’t feel like myself, but I hadn’t for so long at that point. I wanted to change: I refused to be the person I had been with him ever again. So I tried to focus on myself and my health (both physical and mental). I started eating better, I found a great new therapist…and gained back 50 pounds and then some in less than a year. It was maddening to know that I was working out more and eating healthier than ever, and all it was doing was contributing to my weight in the opposite way I intended. And the only thing my OBGYN and regular doctor had to say was, “well, maybe you just need to work out harder.”
I was walking an average of 6.7 miles a day and doing strength and cardio training.
I really thought I’d gotten to a good place with all this shit, but emotionally I felt back at square one. I went to an endocrinologist who told me she thought I “probably” had PCOS (poly-cystic ovarian syndrome) and suggested I try intermittent fasting. I was never able to get a follow-up appointment with her after she suggested I could also try metformin for my insulin issues (something I had taken in my twenties that made me feel sick to my stomach).
I think, at my core, I was just really, really fucking angry and sick of feeling like nobody believed me. Nobody ever believes women about anything, ever. And it was really starting to fucking get to me.
Around this time, I met Dr. Ramos, the latest internal medicine man to rotate into the health clinic I go to for services as a poor person on Medi-Cal. I broke down in his office sobbing—as I so often do whenever my weight comes up in a doctor’s appointment—I was so tired and frustrated. It felt like nothing I was doing was helping, ever as always. But I was so determined to heal because so much inside of my body felt broken, mixed up, and wrong. Not just on an existential level: a literal one. I was trying so hard to feel healthy and in my body, physically present and aware, but nothing was working. It was exhausting and maddening: I was 37 with a bipolar 2 and C-PTSD diagnosis, a host of physical ailments, and a million receipts that pointed to how hard I was physically and mentally working on myself, to no avail.
“It just feels like there’s some sort of disconnect between my brain and my body that’s keeping anything from working,” was a common refrain at the time, in terms of my mental and physical health.
“What if your mental health and weight aren’t the problem to fix, but a symptom of something else?” Dr. Ramos asked. I remember breathing heavily in cathartic release: it’s what I’d always thought, ever since they thought I might have Cushing’s Disease.
He suggested Ozempic (or Wegovy, depending on what my insurance would approve to pay for, but he was confident they would pay for it), which had been in the news because of how expensive it was, and how many rich white ladies and people in Hollywood were taking it to lose weight (and in turn keeping it from the diabetics who really needed it). Immediately, my brain was brought back to the weight loss culture of the ’90s and early ’00s. Absolutely not, I thought. I winced, which he noticed and asked about. I explained how I lived through the diet crazes and quick fixes, of having an anorexic mother who outwardly showcased her disdain for fat people, of hurting myself worse to try and be thin, and that I didn’t want to risk putting my body into another precarious situation that might further hurt it. I wanted to do this right, not just the “lazy” way. No fat person wants to be seen as lazy, even though that’s mostly what we are seen as: lazy, overindulgent, and just generally pathetic. Besides: I wasn’t diabetic and didn’t want to contribute to people not having access to the medication they needed, which felt like it was happening at that time.
“Listen,” he said, leveling with me. “I will write you the prescription and you can do whatever you want with it. Take it or not. But you have PCOS and insulin issues, which contribute to weight gain and mental health symptoms. This might help alleviate that.”
I took the script and went home. I mentioned it to two friends who were essentially and immediately like, fuck that and fuck that doctor, and just generally fuck diet culture. Which: yeah! Same! Fuck!!
But also: I can’t lie and say I wasn’t curious. The stories of people losing weight on it made it seem like, yeah, a miracle cure. But I didn’t want a miracle, I wanted science and logic. So I started researching and gathering anecdotal evidence from other people with PCOS. I spoke with the always-lovely Wynter Mitchell-Rorhbaugh about her own experience with PCOS and Ozempic. I saw how many correlations there were between bipolar 2 diagnoses and insulin resistance. Over and over again I was seeing so much research that suggested fixing one’s insulin issues can reverse treatment-resistant bipolar disorder.
So I said fuck it: why not try to make this one thing in my life easier. Everything else—dating, work, family—was so hard. Why not try and see? If it sucks, I stop it. Easy as that. So I took the medication and cynically waited to experience the numerous reported symptoms (which sounded horrible) before quitting the medication in a private shame. A cycle repeated, a tale as old as time. At least for me.
Only that’s not at all what happened, and my god do I love to be wrong about shit.
At first, I didn’t feel anything. I went about my days as normal. A few weeks in, though, I noticed I was waking up ravenously hungry—something that was deeply unusual for me. So I started eating breakfast in the mornings and eschewing the intermittent fasting I’d been attempting for months. I was scared I would gain weight from “eating so much,” or make myself sick from eating at all. Weren’t people, like, throwing up and feeling permanently nauseous on this shit? I didn’t feel a thing. Hmm.
Seven weeks in, I woke up one morning, quite literally, realizing that I didn’t want to die. Wait, had my brain really been waking up wanting to be dead all this time? I had. The realization hit me in a wave of huge, rumbling tears. Oh my god, I’ve wanted to die this whole time. And now…I feel good. Like…really, really fucking good. For the first time in…holy shit, I could not remember. I felt electric and confused. I told my therapist I was worried I was experiencing a manic episode, even though I was feeling less restless, less anxious, and my head quieter than it had in, oh I don’t know, decades? Ever? What the fuck is wrong with me? What is happening? Did the semaglutide trigger my mania? I was feeling so emotionally buoyant and active, I couldn’t understand it. I was able to actually do things I’d often found too scary or hard or exhausting or overwhelming to attempt before. When bad things happened, I was able to handle them. I felt brand fucking new, man, and it was wild to me to feel so alive.
“Maybe this isn’t a manic episode,” my therapist said to me a few weeks after I voiced my mania concerns. “Maybe this is just what feeling good feels like, and you’ve never really experienced that before, so it feels scary and unsettling?” He was right, and I knew it. I simply could not believe what was happening.
(For those who are curious, in those first two months, I lost 30 pounds.)
Is this how a “normal” body and brain feels like? It was all so unreal, I had to research to know more. I read about autoimmune and metabolic disorders, about how little we know about the connection between our brain and gut, the brain and reproductive organs. I read reports on other surprising brain revelations, like this piece in the Washington Post and Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan at the behest of one of my best friends, Ali.
I became obsessed with how my brain was changing. Sure, my body was changing, too, but I didn’t care about that as much (another sign that something had changed within me). It was my mood issues that really plagued me these days. And once my brain stopped screaming out for sugar, once it stopped trying to run on fumes, exhausted by its inability to properly receive and process the glucose that makes it possible to send signals to the rest of my body (thanks to my insulin issues/the blood brain barrier), everything fell into place.
My psychiatrist even suggested that the Bipolar 2 diagnosis I was given years prior by another doctor was possibly incorrect. I definitely still had some impulsive, ADHD-y tendencies and C-PTSD triggers that would probably benefit from a low dose of Strattera, but my deepest, darkest mood disorder tendencies had been completely eradicated. It felt like my brain had gotten a deep clean, that whatever barrier was keeping me from internalizing certain lessons from therapy was no longer there. I could breathe, I could hear my body’s signals for the first time in, maybe, my whole life.
I felt like Bella fuckin’ Baxter, y’all (and yes I was ready to fuck as much as she did, too. A post for another day, though!)
Science was also, somehow, backing up what I was thinking and experiencing. “Ozempic is a brain drug” a headline from The Atlantic declared. Addicts were reporting that their desire for alcohol and the like was disappearing. People talked about “food noise” in Reddit threads on end.
And yet, the conversations around the drug still feel geared towards how it’s a lazy person’s quick-fix, an easy out for rich lazy people. I mean, just look at how people reacted to Oprah admitting that she was on it. That poor woman has dealt with weight struggles and public shame for it her whole entire life.
Even this week, when Barbra Streisand straight-up asked Melissa McCarthy “did you take Ozempic?” in one of the most “okay grandma, that’s enough”-coded Instagram comments of 2024, the discourse started churning up in the most unproductive of ways. Shame and judgment were front and center, all written under the moralizing guise of “concern.” A cycle continued. But I think we all know that’s bullshit: we have a general inability to talk about and consider the humanity of the fat people and bodies that society so loves to demonize, pick apart, and demote to a lesser-than status. Because fat bodies are just so gross, right? Because they’re not what advertisers tell us is attractive and pretty and good. Because ew, flesh and rolls.
But at the same time, I can’t deny that I’ve lost over 75 pounds in the last year and I feel amazing in my body. I am thinner than I was as a fucking 12-year-old. I am eating more than I have in years, and there’s a calm steadiness to my brain that feels so healthy and necessary to my own reclamation of self and worth. And NEW! Because as it turns out—given that insulin resistance is over a precursor to diabetes (something many members of my family have, both type one and two, on both sides)—semaglutides really help my body to function properly. And I don’t want to be ashamed or embarrassed or judged that taking this medication helped me get here and literally changed my life. And I don’t think anyone else should feel that way, either. Cycles need to be broken—this one especially.
So of course I wrote a very lengthy series of Instagram Stories expressing my general frustration. Which has led us here to this very long and interwoven story. Because a different narrative is needed.
“I hate to use the word miracle but it’s been so fucking life changing,” a friend admitted to me in DMs after I posted on my Instagram Stories. And they were not the only one. Because fat people can never win, can they?
You’re shamed for being fat, you’re shamed for wanting to be (or becoming) thin. You’re shamed for accepting your body if it’s bigger (because you’re promoting an unhealthy lifestyle), and you’re shamed for showing off and accepting your body when you’re happy and in love with it—thin or fat. ESPECIALLY if you’re a woman/femme-identifying person in that body. The assumptions, judgments, and projections never cease. So few people understand that weight isn’t a moral or personal failing—sometimes weight is a symptom of something else. (Which, hey, doctors: you should really know this shit, by the way! Because your anti-fat medical biases are LITERALLY KILLING PEOPLE.) Sure, sometimes weight is not a symptom of something else, but regardless of WHY a person is fat…the point is that it is ultimately none of your goddamn fucking business. And what you feel about that says a lot more about you than it ever will a fat person.
Read that again: what you feel about fatness and fat people says a lot more about you than it ever will a fat person.
I just want to be able to feel comfortable, healthy, and happy in my body. Regardless of what that looks like, physically. Regardless of how attractive society thinks that is. Regardless of anything—I just want people to leave my body the fuck alone and stop acting like they know it and what is good for it better than I do. (cough cough abortion politics OH MY GOD cough cough cough) I would really like people to stop being so shameless and nosy when it comes to peoples’ bodily changes. And I would really like people to stop being so nasty to fat people for either trying, not trying, to lose weight. I just want everyone to shut up and leave each other alone, ultimately. Don’t you want that, too?
It’s so hard to have a body. These meat sacks for our souls are incredibly vulnerable—we can get sick or hurt, physically or mentally, and very quickly feel out of control of them. And yet we all continue to engage in these cycles of shame and hatred and judgement, because I think deep down a lot of us hate ourselves (at least a little bit) and resent other people who refuse to do the same. As if we don’t want and need to be a little bit kinder to ourselves and other people in order for humanity to survive.
I have been radicalized, in many ways, by my own Wegovy/Ozempic use. It made me see that I was right, all along, about my body. It made me trust my instincts and inclinations, which has been healing both physically and mentally. It taught me how to listen to my body, to advocate and assert myself. And, yes, it helped me to lose weight in a real, sustainable, dare I say HEALTHY way—for the first time in my life.
And I don’t want myself or anyone else to feel any sort of shame around weight, or these drugs. People shouldn’t have to talk about it, but I want to in order to make people feel less ashamed and embarrassed (sort of my whole thing). To make them feel more empowered to ignore how people judge them or treat them for taking a medication that’s just so easy for people who don’t know shit to dismiss. Every body is different and just because exercise and eating well worked for you doesn’t meant it works for everyone. And it doesn’t mean everyone has to, wants to, or will be thin. BEING FAT IS OKAY AND NOT A MORAL FAILING, YOU GUYS!
It surprised me, and many others, to see Barbra Streisand so publicly question another famous woman’s physical appearance. Probably because Babs herself spent years and years dealing with people judging and commenting on her body and beauty (in her case it was her nose). But Barbra is also a woman in her 80s who is probably not all that deeply engaged with The Discourse, and has notoriously always just said what she’s thinking sans filter—just look at her memoir. And I, for one, have always loved her for it. That lack of filter is what helped her to become one of the most important female writer/director/performers of all time. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t stick her foot in it from time to time. As we all do. And that’s OK—because we only really learn and change in discomfort.
And that’s where the necessity for kindness continues to be the point. People talk all the time about worrying about cancel culture and not being able to say anything lest your life potentially get ruined. But if we all had a bit more compassion and kindness towards ourselves and one another…maybe we’d have a bit more space for the nuance our discourse so desperately needs?
But what do I know? I’m just another (formally?) fat bitch on a semaglutide. Maybe kindness is just the lazy answer.
(Spoiler alert: it’s not.)
Your words and honesty are refreshing. Thank you.
Thanks for writing this and sharing it, Alicia.