On Ozempic for Weight Loss and Feeling Judged? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Feel Guilty

If you are taking Ozempic—or any GLP-1 inhibitor medication—to lose unhealthy weight, you should not feel guilt or shame. Guilty feelings are often a reaction to the misguided arguments and stigma that surround obesity and overweight. Let’s see how scientific research disproves outdated attitudes about weight loss.

Why are people against using GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic for weight loss?

fallacy /’faləsē/ [noun]: a mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument

1. The “You’re so vain” fallacy

When people say “you’re just losing weight to look better,” they fail to understand that unhealthy weight is associated with an increased risk of developing several diseases and medical conditions, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, some cancers, depression, and more. 

Diseases aside, carrying excess unhealthy weight can create barriers that prevent people from doing the activities they enjoy, and this can have social and psychological effects. The desire to improve your ability to live the life you want is not a cosmetic goal.

2. The “Your disease isn’t serious” fallacy

Let’s break this one down by first understanding what a disease is: a disorder of structure or function with a known cause and a distinctive group of symptoms or signs. Obesity has a known cause—or to be exact, many known contributing causes, including genetic, psychological, physical, metabolic, neurological, and hormonal impairments. It also has distinct symptoms—and beyond the physical changes, these include negative effects on social and interpersonal relationships.

Here are a few more reasons to believe that obesity is a serious disease that should be given the same attention as any condition that is affecting millions of people around the world:

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirms that extra belly fat is linked to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and heart and blood vessel disease.
• The National Cancer Institute states that, compared with people of healthy weight, those with overweight or obesity are at greater risk for at least 13 types of cancer.
• According to the Obesity Action Coalition’s fact sheet, obesity—and specifically, excess fatty tissue leading to inflammation—can increase the risk of stroke. 
• Recent research published in Cell reiterates that decreasing body fat mass can normalize a metabolism that has been impaired by obesity and can even help people achieve diabetes remission.

3. The “Eat less, do more” fallacy

When people say “to lose weight, all anyone needs are diet and exercise,” they fail to understand how complex obesity is.

Unhealthy weight gain can be caused by a variety of factors—even the type of bacteria that live in your gut can play a role. On top of this, our environment and what we’ve been taught is a “balanced diet” have set us up for failure when it comes to staying healthy. What’s more, the way the human body has evolved over thousands of years to process food doesn’t fit well with the carbohydrate-dense diet and less active lifestyle that modern living has afforded us.

Eating the right combination of foods and staying active are great recommendations for everyone. But when diet and exercise are not enough to overcome all the additional barriers to weight loss and lower your risk for weight-related health conditions, it’s encouraged that you take the next step to achieve it. This next step could be finding a fitness partner, joining a support group, starting therapy, exploring surgical options, or trying medication. 

It’s your prerogative to find the right solution for you—and it’s also your right to define what success looks like for you.

4. The “Treatment trumps prevention” fallacy

This is a widespread belief in our society—not just about obesity, but all diseases and unhealthy conditions. We are much more likely to visit our doctor when something is wrong rather than take steps to keep ourselves in a state of good health. Medical care is the same way, tending to focus on reactive treatment rather than proactive prevention.

This is a big reason why experts in the diabetes field made a push for recognizing prediabetes as a formal diagnosis. They knew that by identifying an earlier stage of unhealthy blood sugar levels (instead of waiting for clinical diabetes to take hold), early diabetes treatment—including an improved diet—would gain traction and save more lives. 

Looking at obesity specifically, researchers at Washington University confirm that taking early action to reverse insulin resistance (which can be caused by too much body fat) can also prevent heart disease, kidney disease, and nerve damage.

You could take prevention a step further and say that it would be better to prevent obesity and excess weight rather than treat it with GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic. This is true, and many dollars and hours of effort have been put toward obesity prevention. But barriers to healthy lifestyle are woven into the fabric of our society, so breaking them down will require major shifts in social norms—and deep, sweeping changes that don’t happen quickly.