The GLP-1 Secret Society

Did you hear about Serena Williams? She just came out!” I had arranged to speak with a woman I’ll call Katherine, 37, a wardrobe stylist in St. Louis, who takes Zepbound to help manage symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), on the same day that the tennis legend announced her “life-changing” relationship with the same medication.

Katherine’s choice of words was striking. Coming out. We all know what it implies: bravery. Going public with a controversial truth. Overcoming fear of rejection or judgment. Yet as Williams embarked on her press tour as the new spokeswoman of Ro, the online weight-loss meds platform (in which her husband, serial entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, is an investor), appearing in Vogue and on the Today show, she repeatedly insisted just the opposite. There is nothing remotely controversial about taking Zepbound — that was the undercurrent of everything she said, in every interview. And there is no reason to be secretive about taking it. “You’re not taking a shortcut,” Williams told us. “There’s no shame in this.”

According to a recent survey from the think tank RAND, nearly 12% of all Americans have tried a GLP-1 agonist, the class of drugs that includes Wegovy, Mounjaro, Ozempic, and Zepbound. These drugs have been on the tip of every wagging tongue for more than two years now. Yet, contrary to Williams’ talking points, the people least likely to gab about them may be the ones who are actually on them.

Plenty of folks proclaim their shots, loud and proud. When I put out a query on Instagram about the secrecy surrounding GLP-1s, one writer friend responded with characteristic brio: “I tell everybody I’m on Zepbound and give them permission to tell me how hot I am.” Another friend wrote, “I’m on it and VERY PUBLIC.”

But far more responses to my query gave new meaning to the term secret weapon. One friend wrote back almost immediately: “Secret GLP-1 society all the way!” Another confessed, “I didn’t tell anyone for ages — even my mom.”

In an era of unprecedented transparency about our vanities, and the lengths to which we go to service them — with fashion-world types shouting about their “blephs” from the (digital) rooftops, and reality TV royals specifying the exact number of CC’s in their breast implants — somehow, being on a GLP-1 can feel still like a third-rail topic. Even our best friends don’t always tell us what they’re taking, and oftentimes, we don’t ask, whether because we don’t know how to ask or we don’t want to put them on the spot.

“We’re five, six years away from a revolution in the way we use these drugs, and the shame we feel about them.”

Take Megan, who recently ran into a friend from grad school on one of those New York City boat tours that cruise around the Statue of Liberty. She could pinpoint exactly when she’d last seen him — March 2020, right when life ground to a halt. Five years later, he was gobsmacked. “He was like, ‘Megan, you look great. You look great,’” recalls the 51-year-old brand consultant.

The old Megan would have come right out with an explanation for how her body had changed, as if one was owed, just because he had noticed: Over the last year and half, she’s lost 100 pounds, dropping from a size 22 to a 12, by cycling through several different GLP-1s under the supervision of a weight-loss specialist. But, unlike the many times she’d lost weight in the past, Megan simply gave him a Mona Lisa smile and took the compliment. She knows this friend probably suspected GLP-1s were involved — that’s the world we’re living in now. But outside the circle of her immediate family, she never talks about it.

This summer, Emily Sundberg, author of the cool-girl Substack newsletter Feed Me, published the results of a reader survey (done “in partnership” with the online weight-loss drug marketplace Found). A full third of respondents had tried a GLP-1, but their comments revealed that for most, this was not an uncomplicated choice. “I use them secretly but think it’s embarrassing,” wrote a reader from San Francisco. “I am still embarrassed for other people if they get on them,” said one from Little Rock. A Parisian reader summed up the mixed feelings — and the layered judgment — of it all: “It’s kind of like cheating, shouldn’t we all work to get healthy, not thin? Also I hate the pendulum swing back to skinny = beautiful that this has caused but also I want it?”

Who wants to put themself in the eye of that storm?

Julie Rice, the onetime founder of SoulCycle who recently joined WeightWatchers as its new “chief experience officer,” compares our attitude to GLP-1s to the way we once talked (or didn’t) about Botox. “It was kind of a lean-in, quiet conversation at the lunch table on Saturday — who was, who wasn’t,” Rice says. “Somebody would disclose the name of who they got Botox from, but three other people at the table who you knew got Botox wouldn’t even say they’d had it.” Back then, the idea of paying hundreds of dollars to have something called “botulinum toxin” injected between one’s eyes sounded, to most people, mildly insane. Many women kept their shots a closely guarded secret, rather than risk being seen as vain, self-obsessed, or, god forbid, desperate.

Today GLP-1s are in a similar phase of early cultural and psychological acceptance. But they’re also a far more complex idea for us to metabolize, so to speak, than Botox ever was, because they take us all the way back to the seven deadly sins, bringing up charged and deeply rooted ideas: fat, thin, obese, “healthy.” Self-control, self-abnegation. Good, bad. The dastardly BMI. These medications poke at what can be one of the most painful and complex relationships of our lives — the one with our own bodies.

“I don’t feel like I ‘deserved’ to gain the weight, so I don’t feel like I achieved anything by losing it.”

Botox was arguably a comparatively straightforward proposition. When you get wrinkles, you’re just a victim of time — and aren’t we all? Yet in spite of everything we now know about the disease of obesity, weight gain is still widely viewed as a personal failing, a sign of weakness. Paraphrasing Feed Me’s conflicted Parisian: “Should” weight loss be easy? And if weight gain is your “fault,” do you “deserve” an “easy way out”? (Overuse of quotes intentional.)

When Cadence, 39, gained nearly 50 pounds over the course of the pandemic, her doctors were flummoxed. This was a “statistically significant” amount of weight on her 5-foot frame, she says. Suddenly, none of her clothes fit; her body didn’t seem to move the same way. She was in “constant physical discomfort.” Nothing she tried would shift the weight. Until Wegovy, which returned her body to its previous size in a matter of months.

For Cadence, this was a Serena Williams-esque turn of events, truly life changing. Nevertheless, she says, “I’m weirdly reluctant to declare it publicly or to acknowledge it. I think maybe it’s [a fear of] being seen as not having ‘done the work.’”

One of the ironies of Oprah having become one of Ozempic’s most vocal proponents is that she was the one who helped crystallize our ideas about the “right” way to lose weight in the first place — which is to say, triumphantly, over months or years of epic battle, ideally with trainer Bob Greene at one’s side. When she dragged that little red wagon of fake fat out onstage or hoisted her plus-size jeans in the air on camera, the message was that losing weight was a victory of good over evil deserving of a ticker-tape parade. Today, some GLP-1 users find that weight loss via medication, which doesn’t feel earned in the same way, doesn’t come with that sense of accomplishment. “I don’t feel like I ‘deserved’ to gain the weight,” Cadence says. “So I don’t feel like I achieved anything by losing it.”

Megan, the woman who stayed mum on the boat tour, says her old friends are well aware that, over the years, she’s gained, lost, and gained again. Each time, “I would be like, ‘Oh, my God, I dropped 30 pounds!’” she recalls. “I’d trumpet it everywhere.” Then she’d toss out her larger clothing in celebration. “Eight months later, you’re like, sh*t.”

It is often not “society” that is the primary or most merciless judge of GLP-1 users. It’s the users themselves.

This time, Megan resolved that her weight would be nobody else’s business. It helps that GLP-1s famously quiet “food noise” — when weight loss isn’t all-consuming, she says, you don’t feel compelled to talk about it all the time.

How much should a GLP-1 user be expected to share? Sherrie Delinsky, Ph.D., a psychologist specializing in body image in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has been having this conversation a lot lately with her patients. There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy, Delinksy says. The former “is a personal decision: that other people don’t really need to know your business.” Like Katherine, the woman who broke the news to me about Serena Williams, who so reasonably told me, “I don’t tell people about any other medications I take. Why should I tell them about this one?”

But Delinksy says secrecy, on the other hand, can be a red flag for internalized stigma or shame, often about the nagging should — as in, I should be able to manage my weight without meds — which persists even when experience (and now science) has shown that we can’t. Most of Delinsky’s patients have lost weight before, then regained. “With that comes a deep sense of failure, disappointment, shame, frustration, anger, all directed at yourself.”

This was a common theme in my interviews for this story: As deafening as the chatter can be around GLP-1s, it seems clear that it is often not “society” that is the primary or most merciless judge of GLP-1 users. It’s the users themselves.

It can be tricky to know how to talk about weight loss — medicated or not — in the wake of the body positivity movement (RIP). What does “body positive” even mean when you’re no longer accepting your shape as-is — because, for the first time, you have the option of changing it? We’ve seen all kinds of responses to this conundrum. Plus-size influencer and entrepreneur Katie Sturino won kudos when she frankly acknowledged the use of weight-loss shots to improve her health and get thinner. Lizzo, on the other hand, flipped-flopped on her use of weight-loss meds — denying, then later admitting that she had “tried it” — and recently referred to her dramatic shrinkage not as weight loss at all, but rather as “a lifestyle change that resulted in the intentional release of weight.”

Sam, an actor in London, was incensed when GLP-1s started making headlines. “Oh, I was very anti,” says Sam. “Like, ‘What kind of world do we live in!?’” For decades, Sam had avoided actorly habits like fad diets and juice cleanses, and even Botox. “I have this thing about having to be my true self,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh.

Then perimenopausal weight gain kicked in. Earlier this year, Sam caved, giving in to the shots. Now she’s 23 pounds lighter but tight-lipped — in part because she doesn’t want to seem like a hypocrite. Still, she insists, “I don’t feel guilty. I absolutely love it.”

“I tell everybody I’m on Zepbound and give them permission to tell me how hot I am.”

By the way, women who keep their own shots a secret can be just as outraged as the rest of us by celebrities they suspect are not being open about theirs. “I’m like, ‘F*ck you, Adele,’” Megan says. “‘Oh, you just went to the gym twice a day because you were so stressed about your divorce?’ Please.” (The singer has strongly denied using weight-loss meds.) Megan argues that the rich and famous have a responsibility to not mislead the rest of us about what it takes to look a certain way. “If a woman with an actual weight problem” came right out and asked Megan how she lost the weight, she says, “I’d totally be honest with her.” It’s just that, strangely enough, no one actually does ask.

Part of WeightWatchers’ rebranding as a distributor of GLP-1s has been the building of online and in-person meetings for people who take them. At 20,000 digital meetings a month, Rice says, crowds of WeightWatchers clients gather — just as they have for decades — only now instead of talking “points,” they’re often swapping tips on how to live on these meds. In these meetings, users can be as anonymous as they want to be, asking questions and crowdsourcing advice while still protecting their anonymity. But Rice believes meetings like these will eventually help more people not be secretive about GLP-1s, by normalizing their use. She says the advent of new GLP-1 pills (only one of which, Rybelsus, is currently FDA approved — and that’s for heart disease, not weight loss) will also make a big difference in how these drugs are perceived. It’s early days, she says. “I think we’re five, six years away from a revolution in the way we use these drugs, and the shame we feel about them.”

Casting Serena Williams as the face of Ro? That stroke of marketing genius stands to benefit more than just her investor husband. Williams, after all, is an icon of both physical strength and mental fortitude. Her body is a temple. Take any of the character flaws our cultural lizard brains have internalized about weight gain, and try applying them to her: indiscipline, laziness, self-indulgence… failure? Are you kidding? This is Serena Williams we’re talking about.

Still, it might have felt truer, and been savvier, for Williams to come out of the gate acknowledging that people do have mixed feelings about using these medications. Rather than insisting there is no shame, what if she’d led with something like “let’s stop feeling ashamed”? That kind of frankness could be a big deal for GLP-1 users — and all the people who are chattering about them, too.