I recently attended a dinner that included a 40-something woman I have known for years as part of my extended family. I looked forward to hearing how she was doing as a mother, a wife, and a hard-working professional woman. I’ll call her Lily here. None of those topics came up; what she talked about mostly was her weight loss, courtesy of a new GLP1 weight loss drug. As background, Lily was never noticeably overweight, and was neither pre-diabetic nor diabetic. Standing in the kitchen in her pre-pregnancy skinny jeans, she just wanted to look better, though she never put it that way. She spoke instead of the 20 or so pounds as she lost in psychological terms, that her thinner self made her feel differently about herself as a person: more confident, less ashamed of her body.
I kept my mouth shut; the last thing young adults want to hear is knowledge or advice from somebody their mothers’ ages. But I became sadder and sadder as she described her pharmaceutical weight-loss journey: the drug’s price, its dosages, its overall wonderfulness. I asked myself, How did this talented young woman, a product of this country’s 50-year struggle to ensure that women receive equal educational opportunities, equal pay, birth control, and equality before the law, end up in a suburban kitchen half a century later describing how she felt like a lesser person because she was a few pounds shy of today’s wholly unrealistic beauty norms?
There’s nothing new about a young woman’s desire to be attractive; archeologists discovered recently that even Cleopatra had lipstick. It’s the “feeling better about yourself as a person” part that is so sad to me. Are we really no more than the appearance of our outer shells?
A recent study described on forbes.com stated that 7% of all prescriptions filled in the U.S. are for these weight-loss drugs; medicalexpress.com found that one-fifth of American women aged 50 to 64 are taking them, predictably creating skyrocketing earnings for the corporations that manufacture them. Graphs appearing on yahoo.com show over a 5-year period just how much of a boom for share prices for two major corporations between 2019 and 2024: Novo Nordisk (Wegovy) $100 to over $550, Eli Lilly (Zepbound) $100 to over $600 (though today there is volatile cutthroat competition between those two largest GLP-1 for coveted market share).
Healthline.com recently consolidated data from Medicaid, Medicare, and 1.9 billion claims from private insurers to also determine which states have the highest GLP-1 prescription rates. Unsurprisingly, the poorest states, with West Virginia and Kentucky topping the list, have the highest numbers. These data do not specify for what purpose these drugs were prescribed so there is a lack of granular detail, and poor southern states also have high rates of diabetes, an American epidemic for which these drugs were designed. It should also be noted that Medicaid does not prescribe these drugs for weight loss, and that available data does not include those who pay cash for their prescriptions, bypassing insurance and its data. Given that limitation, the actual numbers of Americans taking these drugs, coupled with the lightning speed of the ever-nimble American pharmaceutical industry to come up with easier methods to administer them, would almost certainly push those numbers much higher.
We unconsciously absorb the culture around us, especially when we’re young and competing in that culture’s marketplace. What we see today, on thousands of media sites, are successful women emulating the Trump harem of thin, designer-dressed women tottering on 5-inch heels, sporting highlighted, flowing locks framing faces caked with makeup.
At our annual Christmas celebration, I gave the women in our group copies of former first lady Michelle Obama’s book “The Look,” which describes the pressures she faced to conform to that beauty ideal (especially as an African American), frying her natural hair in the process and ultimately requiring that she wear wigs in public. When I handed her book out I said that my favorite first-lady comment was made by the senior Barbara Bush, who declared upon moving to the White House that she would not lose weight, color her hair, or buy new clothes. That’s confidence.
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