Is Ozempic Cheating?

Your answer says a lot about you.

Sure, pharma companies are more or less evil, but I have to concede that with Ozempic and other recent weight loss drugs, they may have caught lightning in a bottle, or, in this case, a syringe.

I'm old enough to remember a time when overweight people were told that if they wanted to lose weight, they needed to eat better and exercise, but now the solution is far easier (though more expensive). All you need to do is go to your doctor and say you've tried everything, but no matter how many '1 simple tricks' you try or body booty busters workouts you attend, you can't burn off that stubborn belly fat or shred those pesky chicken wings.

The Doc, no doubt getting a kickback from the pharmaceutical company, will ask about your diet and exercise routine (something lawyers have instructed them to do so they're not sued), but before you can explain yourself, they’ll cut you off, tell you to drop your drawers and give you your first shot in the behind. Congratulations - your new life is about to begin.

Wut Is 💉?

And what life is that? Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, rips through the body, mimicking a hunger-dampening hormone, slowing digestion, evening out blood sugar, and landing hammer blows to dysregulated appetite. In other words, people stop eating faster, and despite what calorie thread bros on Twitter might say, when you eat less, you consume less energy (calories!) and thus store less energy (fat). The end result? You weigh less.

Oh, and for some reason, reduces people's appetite but often interrupts their addictions as well. Some even claim it alters what they want to eat, inverting palates into preferring kale to Doritos. It's all hard to believe, and with no currently recognized downsides other than blindness and rapid muscle loss, it appears that America's obesity problem has a solution.

All that's great, but it's fair to concede that the Ozempic is not the same as changing your diet and exercising. All it does is reduce appetite; no habit change is required.

You can still go to the same restaurants and order the same foods. It's just that with all those hormonal changes, you have no hope of finishing that bacon burger you love so much. You’ll still want to, but you just won’t be able to do it, or, more precisely, you just won’t want to. Ozempic makes you want what you always wanted less.

👏🏻 for Pharmaceutical Companies

I have zero issues with this. Really - it's great.

Sure, it's also the final masterstroke of a long, corrupt society that stresses us out, offers us abundant hyper-palatable energy-dense frankenfood, overwhelms us with conveniences that rob most of us of movement, and then offers us an easy, albeit expensive shot to at least reign in our waistlines with a straight face.

But let's get real - the masses were never going to be henpecked into fighting the system and changing their lifestyle - drugs were always going to be the answer to the obesity epidemic. This is America. Do you think the average person can make it through the modern environmental minefield of addiction (social media, alcohol, sugar, fast food, weed, video games, porn, etc.) ALONE and replace it with a healthy, parallel world that relies almost entirely on them to build and sustain while nearly everyone else in their life doesn’t?

Of course not - that’s WAY too much work. Without burning your life down to the ground and joining some vaguely cult or cult-adjacent group - the Amish, the Mennonites, Hippie Communes, Homesteaders, etc - the only real bulletproof, no bs way you can fight obesity (besides eating almonds out of your purse), is getting the big O.

The Credit Card of Skinny

So that's the state of play these days. As with any disruptive technology - cars, machine guns, planes, radio, birth control - society takes time to adjust to the change. Interestingly, some people have noted that the troubling thing about Ozempic is that it makes being thin an unreliable marker of character now that anyone can take a shot and get skinny. This is strange.

Nowhere else in American life do we flinch at people signaling without the substance to back it up. That's what credit is, and America runs on credit! Most people live in houses they've mortgaged, drive cars they're paying down, and wear clothes they owe to their Amex. If you want to signal financial success, shortcuts are accepted. But when it comes to being thin, everyone suddenly gets really huffy about Ozempic because, suddenly, thinness is decoupled from the character.

Why the double standard? It's an ugly reason. The people who will drive around in a leased Lexus have one less reason to feel superior to all the fatties they used to secretly look down on.

Honestly, I couldn't be more pleased that they're butthurt about it. For as long as I've been alive, people have brainwashed kids not to judge a book by its cover, and the millions of perfectly kind, wonderful people with muffin tops and guts got gaslit romantically, discriminated against professionally, and generally railroaded into exclusion and misery while everyone they interacted with pretended their life sucked for other reasons. Now they get a chance to win their life.

Is it cheating? Sure! But if the worst outcome is that skinny bitches get one less reason to feel better than everyone, I'm all for it.

False Signals

The Ozempic phenomenon reminds me of something well-known in the cycling world—the conflation of appearance and performance.

Cycling has a look. The look of a sport is no one's fault; it emerges over time from the phenotype that conveys an advantage in the sport. NBA basketball players are tall because being tall makes it easier to be a good basketball player. Likewise, being lean and light with narrow shoulders and long legs lends itself to riding bikes fast. There are exceptions, of course, but they are exceptions.

Consequently, during my time in the sport, there was always pressure to be thin, even if you weren't naturally thin because many fast people looked that way. Over time, many cyclists cared more about looking the part than actually being fast.

Here's what's great about cycling - You can be fast without being thin. Not the fastest, sure, but damn good, and I think it's not only a healthy welcome for the sport but also sweet justice for big-boned thicc folks to clown on bird-hipped featherweights who talk shit about how people look in Lycra and then get their doors blown off in races.

Ozempic shows us how much we rely on proxy signals to measure value. In cycling, thinness is a proxy for being fast. In Ozempic's case, thinness is a double proxy! Thinness is a proxy for health which is a proxy for good lifestyle choices.

In the world I'd like to live in, if we wanted to measure health, we would look at metrics that measured health, not check how big their waistline is. If we wanted to measure performance, we'd look at power files, not rely on how baggy their Lycra is, to figure out if they're fast. In the world I'd like to live in, culture moves away from false proxies, and we confront and dismantle the assumptions that produced them in favor of truer signals.

Lol No

But that's never going to happen. No one has time for that that shit, and if they did, they wouldn't spend it on that. Humans use shortcuts and rules of thumb; they don't carefully formulate their opinions based on all of the available evidence and tentatively draw conclusions - they take one look at a porker and think, 'Lay off the fries, bud.' Just like cyclists at the start line take one look at a Lycra-straining competitor and think,' Well, they won't be a problem on the climb.' No matter how artificial and off-base our conclusion-based judgments are, we'll continue making them, even if we realize they're artificial and off-base.

As reluctant as I am to say this, I can't help but conclude that Ozempic reminds us that knowing our judgment metrics are faulty, knowing that doesn't free us from them. We're pattern-seeking creatures living in a world incentivized to monetize false patterns, and until we stop responding to them like we do the real thing, they'll persist.