GLP-1s Have Brought Back One Toxic Habit. Why Can’t We Quit It?

Illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus. Life The Age of Thinvestigation Is Upon Us Ozempic, changing beauty standards, and endless reams of digital footprints have us all going down rabbit holes to assess people’s bodies. What is it doing to us? I recently attended the concert of a pop artist I adore (not the one in the news). As my friends and I left the venue, we raved about her elaborate performance, her costumes and sets, and her vulnerability on stage. Then, after a beat, one of us cut the silence with an obligatory grimace: “But did you notice she’s gotten so skinny now?” I’d noticed her thinness like I might vaguely recognize white noise playing in the background. Because I’d never considered her to be anything but thin, it took me aback to consider my friend’s question. Our conversation was largely a dead end; we chalked it up to the physical exertion required from touring artists and took our respective trains home. But when I was finally alone that night, within the confines of my own phone screen, I began my research. I started with her most recent Instagram posts. I zoomed in on photos of her in strappy tank tops and bralettes. I considered her defined abs, bare legs, and the outline of her ribs in a bikini. I noted her clavicle, which seemed particularly sharp. And then I scrolled back, and back, and back. I ended up five years back. And then I saw it: Her face was fuller. Was her current look the result of the sad reality that our faces hollow out as we age? No, her legs once seemed more muscular too. I tapped on photos of her in gowns on red carpets, in swimsuits on a yacht, and in bodysuits on sets, the pictures flashing across my screen. She’d always been thin, I concluded, but yes, she was thinner now. She’d gone from being an attainable skinny to the kind of skinny reserved for a rare echelon of women. Thus concluded another instance of what I have come to think of as thinvestigation. No, I had not managed to determine how she’d done it, whether it was what she ate, physical exercise, a semaglutide, a depressive episode, an undiagnosed eating disorder, the passage of time, or a mix. But I’d figured out this one piece of it, the part that was available to me: She was thinner now. To be clear, I didn’t feel better for doing it. What was there to do now with all this utterly useless information? Mostly I just felt the shame of ending up years deep in a stranger’s Instagram page. But such is the nature of thinvestigation. Until the last year, my friends and I had never before casually talked about someone else’s body like we do regularly now—not even a pop star. So the fact that it keeps coming up for us is, for me, a warning siren. There were a few years, at the height of the body positivity movement, when we allowed ourselves to dream that the all-consuming diet-culture talk we had been raised on was behind us. Now that seems like an impossibility. Our social media profiles allow us to compare and contrast versions of ourselves and each other with ease. And in this moment of rapid change for weight loss, when being bigger is suddenly more stigmatized, because, the argument goes, if you really wanted to, you could get on a GLP-1 and change your life, it’s easier than ever to dissect someone else’s figure. Maybe that’s the reason thinvestigation seems so acceptable these days. Since the rise (and democratization) of Ozempic, weight loss feels like a much easier choice—and to choose to be as thin as possible is a hard one to ignore. Maybe I dug back through five years of photo evidence because it didn’t feel as judgmental as it once would have. But lately, I’ve started to worry over what the opening of these floodgates has done to us, the thinvestigators. After all, once I’ve discovered that someone does indeed look just a little bit skinnier, I go to sleep, and I wake up, still in this body of mine. I look in the mirror at my belly that is still hanging there over the band of my underwear, and I get dressed for another day. A few weeks ago, internet personality and writer Caroline Calloway wrote about strapping 20 pounds’ worth of ankle weights to her legs and disguising them under sweatpants so she could qualify for an online Ozempic prescription. She went to the trouble of such a maneuver in order to get from an explicitly referenced 130 pounds down to 115, a feat that, in her words, could only be achieved through “a loss of appetite.” For as long as the internet attention span allows these days, people fumed over her essay. It seemed to drip self-loathing, critics said, and plenty pointed out that it isn’t particularly radical, as Calloway seems to think it is, to tell people that “being skinny will make your life better in every possible way.” What can be appreciated about her admission is the unflattering close inspection it gives into the disconcerting trend of using GLP-1s for reasons not considered medically necessary—a means to lose those “stubborn” 15 pounds that exist as the final shred of proof that you live a life of occasional pleasure. Most of those partaking in this are not being as candid; influencers are not setting up their tripods to divulge how they scammed their way into the drug that is increasingly making its way into medicine cabinets across America. And yet, as the celebrities embark on their red-carpet appearances, world tours, and fashion runways, there are the signs that are increasingly impossible to ignore. The gaunt, hollow cheeks, dubbed “Ozempic face”; biceps and quads that are suddenly equal in size; the shrinking clothing sizes on their Shop My Closet pages. Now that weight loss can be the recognizable therapeutic effect of an accessible medication, rather than the product of an opaque combination of diet, exercise, and/or surgery, the impulse to ask “How did they do it?” is even harder to resist. Thinvestigation is not new. People are always trying to deduce what is happening to public, famous bodies: For years, an entire ecosystem has flourished of social media accounts dedicated to figuring out the breast augmentations, rhinoplasty, and fillers celebrities are using to transform their bodies and faces. It’s accepted that a plastic surgeon, in their downtime between face-lifts, might make a vertical one-minute clip speculating about the work someone influential had gotten done. But now that so many on our feeds and screens are rapidly shrinking, and they all have a trove of archival footage of their former selves online, no expertise is really needed. Anyone can thinvestigate on their phone: Is their jaw sharper? Have they shrunk in the past six months in ways the naked eye can just see? Every red-carpet event—or slight shift in a public figure’s appearance—now seems to inspire a wave of speculation, warranted or not. Recent thinvestigations that have occurred or are ongoing have included Charlize Theron, Olivia Wilde, Kai Gerber, Kelly Osbourne, Ryan Seacrest, NFL influencer Annie Agar, Jenna Ortega, and even influencers with no more than 250,000 followers. At first, much of the discourse around Ariana Grande began in a similar fashion, with people pointing out her weight loss as early as 2023. Her response to these observations was to make a video defending herself against criticism, which noted that perhaps we should all stop commenting on people’s bodies in any direction, but also stated that it was her previous body that was in fact the unhealthy one. This might have quieted things, but her thinness has only become more pronounced since, fueling conversations during both Wicked movies and now her world tour. Finally, we have arrived at our current moment: a point where we can see something is very wrong, and no one has a clear idea of what to do or say about it. Perhaps what we should take away from this is that even seemingly light-hearted observations about thinness are just a few degrees removed from not being as harmless as they might seem. There has to be a way to acknowledge the alarming shrinking currently happening to some of the most visible women among us, to realize that no, GLP-1s don’t make this kind of thinness OK, and to express concern over it. We need to figure out how to do this without being lured back into a conversation so many of us once chose to opt out of. Because we did opt out, for a while. In certain circles, thanks to the work of fat activists and the body positivity movement, we’d gotten the closest we’d ever been to eradicating weight loss and gain as an acceptable subject for idle chatter over our dinner tables and in our group chats. That this ground we gained is now gone is a loss we have not yet realized the magnitude of. But I’m starting to realize it. Once I finish dissecting whether a public figure is skinnier—possibly at the hands of a GLP-1, let’s zoom in on her eyes to check—I can feel the talk about bodies radiating around me, making me hyperaware of my own and everyone else’s. Examining and investigating the root of thinness, after we’re all already forced to see it on our screens 24/7, has a way of reinforcing our collective obsession with striving for it, attaining it, wondering what it might feel like. There are circles where this kind of talk is endemic, where there never even was that mid-2010s pause in dissecting ourselves. I happen to straddle them both: the world where talking about a dramatic change to someone’s body is impolite and insensitive, and the world where it is the only subject people want to discuss when they first see you. I know the latter so well because in the past year and a half, I myself have undergone dramatically visible weight loss: I’ve lost over 40 pounds and counting, or three pant sizes. Every time I fly back to Miami, where my family lives, the gaggle of comments begins from the older Latino contingent: You’ve lost so much weight! You look so pretty now! You’re so skinny, but you have even more room to lose! Ever since you moved across the country, the weight came right off—you were just in a bad place! How did you do it? The answers are mostly boring: Yes, I’ve lost weight, and I did it consciously. It starts back here: I had gained weight very quickly during the pandemic and the years that followed. I have a long family history of diabetes, and one day after exiting the shower, I noticed a dark fold of skin by my neck in the bathroom mirror. I took photos of it to get a closer look, and I self-diagnosed it as skin thickening that can be an early sign of insulin resistance. I was terrified; it coincided with a life-changing move, and so I suddenly had a catalyst to do something with my fear. Now I walk a lot, I eat mostly whole foods, I read the sugar contents of what I buy at the grocery store. I have not considered a GLP-1 because I don’t want to have to be on a medication for the rest of my life. Even so, I have loose skin in places no twentysomething woman wishes to, and none of my old clothes look as good as they once did. But buying entire new wardrobes is expensive, and tailors are worse, so I’m a baggy-jeans enthusiast. I don’t tell them this, because I know these are not the answers they’re looking for, and I don’t want to give fuel to a conversation I find suffocating. Usually, my response to their statements and questions is to smile and say, “Yes, I have. I’m trying!” I grew up watching weight be a lifelong project for the women in my community. I know that their comments are said out of love, and filled with pride and admiration over my having achieved something they themselves have pined for. So, I don’t tell them what it feels like to know they’re paying such close attention to my body. That’s just the world they exist in, and one that I’m a part of too, every once in a while. At the same time, no friend or contemporary pointed out the obvious to me before I was ready to talk about it—even as we talked about the celebrities shrinking around us. I know there’s a line between someone famous and someone we actually know, but at times, I wondered if any of them noticed. I even thinvestigated myself: scrolling through old photos and questioning whether I actually looked different. But I know no one will be scrolling deep into my Instagram archives because, as a still-not-skinny person, I know that losing weight is what I “should” be doing. Celebrities are being thinvestigated right now because they’re rewriting the standards of thinness—and the new rules they invent often trickle down to the rest of us. But figuring out whether someone’s body has changed doesn’t actually give us any insight into how it happened. We can suspect misuse of GLP-1s, but we often have no proof. (And what would be different about them if we did? What kind of crime is this, and what would the consequences be? Would we stop watching their movies, listening to their music?) There are many reasons why someone might lose weight: an eating disorder, cancer, a new hobby or workout routine, new medications, getting off medications, a breakup, depression, or, in my case, newfound happiness and also fear. You can’t always tell the difference between when someone is doing it for all the “right” or “wrong” reasons, or is one of those for whom it simply just happened. As much as I wanted to believe my own thinvestigations were born out of righteous criticism of a changing beauty standard, I knew deep down that caring this much felt like diet culture repackaged for a new era—and it feels like as much of a trap as the first time. When I did start talking to my friends about what, over the past few years, had been happening to my body, I realized something. These conversations aren’t about the number on a scale or even what I look like now. I focus, rather, on the ways my life is different. I tell them about my walks at the park, or my frustrations with my once carefully curated closet, and the clothes rental service I’m using to figure out a new way to dress. I complain to them during trips to my hometown about my family’s litany of body-related comments. We commiserate over the endless ride we are on when it comes to how societal expectations around this stuff seep into our intimate relationships. My friends are curious, and share their own struggles about their own never-ending pursuits of health, like how hard it is to balance on a reformer Pilates machine and whether we should be figuring out how to fibermaxx. These conversations soothe me. Because wanting to be thin—or to act on our various criticisms of and insecurities about our varied bodies—is not how we are tethered to each other.No, we bond over the actual realities of living. Still, what I have realized is that even with all these positive, humane conversations, something else happens in our heads when we are alone. I can set aside the pop star after the concert, only to find myself dug in when it’s just me and my phone. I can smile and deflect to my family, only to find myself thinking about a comment days later, on a plane ride home. I know that the way we scrutinize and investigate other women eventually makes it back to ourselves, even if we insist that it doesn’t. Maybe I should commit to stopping my own thinvestigations. Or maybe it is simply enough to know that we exist in a world that encourages us all, and especially women, to be as thin as possible—and to decide to try to live differently. I’d like to nod at the madness happening out there and choose to stay inside this warm room a little longer, where I’m laughing and gossiping with the women in my life about everything—or really, anything but “how she did it.” Celebrities Health Internet Culture Prescription Drugs Social Media Women Ariana Grande