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We have been absolutely bombarded in the media over the last few years about Ozempic® and other GLP-1 medications that have helped many people lose weight.
Whether you are one of the folks who have benefitted, you’re on the fence about trying them, or you’re against using them entirely—how do we collectively come out of the Ozempic era strong and still able to love ourselves?
We have seen this trend before.
Weight loss medications and surgeries touted to be the next big thing, only to find out years later that those pills and surgeries didn’t have the efficacy that people hoped for long-term or that they were downright harmful.
Undoubtedly, you know someone or a few people currently on the drugs, singing their praises, and maybe losing significant amounts of weight. In my work as an eating disorder therapist, I see a relatively high amount of people on GLP-1’s looking to heal their emotional eating, quiet the “food noise,” and get back to a lower weight.
There is so much hype. Excitement is high for people who have struggled with their weight for years. However, most people I talk with are clear that they can’t be on GLP-1’s forever, that they’ll likely gain all the weight back once they stop, and that they need to truly heal their relationship with food in order for their changes to last.
Yet, the drug is still so tempting.
When being pummeled on the daily with messaging that we are not enough, lazy, weak-willed, and unwanted if we are what society deems “overweight,” how do we continue to love ourselves, or perhaps learn to love ourselves for the first time despite this rhetoric?
I think the message is: “You’re not enough the way you are and you need medication to get there.”
Let me say, I hold no opinion on whether Ozempic is good or bad, or whether you should personally take it or not. I just want people to love themselves.
We have been making collective progress in the last few years with more people turning toward body positivity and acceptance of themselves. I follow accounts on my Instagram feed geared toward loving ourselves in larger bodies, women who lift weights that are strong and healthy but not skinny, men in fitness careers who are accepting that they have a normal-looking belly rather than six-pack abs, and folks turning toward accepting that their bodies are intended to be a little bigger because they are unwilling to do unhealthy or extreme things to shrink themselves.
This progress is so refreshing.
And yet, my feed is simultaneously punctuated by ads for GLP-1 medications. I can’t escape it. I’m actually one of those people who has carefully curated my feed to include body positive and anti-eating-disorder accounts, painstakingly unfollowing folks who spout diet culture or spend lots of time showing off their thin bodies. So, for these ads to infiltrate my high standards is frustrating.
This juxtaposition has me thinking about self-love. We all know that spending too much time on social media can make us feel bad about ourselves. That’s a given. But what else can we do?
It’s in the ways we care for ourselves. The small gestures we take toward ourselves. Taking a hot bath when we need to unwind or be alone, taking time off of work when we are sick and truly resting, sending ourselves loving and compassionate energy when we make a mistake, taking a few extra moments to eat a beautiful lunch without distractions. When we slow down and put mindfulness first–instead of rushing from one thing to the next, prioritizing busyness and other people’s needs–we strengthen our connection to ourselves and to the divine.
Meditation is one of those ways we can improve self-love, as well. When we meditate daily, we connect to something bigger than ourselves. We discover a loving energy, a strength from within that bubbles up from the inside. We realize that searching for things outside ourselves to feel enough is fruitless and never ending. The love that bubbles up from within is the only true source of self-love, but there is an endless supply available to us when we just tap in.
Yes, it takes discipline to meditate every day, but the efforts pay dividends to our self-esteem.
Remembering that we are part of a system that is sick can help too. Our society–the diet culture we live in–keeps pumping us full of the notion that we are defective because they want us fully sold on the idea that we need outside interventions–that we pay for–to be whole, loved, and accepted.
Our whole society is built around this. When we remember that this is what we were born into but it is not us, we can detach emotionally from it. It takes reminding ourselves constantly, but it can be done.
Other things that help are catching ourselves when we’re deriding ourselves about our weight, saying affirmations, coping with the mixed emotions we feel about our weight in ways that go beyond diet and exercise, turning away from media that makes us feel bad, filling our lives with activities and people we truly enjoy, and focusing on the good in our lives.
We can collectively make it through yet another weight-loss focused era.
Let’s remind each other not to get too sucked in, to take it all with a grain of salt, and to remember that we are being marketed to. Let’s remind our friends that they are great just the way they are, support each other in practicing self-care, and put a voice to why and how diet culture feels so wrong.
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