285 pounds. Forty-three years old. Summer 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave you thought about GLPs?\u201d my primary care physician asked as she listened to my heart.<\/p>\n
I laughed nervously. \u201cNo, but I am now.\u201d Humor has always been my shield.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t flinch. \u201cYour BMI is over 40. You\u2019re at risk for all sorts of health conditions. Why don\u2019t you look into our weight-loss program?\u201d<\/p>\n
My labs were fine. But that didn\u2019t matter. My body size alone was enough to warrant a prescription. I left feeling ashamed, reminded once again that medicine sees fatness as a disease in itself \u2014 regardless of actual health indicators.<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t the first time.<\/p>\n
In 1995, I was 14 years old and weighed 367 pounds when an endocrinologist bluntly told my mother that I would \u201clikely be bedridden by 20.\u201d He described my legs as \u201cenormous\u201d and referred me to bariatric surgery. Soon after, I underwent a stomach stapling procedure that left an eight-inch scar down my chest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the time, pediatric weight loss surgery was quite rare<\/a>. But to my doctors, my fat body made it acceptable \u2014 even necessary.<\/p>\n The procedure turned eating into a cycle of pain and vomiting. Food lodged in the tiny passage created by the staples left me doubled over until I threw it back up. I became, in effect, a medically induced bulimic \u2014 praised, nonetheless, for my weight-loss \u201csuccess.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Within a year, I had lost nearly 100 pounds. Friends, family and even acquaintances congratulated me. No one saw the violence done to my body or the damage it did to my relationship with food. They didn\u2019t know the surgery left me dependent on ice cream<\/a>, crackers and mashed potatoes because I could easily chew that stuff down to a pureed consistency to avoid the pain that followed whenever food got stuck in my staples. After the surgery, and even still today, I can\u2019t tolerate most fruit \u2014 too acidic \u2014 nor many vegetables \u2014 too fibrous. Stomach stapling didn\u2019t make me \u201chealthier;\u201d it only made me thinner.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n That surgery didn\u2019t even \u201ccure\u201d me.<\/p>\n More than two decades later, in 2017, weighing nearly 390 pounds, I went under the knife again, this time for a sleeve gastrectomy. By then, I had surrendered to the diet industrial complex, a multibillion-dollar ecosystem<\/a> built around the idea that fat bodies are inherently flawed. The pressure was relentless \u2014 to fix, shrink and manage a body that medicine had always treated as a problem to solve.<\/p>\n And the scrutiny wasn\u2019t limited to exam rooms. In restaurants, on airplanes, at conferences, strangers felt entitled to comment on my body. I\u2019ve been mocked for eating a donut, told loudly in a food court that I was \u201ckilling myself,\u201d and subjected to humiliating requests to be reseated on flights. I\u2019ve even overheard cruel remarks in a language people assumed I didn\u2019t understand. Those moments left wounds far deeper than any heat rash or bruise from too-small chairs.<\/p>\n Society\u2019s obsession with fatness extends well beyond personal interactions. Fat people are consistently portrayed in the media<\/a> as lazy, undisciplined or morally flawed. Research has documented<\/a> how these stereotypes influence health care practices and workplace discrimination. This cultural narrative seeps into medicine, where clinicians \u2014 even those with good intentions \u2014 can unconsciously perpetuate stigma.<\/p>\n Today, at 44, I\u2019m on Wegovy. Reluctantly. When I started, I told my doctor my goal weight was 250 pounds \u2014 a number that, at 5\u201910\u201d, felt right to me.<\/p>\n Now I weigh 235, down 50 pounds in eight months. My doctor tells me to stay on it. And I\u2019m not sure why I\u2019m listening.<\/p>\n Initially approved to treat Type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 medications like Wegovy are now viewed as a breakthrough<\/a> for weight loss, but for me, they feel like another chapter in the same story: doctors offering interventions driven less by my actual health and more by the fear and stigma that surround fatness.<\/p>\n