What “thin” looks like and means in Western culture continues to morph over time, but one implied narrative threads it all together: the belief that the thinner body signifies a more psychologically controlled and more disciplined self. By making appetite suppression a chemical and physical process, the use of GLP-1s for weight loss ostensibly rewrites that narrative; but does it?
While men increasingly face their own pressures around body size and physique, compulsary thinness has historically been directed most intensely at women. During the ‘90’s, the androgynous Kate Moss “heroine chic” image marketed deprivation as edgy and cool; then the Victoria’s Secret angels rewrote women’s thinness as sexy, toned, and bronzed, repackaging discipline as sexual empowerment; Thinspo and Pro-ana language expanded to include Fitspo, where strong was to be the new skinny but control and discipline were merely repackaged as “wellness.” Despite the shifting language around compulsory thinness, being thin has remained the glorified reward you gained for your struggle and sacrifice.
The mythology of suffering exploits the self-awareness and self-understanding people gain through attention to their biological signals of hunger and appetite. The woman who tunes into that hunger can then ignore it. The myth acknowledges, almost necessitates, the body’s signal of hunger but moralizes the women who can, and cannot, use and optimize it. This is the mechanism behind Kate Moss’s popularized phrase, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
A Different Path to Thinness
Into this cultural milieu enters the non-medical use of GLP-1s. Originally approved for type 2 diabetes, these drugs have become increasingly available through prescription and the black market to those without metabolic disease. They work primarily through suppressing appetite and slowing the rate at which food leaves the stomach. Patients have reported a decrease in cravings and an inability to overeat without becoming ill when doing so (Tolentino, 2023). The issue is not whether women should take GLP-1 medications for certain conditions. This is a medical question that belongs between them and their physicians. The question here is what it means that the cultural moment surrounding these drugs has seemingly settled into a new narrative that challenges the myth of suffering.
Appetite suppression is now advertised as a given chemical and biological phenomena that bypasses the need for psychological discipline and willpower. Weight loss can come without the emotional distress of calorie counting and persistent exercise. Disrupting that moralized narrative is, in itself, quite worthy. But the new story produced still says that appetite is a problem, that a suppressed appetite is a liberated one, and that chemical management is care and cure. If the mythology of suffering exploited the self-awareness of hunger, the use of GLP-1s seeks to quiet the signal of hunger and self-awareness. But the body’s signals of hunger and satiety are not simply inconveniences to be managed for those without chronic conditions. They are, among other things, a form of embodied self-knowledge: the particular knowledge that comes from inhabiting a body over time. What a person knows about their own hunger is part of what they know about themselves.
Writing in 2023, Jia Tolentino traced a historical genealogy of thinness from the Industrial Revolution to today, showing how thinness became a class and racial signifier in the nineteenth century. Lifestyles became increasingly sedentary, food became easier to access, and dress sizes became standardized. “The diet industry roared to life” in the form of thyroid extract pills, reducing salons, and pop culture articles about the “deformity” and “crime” of being overweight. Following the chronology up through the body positivity moment of the 2010’s and its reversal in the “shrinking” Kardashians of today, Tolentino shows how this thinness supremacy is old, adaptive, and persistent.
The introduction of GLP-1s, Tolentino argues, has ironically “prompted less a public consideration of what it means to be fat than a renewed fixation on being thin.” While the drug may significantly help those who struggle with chronic health conditions (notably diabetes and obesity) to regulate their metabolic function and those with compulsive thoughts of food to work toward a different relationship with food and cravings, for those who use it off-label for aesthetic purposes, “it might function more like an injectable eating disorder.”
In their 2024 feminist analysis of GLP-1 pharmaceutical marketing, Warin et al. argue that GLP-1 drug advertising’s emphasis on women’s empowerment actually undercuts its own promises of self care. By medicalizing appetite, “offering a pharmacological solution that overrides the ‘emotional strain of weight loss,’” and releasing “women from their time poor lives,” the advertising “presents a heroic narrative that unbridles women.” It promises self care in the form of emancipation. But Warin et al. complicate this rhetoric of self care by calling on research that concludes there is “no guarantee of improved mental health quality of life” after weight loss. They conclude that “a more stable form of self-care, and what has been described as ‘freedom’ from the ‘misery’ of dieting” may be best “produced [instead] through less-conditional self-acceptance.”
The Persistence of Virtue
Though the introduction of GLP-1s has seemingly de-emphasized the role of willpower in weight loss, women share that this narrative of moralized willpower nonetheless persists. Cassidy George, writing in 032c in 2025, interviewed women on their experience taking GLP-1’s. One woman shared her experience with the stigma of taking semaglutide: “if you’re ‘cheating’ with Ozempic, then apparently, you don’t deserve applause.” Another respondent shares, “Skinny was always attractive—it’s just easier to reach now. But as soon as people hear you had help getting to the version of yourself that society prefers, it suddenly doesn’t count.”
Describing what she calls “the Great Disappearing Act” (bodies vanishing en masse through GLP-1 use, against a cultural backdrop of resurgent heroin-chic aesthetics), George recounts her own experience of being praised as “the best I had ever looked, at least according to those of us brainwashed by white, Western beauty ideals” at “the worst I had ever felt.” George was not on semaglutide, but stress and emotional upheaval prevented her from eating and sleeping properly. She was, in her words, “profoundly unwell.” But people read her body’s distress signal as though it were an achievement. She had never felt so valued. The cultural gaze has been so conditioned to equate thinness with virtue that it can no longer distinguish wellness from emotional and psychological distress.
Thinness culture has never just valued thin bodies but has instead valued the moral performance of suffering required to achieve them. Even when pharmaceuticals seemingly remove the necessity of self-denial, the cultural imagination continues to romanticize disciplined deprivation. When thinness is treated as evidence of self-control, larger bodies are often read as signs of indulgence and laziness. In short, body size continues to be read as a proxy for character even in the age of GLP-1s. If non-medical use of GLP-1s is going to change anything meaningful about our relationship to weight, it needs to do more than change bodies; it needs to unsettle the meanings we attach to them.
