Everyone Warned Me About The Side Effects Of GLP-1s. Nobody Warned Me About The Judgment. - BuzzFeed

Hilarious indie essayist.

I took my first dose of Wegovy on a warm Sunday morning in May of 2024. I swabbed my stomach with an alcohol pad, pushed down on the autoinjector, and waited for the cataclysmic side effects I’d read about on social media: life-shattering nausea, vomiting myself inside out, biblical proportions of diarrhea.

Nothing happened. I felt…good? No. I felt great. For the first time in 20 years, I had energy, and most importantly, no pain. I’ve been feeling great, mentally and physically, for the first time since I was a teen, and I feel like I can’t share that joy because apparently Wegovy is a deal breaker. It’s hard to find a space where someone isn’t loudly sharing their non-medical opinion on GLP-1 weight loss while gleefully predicting (and sometimes wishing) long-lasting negative effects on its users. The last time I was this pain-free, I was on fentanyl in a recovery room after major abdominal surgery, although with the way people act about GLP-1s, I feel like they’d prefer I just kept taking the fentanyl.

In an April 20th essay for the Cut, writer Sophia Ortega shares that she ghosted a close friend upon discovering the friend was on a GLP-1 medication. Though the friend had hidden the prescription specifically to avoid upsetting her, the article focuses on Ortega unearthing the secret and cutting ties. I’m not the friend in Ortega’s " Losing My Friend Over Wegovy " article, but I might as well be.

One thing I learned as a chronically ill woman who grew up as a fat little girl is that my existence constantly triggers other people’s trauma. They don’t want to be fat like me. They don’t want to be sick like me (despite the latter influencing the former). I use two injectables: Enbrel (for my autoimmune diseases) and Wegovy (for my weight and inflammation control). I’ve been on Enbrel for over 20 years, and in those intervening decades I’ve stopped counting the number of people who have to immediately tell me they’re afraid of needles or can’t help but comment on me eating in public. Oh, you’re eating lunch early. Didn’t you just have a snack? I just can’t snack all day. Good for you, Linda. But if I don’t eat this yogurt right now, I’m going to barf undigested pills onto your desk.

Either way, I present my existence as a fat woman, or as an ill woman, or as a fat and ill woman, someone is commenting on my health, my body, and the choices I make to stay alive and healthy, offended that I’m not asking their opinion or holding space for their trauma first.

I have MAS or multiple autoimmune syndrome meaning I test positive for three or more autoimmune diseases. My lucky combination includes rheumatoid arthritis, polymyositis, and Hashimoto’s. All of these diagnoses include chronic pain, exhaustion, weight gain, and joint damage. All of the medications that treat them also have weight gain or increased appetite as a primary side effect.

Just one of these autoimmune diseases can reduce my lifespan by 10 years and have a serious impact on my ability to retain housing, a job, and medical coverage, not to mention my ability to maintain friendships and relationships. Being in constant chronic pain makes me seek out easy dopamine as part of pain management — for some people in my position that would be drugs or alcohol, for me it was binge eating and high-calorie food. Binge eating would cause me to spiral and then hurt myself working out. I'd crash diet and lose 40 pounds and then gain back 60.

I’m 41. I lost two decades to extreme fatigue, brain fog, and most of all, chronic, daily, debilitating pain in my joints and muscles. I do not have wild clubbing stories from my 20s, but I can tell you the best heating pad for what ails you at 50 paces.

It’s not a life I would have chosen for myself. It’s not a life I’d choose for anyone. While Ortega described the universal feeling women have about food, hunger, and an obsession to be smaller, be less, in my experience to be fat is to do nothing right ever: lose weight but not like that, and don’t do it around my boyfriend because I can tell you want to steal him, and for god’s sake, take everyone else’s trauma and eating disorder into account before you do lose weight.

The article highlights a bigger problem we have in America: the inability to let go of main character syndrome. Not everything is about you. It does not matter how hard you virtue signal, Batman is still fictional.