Yes, GLP-1s make you thinner. But do they make you freer? | Opinion

Everyone I know seems to be talking about GLP-1s.

Maybe that is not literally true. But it feels true. In 2025, the KFF Health Tracking Poll reported that about 1 in 8 U.S. adults said they were taking a GLP-1 drug, with women more likely than men to report current use. Every week, sometimes every day, another celebrity appears online looking suddenly, dramatically thinner. The captions are breathless. The comments are admiring. "You look amazing." "You've never looked better." "What's your secret?"

We know the secret − or think we do.

And I find myself asking a question I wish our culture had made less urgent: Is getting thinner the goal for American women again? Or has it always been the goal, only now there is a powerful new tool that makes it feel newly attainable?

People deserve access to the help GLP-1s provide

I ask this as a psychologist, as a mother, as a woman getting older, and as someone who would not mind losing a few pounds. I want to feel healthy and strong. I want my clothes to fit well. I want to look good. And, to be candid, I want to feel attractive to my husband.

Should I feel guilty for that? Should I feel guilty for wanting to lose weight naturally, rather than taking medication to get there faster? Why am I even thinking about this so much?

These questions sit at the intersection of medicine, vanity, shame, health, aging, privilege and freedom. They also sit inside a culture that has always had a complicated relationship with women's bodies.

GLP-1 medications, including drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound, are serious medical treatments for many people. Obesity is a chronic condition associated with diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other health risks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 40.3% of U.S. adults had obesity during August 2021 through August 2023.

These medications can reduce appetite, improve blood sugar and, for some patients, change the trajectory of their health. In 2024, the Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy to reduce the risk of serious cardiovascular events in adults with cardiovascular disease and obesity or overweight, alongside diet and physical activity. For people who have struggled for years with weight, stigma, food noise and metabolic illness, the moralizing tone around these drugs can be cruel.

People deserve relief. They deserve care and compassion. They deserve to make medical decisions with their doctors without becoming targets of public judgment.

GLP-1 is a medical breakthrough that amplifies cultural problems

Still, these drugs are entering American life at a very particular cultural moment. They are arriving in a country where women have long been taught to monitor themselves from the outside in. How do I look? Do I look older? Do I look desirable? Do I look disciplined? Do I look like I have "let myself go"?

We used to absorb those messages from magazines at the grocery store checkout. Now they arrive through Instagram, TikTok, celebrity feeds and before-and-after photos that appear between pictures of our grandchildren, our friends' vacations and the latest political outrage. The technology has changed. The pressure has become more intimate, and more constant.

Research summarized by the American Psychological Association found that reducing social media use can improve how teens and young adults feel about their weight and appearance.

Wanting to lose weight does not automatically mean a woman hates her body. Wanting to be healthy can be an act of self-respect, and the desire to feel attractive is part of being human in today's world. The danger begins when caring about our bodies quietly turns into obeying a culture that has always rewarded women for taking up less space.

That is what troubles me about this moment. A medical breakthrough has entered a culture already organized around comparison. And once comparison takes over, private decisions start to feel competitive. Who looks younger? Who looks thinner? Who has access? Who is willing to do what it takes?

Our kids are watching how we handle weight – and weight loss

This GLP-1 conversation reminds me of another one from years ago, when my own children were in school. Many students seemed to be taking Adderall or other stimulants − some appropriately prescribed, others passed around as academic performance aids. The whispered logic was familiar: Everyone is doing it. They can focus longer. They can study harder. They can get better grades. They can get into better schools.

My children were strong students, deeply engaged in their own passions. I had an aversion then, as I do now, to giving or taking drugs that are not medically needed simply to compete in an already distorted system. But I remember wondering, as parents sometimes do in the dark hours: Am I protecting them, or disadvantaging them?

That question returns now in a different form. If other women can become thinner, faster, with medical help, am I foolish not to join them? If thinness still brings compliments, opportunity, admiration and perceived self-control, is refusing the drug a principled choice ‒ or just another way to fall behind?

This is the emotional trap of enhancement culture. It turns personal decisions into status decisions. It takes a medical tool and places it inside a ranking system. It tells us we are free to choose, while surrounding us with consequences for choosing differently. A 2016 study led by Amelia M. Arria and colleagues found that college students who used prescription stimulants nonmedically did not show GPA increases or detectable academic advantages over peers.

To be sure, we have to be careful. A person using a GLP-1 may be trying to lower blood sugar, reduce joint pain, quiet relentless hunger or reclaim energy. A student taking medication for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder may be trying to function, not to game the system. From the outside, we rarely know the whole story. Shame is a poor guide because it flattens complexity. It turns treatment into vanity and vulnerability into moral weakness.

A better guide is the quality of the question we ask ourselves. Am I making this choice from care or self-contempt? From health or humiliation? Am I treating my body as a partner in my life, or as a project that must be fixed before I can be worthy of love, confidence or respect?

For parents, grandparents, teachers and anyone who cares about young people, there is another question: What are we modeling? I ask because the next generation is watching. They hear how we talk about our bodies. They notice whether every compliment is about thinness. They absorb whether achievement is treated as character, chemistry or both. They learn what counts as "enough" by watching whether we ever allow ourselves to be enough.

Before starting a GLP-1, ask these questions

So before asking whether you should take a GLP-1 medication, it may be more important to investigate what feelings are driving the desire to decide. Is it frustration with yourself and your body, disappointment over another abandoned diet, shame, fear or exhaustion? Naming the emotions and dealing with those feelings with honesty matters because rumination often keeps us stuck, and humans are remarkably poor at predicting how we will feel after a major change ‒ whether that change is taking a GLP-1 or not.

Medical advances can be liberating. A culture obsessed with thinness and performance can turn even liberating tools into new forms of pressure. We need room for both truths.

We also need a wider definition of health. Health includes blood sugar and blood pressure, yes. It includes strength, mobility, sleep, nutrition and medical care. But it also includes dignity. It includes freedom from constant self-surveillance. It includes the ability to inhabit a changing body without feeling that aging itself is a failure.

A woman should be able to take a GLP-1 without being judged as vain. A woman should be able to decline one without being judged as undisciplined, outdated or unserious about her health. A parent should be able to treat a child's ADHD without suspicion, and also resist medication where there is no medical need. Health care should expand our agency, not narrow our idea of what a successful body or mind must look like.

So no, I do not think I should feel guilty for wanting to look good for my husband. Desire is human. Aging is vulnerable. Wanting to feel attractive is not a moral failure.

Maybe the most radical thing right now is to pause before we swallow the story that smaller is always better, that faster is always wiser, and that every human struggle should be optimized away.

But I also do not want to hand my self-worth back to the culture that has been trying to shrink women for generations.

The question is larger than what these drugs can do to our bodies.

It is what this moment is revealing about our hunger ‒ for health, for approval, for control, for relief, for love ‒ and whether we can meet that hunger with something more honest than shame.

I decided not to take the drugs.

For now.

Robin Stern, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice and UPEACE Global Ambassador for Peace. She is the author of "The Gaslight Effect", "The Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide," and host of "The Gaslight Effect Podcast." Opinions are those of the author.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Yes, GLP-1s make you thinner. But do they make you freer? | Opinion

Reporting by Robin Stern, Opinion contributor / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 13, 2026 at 5:05 AM.