One Year on a GLP-1 Drug

Has Zepbound changed my life? Maybe? But maybe not?

CW: Discussion of Weight, Weight Issues, Body Dysphoria, Weight Loss, Etc.

The problem with writing a big feature piece about taking GLP-1 drugs is that, well —it ruins my backup plan! Which, if my Instagram stories is any indication, is an easy one: so many women are trying to sell MLM-style weight-loss plans by showing their significant weight loss on social channels that I fully guess comes from GLP-1 drugs and crediting it to something that you, the viewer, can buy, so that we can pretend to be self-improving and then hating ourselves when it doesn’t work, wash rinse repeat, because that’s what much of social media is these days. Being a human person with a body who identifies as a female during a time when everything is exceedingly dumb isn’t easy at the best of times.

But it’s been an interesting time in “taking Zepbound.” It’s been about a year and I’ve lost a surprising amount of weight, and I can see the change. But one thing that I am only aware of at the moment — because whether I stay on it is tenuous, currently — is that for me, I am able to eat intuitively when I am taking a GLP-1. It’s helping my brain not go into overdrive, and mostly I eat a meal when I need to and I don’t think further about it. The space has been luxurious. And while I do miss the glorious feeling of eating food and then getting the sparks of pleasure that come with it, I don’t miss the amount of time devoted to thinking about what I’m going to eat, mentally wondering if it’s healthy or unhealthy or if it is nourishing or will stay around forever.

I think one thing that’s been weird about weight gain and weight loss is that when I looked in the mirror, I mostly saw the same weight. I was convinced my body looked a certain way, and then when I saw pictures, I would be very confused about the difference between what was in my head and what was on the screen. The results? I would mostly end up criticizing myself.

Now, I have gotten to the point where weight loss is showing in my face, and it feels quite different. My nose is longer. My neck is very different, ropier in a way that I find weird, and it’s smaller in circumference. New wrinkles and indents are popping up on my face. Loss of collagen is real, and it’s messing with my head, even though it’s pretty clear I have no idea what I actually look like.

I am very susceptible to the siren call of women on Instagram promising to ward off aging with face yoga, when I probably should accept that I am a pale woman with a love of brims on hats whose genetic history (pasty) doesn’t often lend itself to “aging well” — and in this case, when I write well, I mean “hot,” because somehow in this supposedly more enlightened time (I’m not abusing the word that conservatives took from Black activists and warped infinitely when they could’ve just said “politically correct,” which just means speaking kindly and thoughtfully) women are allowed to stay in the limelight and the public light when they are conventionally attractive. I’d like to be back in the public, at least, i.e. leaving my house occasionally, so I am feeling the pressure to “look good,” but then I see the wrinkles that came with the weight loss, and I end up being so mean to myself. So many mixed messages makes me feel insane on a regular basis, and insecure on average. Jessica Defino’s Substack can only help so much.

But I didn’t even have time to delve into this insecurity and these thoughts, aggravated by the surreality of seeing your peers in the public eye show up with completely different faces and you can’t say shit about it but also there is something weird about that messaging of a brand new face, why you got it, how much you spent, and how it feels, and the way it trickles down to normies like me.

How do you function when you’re living in a world where everyone with power looks a little like the lady in Brazil? I mean, have we looked at Tom Brady’s weird face? Why does society demand this adherence to youth, even when you’re the Greatest of All Time and a man? I’m watching a show on Netflix right now where incredible character actor Bill Camp interacts with the glossy gorgeous stars and they’re all the same age, peers really, but he looks eight million years older than the working movie stars.

Recently, my insurance announced that it wasn’t covering Zepbound anymore, which means that we are likely to end up paying for it out of pocket, and so that too — will I continue taking it? Can we afford it? Are there other options? Will there be continuity? — has become a real question mark in my life. (When I also have the Irish curse, i.e. Obstructive Sleep Apnea, and Zepbound is the only GLP-1 approved for treatment…)

It’s funny because in so many ways I have felt like this drug was a fairy granting a wish, with the possibility that it all goes away in the snap of a magic wand. In six months, will I still be taking Zepbound? Will I gain back the weight? What clothes of mine will fit and what do they even say, because I know I have tendencies that read millennial but Gen Z’s embrace of 1998-core is wild, to say the least. And it’s always funny how fashion trends curve around to stress one’s flat stomach, as if you’ve never had a baby. Like, before Health Insurance became the thing I think about all the time, I was feeling that this season was my time for style ennui, which I have in spades, not trying to figure out if I still take this drug and/or whether that will make a difference in weight and what that means to the world’s reaction to me ennui. I don’t like living in a world where it feels like your looks and your weight matter, and I frequently try to pretend that it doesn’t, delusionally — that I’m a brain in a jar — and it only gets me so far. My naiveté is proven wrong all the time.

To preserve the drugs I have, I have been extending the time in between shots. That’s fine, but I already feel the difference in my mental health. Depression has come on with the force of a cold, the way that it’s like, oh, wait, I am simply consuming and I don’t like anything, and I don’t have any energy to do anything that interests me. People message me and my response is Oh they HATE me, obviously, I can never respond but also shouldn’t I respond snappishly where if you really read the messages, you’d be shocked as to how benign they are. I think these feelings have a lot to do with Zepbound, and my cycle, and maybe even depressive tendencies.

Intellectually things are pretty good! I love everyone I see and being in the world! And yet my body is refusing to understand that state, I can feel the various ways in which depression has come on, and I don’t know what to do to snap out of it. Frankly I’m just tired of depression being such a perennial and a constant, especially when I am in this whack-a-mole time of my life, trying to put myself out there for jobs and opportunities, but dealing with rejection a high percent of the time — and I still would even if I jumped over some arbitrary bar that I would consider “success” — and so often I feel like the mole getting boinked on the head.

I like taking Zepbound. I would like to continue taking Zepbound. There’s so much that’s stirred up by taking Zepbound, as if you’re taking a guided tour through the muck of your desires, urges, ideas about beauty, and life and I haven’t finished working with that muck, by any means. You gotta marvel at it: the way that insecurity is a perennial! How can you be a woman and not blunder through the world insecurity-first?

Seriously, if you know the secret, please tell me.