all my friends are on ozempic

Season 20, Episode 05: all my friends are on ozempic
17 April 2026 – My two best friends are on weight-loss drugs, and so is the rest of the world. Why is it so important to be thin?

This essay discusses weight, body image, dieting, etc.
Take care of yourself and don’t read if this won’t be good for you.

“Is it better to speak or to die?” has recently been stuck in my head as “is it better to be skinny or to die?”

I’m alarmed. You should be alarmed, too.

This new paradigm I’ve created makes no sense when compared directly to its original, which is more so a moral question. My new statement, conversely, is one wholly made of societal pressures and anxieties. It’s the worrying question that has constantly haunted the minds of women, even during the periods in which it seemed we were making progress toward body positivity. To what ends will we go to be skinny?

I’ve always been slightly too big for the rooms I occupy. At five, I was taller than all the boys in my kindergarten class. In middle school, around age 11, I knew I weighed more than all my friends when we would play dress-up games at their houses and I consciously chose only the stretchiest items.

At 13, I met my best friend: we were the same height, a somehow towering five foot nine, and our bodies looked the same. It was like I could see myself for the first time, and I wasn’t out of place in my world at all.

This isn’t to say all was sunshine and rainbows. No, we may have found our partners in crime, but we were still ridiculously ashamed of not being skinny. Once, we asked a (male) friend who was bigger. I remember hoping he’d pick her then feeling sick when he pointed at me. I hate that we found it necessary to ask those questions at such a young age.

Throughout high school, I was still conscious of my differences: doing YouTube workouts posted by skinny girls at midnight, hoping my parents wouldn’t hear; trying to diet in secret only to fail over and over.

It’s been no help that throughout my life my mother has always been on a diet, has always complained about her weight, about how she’s not beautiful because of it, not realizing that we looked the same.

Now I’m at college, practically living on my own, and I’m still unhappy with the way I look. I research diets and think about not eating at all though I always succumb and scan my ID card into the dining hall. My eating habits have gotten healthier overall, and I feel better than before, but I weigh more than I used to. After spending weeks consistently going to the gym and eating well, nothing changed. I’m writing this during a period in which I skip the gym to do schoolwork most days. Still productive, but I feel a sinking, guilty feeling every time.

Last weekend, a college friend and I were eating dinner before a formal. Usually, she’d eat more than me. I never judged her or questioned her––she’s over six feet tall, and is an athlete. Then, at this dinner, she told me she wasn’t hungry anymore because she’d started taking weight loss pills.

I suddenly felt ten times bigger than I actually am as I noticed that I was eating all the food I’d piled onto my plate. Was wasting our food an aesthetic now? When did it suddenly become cool to only eat half your plate and say you were full?

She’s my best friend, and we talk everyday. I had no idea she was starting weight loss pills. My intrusive thoughts fly like violent bullets into my brain, I think maybe she thinks I’d be jealous. I think that I’ll never be skinny because I don’t want to go on drugs to do it. I think she’s cheating and I shame her then I regret it and I feel horrible. I think that one day she’ll be smaller than me and I’ll, once again, be the biggest person in every room I enter.

Why is my worst nightmare to be alone in my difference?

I started Normal Girl Field Guide because I wanted to emphasize the normality of difference, but I also want to candidly express how hard it is to uphold my own messaging. I feel like a fake most times I open Substack.

I also want to note, that while I’m above average in both height and weight, I don’t think I actually stand out in a room, despite my gut feeling that everyone thinks I’m bigger than I should be. I’m therefore lucky enough to be able to hide from my own insecurity at times; I can push it aside to get through almost anything.

My best friend from middle school, the one I mentioned earlier who first made me feel seen, was on a weight loss injection a few months ago. She got visibly skinnier, but had to stop taking it due to adverse medical effects. I was really scared for her health, but the darkest parts of me were happy she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore.

When she’d talk to me about how none of her clothes fit––they were all too big for her now––I was reminded of another instance from when we were kids. I bragged to her about dropping a pants size, and she said she was proud of me. Of course, we were in the moment of pure body positivity and self-acceptance, so this praise was followed by “as long as you’re losing weight healthily.” I now look back and consider that I never lost weight at all, that they were just a different brand of pants.

The internet is pushing skinny as the standard again, but it never really stopped. Even while the world was preaching body positivity, young girls like myself and my friends were finding roundabout ways to talk about our desires to be small. Is it better to be skinny or to die? Part of me wants to say the latter. It always has.

Not a single day goes by that I don’t think about my weight. I hate it.

I hate that I can spend so much time confident in myself, but a tiny thought can send everything crumbling. The fact that I’ve been so indoctrinated into thinking skinny is the only way to be beautiful is more detrimental to my mind, and to the minds of girls all over the world, than I think we can even fathom.

I can’t stop my incessant attempts at eating well or exercising, despite the fact that my genetics are hard-wired to be unresponsive to such things.

My relationship with my weight isn’t novel, and I know people around me feel the same. My sister was always the same size as me, she always felt the same social pressures…until she dramatically lost weight. Now, we shop together and she can always find something that looks good on her. I nearly cried in a dressing room as she sat patiently waiting for me. I didn’t buy anything.

I also know, though, that she still feels like she’s not enough, even when she’s the same size as her friends now. So again, we arrive at a horrific question: will skinny ever be small enough?

All my friends are getting skinny, and I want to join them so bad that I hate them. I also, though, refrain from talking to people about these feelings. I bottle everything in until it explodes out of me in my poetry and my articles for you all.

I don’t want to take weight loss drugs mostly because I don’t like to take medicine at all unless it’s medically necessary. You should see how long I wait to take cold meds when I’m sick. I’ve also seen first hand the adverse side effects these drugs can have, which makes me all the more wary. I know that my aversion is partially due to the stigma of it, too, though.

Any celebrity on ozempic gets publicly ridiculed for it, and will be especially criticized for “going back on” any previous body positive proclamations. Mostly, though, I think we hate celebrities because we understand why they’d do it. We are the social pressure they face, just as they are the social pressure we face.

“Skinny” is a cycle we’re feeding over and over, allowing it to grow into something grotesque and uncontrollable. Now we, too, are uncontrollable.

I constantly tie my self worth to my weight, imagining it as something I must control. If I’m skinny someone will fall in love with me. Worse, they won’t love me until I’m finally skinny. Like it’s a final form I won’t be happy until I reach.

But I can’t control it, at least not at this point in my life. And, honestly, the more I fight for fruitless control the further weight loss slips from my fingertips.

I don’t need to be skinny to be happy; I need to be happy to be happy. Maybe I’ll get thinner along the way, or maybe I won’t. It’s clear to me that I’ll never be satisfied with myself when one of those options is equitable to social death in my mind.

My mother is a haunting figure of this subject. I want to blame her as if she is not equally a victim of the world around us. All I can blame her for is her genetics, and even that was not her at all, but an amalgamation of others.

I wish she would look at herself and love herself more. Perhaps that would be the key to my own self love. Realistically, though, that’s just another means of putting the blame on someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Would any of us be any better, if we were single in the 2000s with two kids and a shitty, difficult job? She did enough good that I struggle to hold any resentment at all, though deep down it lingers.

I used a scene from episode one of Girls as this week’s cover photo because I watched it for the first time recently. Hannah talks about her own weight in a way that feels not full of self-hatred, but instead as if it were drawn from the intrusive thoughts forced into her head. It’s not necessarily degrading or full of self-hate. It’s just the way it is. I related to her off the bat.

Please avoid spoilers for the show in the comments, I literally only know what happens up to episode two and that everyone is very reluctant to admit which character they’re most similar to.

This week’s song is “My Mother & I” by Lucy Dacus, a beautiful song that really encompasses seeing yourself in your mother. Give it a listen!

P.S. Please comment your own tips and tricks for self acceptance, or share your experiences relating to this article. Maybe we can all help to uplift each other :)