What I Saw as a Celebrity Private Chef Changed How I Think About Ozempic

I recently wrote a piece that reached a way bigger audience than I was expecting. It was about Ariana Grande’s extreme thinness and, as someone who struggled with anorexia, I could see where her behaviors were coming from because I’d exhibited many of those same behaviors in the past.

For context, when I’m writing something (especially an analytical piece), I become demonically insufferable. I’m not really one to “sit with an idea.” Rather, I hold everyone in my life hostage while I verbally process it. My hairdresser got the thesis, my “Brunch Girlies” group chat got basically a dissertation, and my therapist read the first draft. All this to say: No one was safe.

In the days leading up to the Ariana piece, my brother fundamentally reached a breaking point. As we roamed the isles of Fairway, to pick out a cake for my dad’s birthday he screamed:

“TOVA, I COULD NOT GIVE LESS OF A SHIT ABOUT ARIANA GRANDE’S GAPING MOTHER WOUND. I JUST NEED YOU TO TELL ME: CHOCOLATE OR FUCKING VANILLA?”

My friends and family have slowly become accustomed to the fact that my writing topics become temporary obsessions and they deal with it because they love me. My iPhone, however (the ever-attentive Big Brother in my pocket) enables the shit out of any cultural fixation I find. Which is perhaps why the second I published my own piece about anorexia culture, my algorithm essentially went, Sick. So this is what we’re doing now, and began showing me almost exclusively malnourished celebrities.

My feed was soon flooded with pictures of 23-year-old Jenna Ortega, her recent weight loss making her already-thin body look so frail that the photos were difficult to look at. What was even more painful to watch was the way the internet descended on her, pointing out her sunken face and exposed arms like vultures picking at a carcass.

But it wasn’t the images that bothered me most; it was the callousness of the commenters as they insisted, almost manically, that Jenna Ortega was on Ozempic. It was as though her use of the fashionable weight-loss drug somehow absolved them of having to empathize with someone who looked on the brink of physical collapse.

I’m not saying I think Jenna Ortega is an appropriate candidate for a GLP-1—that’d be fucking crazy. But here’s the thing: even if she did use a weight-loss drug to get there, attacking her over her speculated use of one is wildly problematic for reasons I’ll get into below.

GLP-1s suppress appetite, so, yeah, they make weight loss easier. But half my friends are on them, and very few have become as thin. For some, the medication has been genuinely life-changing.

At my last AA meeting, I had a heartwarming conversation with a woman who struggled not just with alcoholism but with binge eating as well. Going on a GLP-1 helped with more than her desire to snack all day; it helped with her drinking as well. As someone in AA, I know how fucking hard it is to get sober, especially if you have an eating disorder, so hearing that someone had found a medication that made her life even a little bit easier felt kind of incredible.

I felt the same way when my best friend finally found an antidepressant that worked. Not only was I like, “More power to you,” I was happy for her because finding a drug that works for you doesn’t have any reflection on who you are as a person. It’s not “cheating.” It’s needing a tool to help make your life easier and finding one.

Okay, some people are misusing a pharmaceutical tool… big whoop. People misuse pharmaceuticals all the time. Why is this different? And furthermore, why are we judging the value of a medication by the people who abuse it?

If you’re already thin, a GLP-1 can make you drop an extra ten pounds so you look visibly emaciated. But you know what it can’t create? The desire that makes a woman want to do that to herself. Women in Hollywood are smiling in couture while they are dying in front of us. And I don’t care about the tools she used to get there; I wonder about the mental illness that seeded it in the first place.

As someone who spent half a decade cooking for celebrities-