Once upon a time, a famous person might lose weight with alarming speed and say with a straight face that she’d done it by eating a balanced diet of smaller portions. Though we regular folks wanted that to be true — it gave us hope we could follow their simple steps and shrink ourselves — there was always a sense that they were gatekeeping other keys to success, like the employment of private chefs, extravagant at-home gyms and maybe even the sorts of drugs only the rich and privileged had access to. So it’s been a breath of fresh air to hear stars cop to using semaglutides, a.k.a. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. But that openness has its downsides too.
When Serena Williams announced in August that she’d used Zepbound — and was now a celebrity patient ambassador for telehealth company Ro, which sells GLP-1s — backlash was swift, with detractors accusing Williams of everything from setting a poor example about body image to medical irresponsibility. A few weeks later, Williams — one of the greatest athletes in history — posted on Instagram about what a trying month she’d had, saying she was now prioritizing her mental health. It was impossible not to put the pieces together: Her honesty about using (and now selling) weight-loss drugs had not gone over as expected.
Others have been there before: stars like Rebel Wilson and Lizzo, who for so long were a North Star for fat fans more interested in changing society than their bodies. When both admitted to Ozempic (Wilson is now Noom’s chief wellness ambassador, touting the brand’s microdosed GLP-1 product), many took it as a betrayal. Here were two women who had previously given the middle finger to diet culture, said “take me as I am or GTFO,” now instead using those fingers to press down on an injector pen and, in some cases, encouraging us to follow. (Male stars who’ve taken GLP-1s, like Eric Stonestreet, a spokesperson for Mounjaro, and Charles Barkley, an ambassador for Ro, seem to avoid the backlash women endure. Black women, especially, thanks to misogynoir, get the most criticism.)
Serena Williams Shows Off Her Figure After Using a Weight Loss Drug
I am a fat person who has yo-yo dieted her entire life. After years of actively deprogramming from and rejecting dietculture, in 2023, I started Wegovy. I felt conflicted: On one hand, I am allowed to do what I want with my body. In fact, in a time of increasing control over women, the act felt in some ways transgressive. On the other, I wasn’t so much rebelling as I was embracing the oppressive, misogynistic diet industrial complex all over again.
The people suffering the most from the normalization of weight-loss drug use are people in fat bodies who don’t want to lose weight and already face medical indifference and legalized bigotry. (Title VII, the federal law that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, does not protect against size discrimination.) Cultural critic Virgie Tovar, an ambassador for Weight Stigma Awareness Week (Sept. 22–26), shared on Instagram her experience of fat-shaming at New York Fashion Week 2025, something she says had not happened before. “There are real-life, real-world human impacts for cultural shifts around the pro-weight-loss culture that we’re in right now because of GLP-1s and the way they’re being marketed,” she noted.
Serena Williams Reveals 31-Pound Weight Loss From GLP-1
Which is all to say: It’s complicated. No one taking a weight-loss drug should feel compelled to apologize for it, and yet, I still wish that celebrities — whom so many people idolize — didn’t actively sell them. Most of all, I wish we could get to a point where we didn’t equate thinness with health, beauty or moral superiority. On that front, I’m afraid we still have very far to go.
