Weight-loss drugs are colliding with body positivity, and the people taking them feel caught in the middle

Gabriella Coro, a 35-year-old Miami professor, avoided photographs for three years after her son was born, unable to shed about 30 pounds from her pregnancy. Prescribed a GLP-1 late last year, she lost nearly all of it in three months — and felt, in her words, “almost a traitor to everything I stood for in regards to body positivity.” The slogans she believes — the only beach body is a body on the beach — sat uneasily beside the injections. She is happy she did it, she says, and still conflicted: going back on the drug, if she needed to, would feel like a failure of self-discipline.

Her ambivalence is playing out at population scale. About 12 percent of Americans are now taking GLP-1s, and prescriptions among overweight adults have risen nearly 600 percent since 2019. Rutgers psychologist Charlotte Markey argues the drugs are marketed as a way to change your body and feel better about yourself, and are oversold in that role: there is no data showing that taking them improves body image, even as body image itself is bound up with depression and anxiety. Markey also describes a harsher edge appearing in her own practice — people who have been prescribed the drugs and are not eating enough, developing eating disorders as a result — while separate research finds larger-body users are now judged negatively for taking what others call a shortcut. Losing weight on the drugs, in other words, does not mean feeling at home in the body that results.

Ruth McClelland-Nugent's experience is the same tension in another register. She took a GLP-1 for diabetes, lost roughly 100 pounds, and now fields compliments about how great she looks while knowing, as she puts it, that she is very sick inside: diagnosed with gastroparesis, she describes persistent effects months after stopping a seven-week course — weakness, trouble with stairs, a bag of medications to manage symptoms. Obesity physician Tro Kalayjian, who lost 150 pounds without the drugs, calls them an amazing tool for diabetes and obesity but warns that prescribing one without nutrition, exercise, and psychological support sets people up to fail. Between Coro's guilt, Markey's caution, and McClelland-Nugent's compliments she cannot enjoy, the drugs are redrawing what a body is supposed to prove about the person inside it.

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