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The February 27, 2023 issue of New York magazine is one whose cover I can still vividly recall. “Bon Appétit,” read a bold-typed white caption superimposed over an image of a fork stabbing the hollow plastic part of a syringe. Inside the issue was features writer Matthew Schneier’s cover story on Ozempic, which featured a range of users’ least politically correct admissions about the various motives behind their use of a costly and side-effect-heavy drug that, as Schneier wrote, provided an “effortless, near-instant fix.” In Schneier’s story, an actress on Ozempic testifies to surviving on “one and a half meals a day,” while another woman confesses she’d maybe rather risk thyroid cancer than give up the injectable she now relies on to lose weight; if you live with an eating disorder like I do, or maybe even if you don’t, it’s hard not to get triggered reading these pseudonymous interviewee’s casual admittances of everything they’re willing to give up in pursuit of thinness.
Here’s what bothers me about the weight-loss-drug craze: If Ozempic had been approved by the FDA for bariatric use at any point in my teens or early 20s, when I was stuck in a punishing cycle of dieting and binge eating, I’m confident that I would at least have tried to get my hands on it. Given the freedom with which the ZocDoc-sourced, mildly shady doctor I saw back then prescribed me Adderall I didn’t really need, I probably would have succeeded, even during the periods where I weighed the least. Back then, I saw fat as the enemy, the villain waiting in the wings to condemn me to a life of insecurity and loneliness; if you’d told me that there was a medication on the market that would simply zap my stubborn, persistent hunger, my oh-so-unsightly longing for food, I would have regarded it as a miracle cure for everything I perceived to be so very wrong with me, and I probably wouldn’t have stopped until I found someone to provide me with it.
Making the move from “objectively thin person terrified of fat” to “actually fat person living in the world” hasn’t always been easy; indeed, it’s necessitated years’ worth of therapy, endless searching for forms of exercise that would actually make me feel good in my body, enough cooking practice to begin to know how to nourish myself without the help of Postmates, and—of course—boundless support from my friends and family, most of whom have been around to witness my growth and are always there to remind me of it when I wake up on a post-binge day and feel as rudderless and lost and failure-defined as I ever did.
The idea of trading everything I’ve accumulated over the past few years—my fatness, yes, but also my taste for food, my interest in cooking, my ability to relish a good meal at least some of the time—for thinness now feels like the ultimate Faustian bargain, but I know that the “Ozempic craze” might have sucked me up into its wake if it had taken root even just a few years earlier, before I’d had the benefit of enough time and regular therapy to begin to de-prioritize weight loss. I also know there are people for whom weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy provide a huge benefit, and I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone’s health regimen or individual relationship with food, but I worry that drugs like these provide a quick fix to the messy and often lifelong problem of learning to live in a changeable and desirous human body. Where would I be now if I’d gotten accustomed to spending $900 a month—essentially a second rent—on weight-loss drugs in 2017, instead of finding my way to food group and starting Abilify and moving to New York and reading Roxane Gay and initiating the process of learning to occupy space in my own body?
It’s taken me years to be able to say this, but as I sound it out in my head, it feels true; I mostly like my hunger. I’ve grown accustomed to it, and I learn its contours every day when I wake up and try to figure out whether cereal or a big, greasy breakfast burrito or a green juice or just coffee would feel best in my stomach. I try to take the advice I once got from writer and curve model Kendra Austin, who has written extensively about her own experiences living with disordered eating, to “eat dessert every day”; or, at least, to eat dessert whenever I want it, especially when I’m feeling bad about the wanting itself. (When the old mental reflex to “just stick some grapes in the freezer!” or “just pick up some Halo Top!” goes off in my head, that’s when I know I really need dessert—as in, actual dessert, not diet ice cream that tastes like Splenda-sweetened snow.) I used to think of my hunger as something feral, out of control—an untamed animal who needed to be sedated as much as possible, lest it rise up and maul me—but now, I’m trying to see it as more of a kindly invited guest, someone whose preferences and tastes I let guide me without overwhelming me entirely.
The idea of becoming constitutionally uninterested in food no longer holds the kind of power that it once did; I still hate myself in the aftermath of my binges, but I can recognize that they’re much less frequent than they used to be, and more to the point, I know they don’t represent the sum total of my relationship with food. I’m not willing to give up the oceanic chill of the oysters I sucked down on the first date with the person who would become my partner, our feet almost touching under the table; or the comfort of a steaming bowl of pho eaten alone with a good book at my favorite Vietnamese lunch spot in Austin, or the warmth of a loaf of challah just out of the oven that I spent hours braiding into a six-strand twist last Rosh Hashanah. I want to learn to live in harmony with my appetite, not ditch my doctor (who, the last time I saw her, officially confirmed for me that weight-loss drugs weren’t an ideal choice for someone with my ED history) and find one willing to help me chemically overwhelm it entirely.
I wish I could say I felt this way—confident in my size, skeptical of diet culture, unwilling to prolong my near-lifelong obsession with achieving maximum thinness—100% of the time, but unfortunately, that’s not true. When I hear stories about dramatic celebrity slim-downs or watch friends be praised by people I don’t like for looking “so good!” after a bout of stomach flu, I’m still not immune from wondering if I should be focusing the majority of my energy on losing weight, too (no matter how deeply I’m starting to understand that weight loss isn’t the problem for me; it’s a distraction from the problem, a means of controlling my outside appearance so I don’t have to focus on what’s going on inside me). When those worries crop up, I do my best to feed myself compassionately; with good, nourishing food that I actively enjoy, of course, but also with renewed attention to the work of people who remind me how many different ways there are to be alive and eating—joyfully, voraciously, and curiously—in the world today.
To be a thin person perennially engaged in the Sisyphean task of avoiding food is more or less unremarkable in our society; when I stream old episodes of the aughts comedies I grew up watching, I’m grimly aware of how many jokes center around ultra-slender female characters’ bizarre relationships with food, perhaps best encapsulated by Courteney Cox’s character on Cougar Town habitually sucking on chocolates for a mere three seconds before spitting them out. What really seems to freak people out, though, is being confronted with the living fact of a fat person who doesn’t fear food, or who at least doesn’t constantly make a show out of fearing it. There was infinitely more cultural space for me to hate myself out loud when I was thin than there is, even now, for me to appreciate my appetite and my body as an fat woman, but the flip side is, I’m less worried about taking up space (physically, professionally, interpersonally, and otherwise) than I ever was when my main concern in life was being able to fasten a pair of size-25 jeans over my hips in the Crossroads dressing room.
I still read Grub Street Diets hungrily now that I’ve learned how to food shop, cook, and eat in a way that mostly makes me feel good, but it’s out of genuine interest, not desperation; I love knowing how other people feed themselves, what kind of desk lunches and leftover dinners they put together just for themselves. Possibly my favorite piece of food writing ever published, though, is a Guernica essay written by the author Carmen Maria Machado in 2019 and titled “The Trash Heap Has Spoken,” in which she gives a characteristically eloquent voice to the subversive glee of being fat and relishing food: “I take second helpings, thirds. I order appetizers and desserts. I get excited about homemade pasta and pork belly and chocolate cake and dirty martinis and bowls of pickled things. Sometimes when I talk about food, people around me laugh with surprise. Subconsciously, I think, they’re not expecting it; they’re expecting restraint, apology. I refuse to give it to them.”
Sometimes it feels like I expend most of my energy trying to feed myself with this degree of jubilance—not, of course, that Machado’s or anyone else’s relationship with food is easy 100% of the time, but I desperately want to model for other people that it’s possible to be as big as I am at my current weight (or far bigger) and still nurture a connection with and passion for food. Every time I get the buttery croissant and latte I really want at the coffee shop instead of grimly ordering a banana and a cup to go with skim milk, or refill my plate at Thanksgiving in blithe defiance of the disapproving eyes trained on me, I can feel the cumulative pain of all the years I spent wishing desperately to shrink myself; I honor that smaller, scared, sad version of me with each bite. Just because we’re fat, I imagine myself self-righteously lecturing a horde of my fellow over-size-18 beauties in some conference room somewhere, does not mean we owe the thin people in our lives dry salads and performative self-hatred and “No thanks, I’m on another diet” demurrals. We do not have to eat—or not eat—in the way they expect us to. We don’t have to be afraid just because they are.
Excerpted from More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for “Enough,” out July 9.
