I’ve been on Zepbound since last August, a fact that I’ve shared with only four people besides my wife and medical professionals largely because of guys like Adam. On weekends, my wife and I and our daughter can usually be found at one of the three playgrounds within ten minutes of our apartment — it was at one of these, late last summer, where I met Adam. The unspoken law of local playground culture is that you don’t have to talk with other adults, but if your kid befriends theirs, then it’s only a matter of time before you’re exchanging numbers and putting names into your phone like “Dad Josh: redhead daughter in Liberty shirt” or “Russian mom of son with big head” and a note to figure out her name before you make things weird. Adam — not his real name, obviously — was one of those guys who does all the talking, and his opinions weren’t bad or offensive, just sort of dumb. We somehow got on the topic of how I wear moisturizer with SPF in it, and he told me that he just didn’t see the point in men putting stuff on their faces. “Just age gracefully,” he said before going on a little rant about how “everybody is trying to change their bodies” and bringing up drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound, the latter of which I’d just started taking a few days earlier.
It’s not something I’m ashamed of, and it’s really nobody’s business at the end of the day, but I can’t stop thinking about how familiar the stigma feels. Even some of the most supposedly open-minded and liberal-thinking people — men and women — I know have told me they don’t like or “believe” in GLP-1 drugs for losing weight for various reasons that all echo a lot of the same things I grew up hearing about going to therapy or taking medications for my mental health. They’ll usually say something about how they get why people with diabetes or other medical conditions might take Zepbound but quickly add that overweight people are just taking it because “they want to look skinny,” that it’s all about vanity.
I’m probably not in the minority when I say I hadn’t heard of GLP-1’s until I started reading about which celebrities were taking Ozempic to get skinny a few years ago. The way it was portrayed made it sound as if GLP-1’s were the new fen-phen or Stacker 2’s, some magical elixir that was supposed to make the weight just melt off but in no time we’d learn it caused heart murmurs or liver cancer.
Before I started taking Zepbound, I sat around 240 to 245 pounds for about 15 years. And the truth is that I was mostly okay with how I looked. I was always of the mind that, sure, I could lose a few pounds, but I actually liked being a bigger guy. My joke is that I’m built for cold winters like my Eastern European ancestors, like my grandfathers who were both over six-foot-two, even though I’m about three or four inches shy of their height. I once took a lot of pride in one friend saying I had “sort of a Tony Soprano, except really nice” look. The problem, of course, is that James Gandolfini ended up dropping dead of a heart attack at 51 and men in my family tend to deal with all sorts of health problems as they get older — health problems I’ve been told I could avoid with just a few lifestyle changes.
Since having our daughter, Lulu, for the first time in my life, I’ve felt responsible; I needed to make sure I could be around to ensure Lulu had her father by her side as long as possible. So over her first year, I’d cut down on drinking, kept exercising, did more yoga, tried to eat better, and … I ended up finding out I’d gained two pounds when I went for my yearly physical. My A1C was high, and my blood pressure was in the stage-one hypertension range. Add in that I was still prediabetes for the fourth year running and that I figured you could be pre for only so long until you’re finally type 2, so I made the decision that it was time to talk to my doctor about a GLP-1.
Deciding to take medication is a big deal for me. I’m one of those children of the ’80s and ’90s who was overmedicated by my parents and doctors in hopes of “curing” everything from ADHD to anxiety and depression, and it bred a skepticism in me that I’ve had to work hard not to immediately default to. I’m 1,000 percent pro-vaccines and pro-science, but whenever there’s news of a prescription that can take care of any sort of malady, my first thought is, I’d like to wait about ten or 20 years to hear about the long-term results it has on people.
I took my first shot, and the results were instant. The food-anxiety issues I’ve dealt with for most of my life just seemed to vanish within a few days. Suddenly, this fear I’ve always had — that I need to eat unless I wanted some disaster to befall me or that there’s a possibility it might be a long time before another meal presented itself — vanished. I can’t even begin to explain how liberating that has been because, even five months later, I’m still processing it.
Before Zepbound, I had this idea that I needed to finish every sandwich and clear every plate in one sitting and that wrapping it up was not an option. After I started taking my weekly dose, the feeling of immediacy, that I had to eat everything and do it fast, as though somebody would take it away if I didn’t, went away. With that went the feeling of sluggishness that would hit me in the afternoon after lunch, the typical worn-down midday feeling made worse by eating too much. I’ve got more energy throughout the day now, and the worry that I’m killing myself by eating too much but that I’d die if I didn’t eat enough — and then some — is gone. It’s such a radical switch that I’m still trying to remember what the voice in my head that told me to keep eating even when I was full sounded like. It’s so weird to have all that free space in my brain, now that I’m not dealing with some round-the-clock coping mechanism I didn’t need working so hard in the first place.
I should mention that I love to eat. I write about food constantly, and over the 17 years we’ve been together, my wife, Emily, and I have always said that many of our favorite times together involve meals we’ve had. I was worried that love would die away but found that wasn’t the case. Instead, I appreciate food more than ever. I eat slower; I don’t shovel the entire plate in my mouth as if somebody is going to snatch it away from me at any second, the way people in my family also ate when I was growing up. This was something I’d never considered until after I had the freed-up mental space to contemplate the sound of that nagging little person in my head yelling, “Eat! Eat! You’ll die if you don’t eat.” I was raised watching my family’s own traumas play out when they sat down at the dinner table. Some of them actually had been in situations where they had very little to eat and not much time to do it. I myself had lived hand to mouth for years of my own life and was on my own since I was 16, forced to figure out how I was going to stretch a few dollars into several meals too many times, and, still, I’ve always understood it was nothing compared to what my family had gone through before they came to America. Seeing that sort of thing right before your eyes — people eating because they felt survival depended on it — had a huge effect on me that’s never gone away.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about intergenerational trauma that’s in our DNA before we’re even born, and my hope is that Lulu’s genetic wiring that connects her to my grandparents and great-grandparents have weakened with time; she might have my grandfather’s nose or my wife’s grandmother’s name but not the residue of things they may have experienced.
I can’t control what she’s made up of, but I know that she’s learning by sitting and eating with me. Now, instead of scarfing down my food because I can’t shake the fear that another meal isn’t coming, I take my time and enjoy it. I love to eat, but now it’s an entirely different experience.
I’m usually in charge of making Lulu’s dinner most nights, and we’ve made it a point to cook for her since she first started to graduate from strictly milk to solid foods. At first, there was this separation between what she ate and what we ate; I’d work twice as hard to make her more low-key meal, then the more “adult” version for Emily and I. She could have some plain chicken and rice with some peas, but then I’d decide to zhuzh it up and make some sort of elaborate stir-fry for Emily and I that, depending on how busy she was with work that day, we might not even be able to eat together. I don’t know why I thought this way, that because we’re older we needed to eat something different than our daughter, but once I started taking Zepbound, I began having this really nice, calming thought that I could sit down and eat the same thing alongside my daughter, that there was nothing wrong with that, and if I wanted to maybe put an extra pinch of salt or some hot sauce on mine, that was fine. I enjoyed it. I enjoy eating with my daughter.
The conversation is minimal since Lulu’s 1 ½ — she mostly says “Elmo,” then goes down a long list of all the friends she has, naming them one at a time before telling me to sing “The Wheels on the Bus” — but I’m fine with that; I’m suddenly fine with a lot more than I ever expected to be. I’m not going to live forever, but I feel like I’m doing everything in my power now to make sure I stick around as long as I can to make sure I can always sit down and have a meal with my daughter.