John Loftus, Daily Caller:
According to the CDC, 40% of American adults between August 2021–August 2023 were clinically obese. For adults ages 40 to 59, the obesity rate was a whopping 46.4%. (Subscribe to MR. RIGHT, a free weekly newsletter about modern masculinity)
Enter weight loss drugs. Though their long-term side effects remain unclear, at least in the short term, GLP-1s are helping obese Americans shed extra baggage. If you don’t have the willpower to eat less and walk more, you still have an option to trim your waistline before your best friend’s wedding.
But for so-called scholars and activists associated with the “Fat Studies” field, the recent surge in popularity of drugs like Ozempic is becoming a cause for concern that is threatening their entire grift, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday.
Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs may be a promising solution to the growing problem of obesity, but they’ve got a surprising foe: fat activists. https://t.co/iqwe7641Qr
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) August 17, 2025
“Ozempic is 100% making things worse for us,” Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, told WSJ. “It’s created an even louder public narrative that you could just solve all your problems by taking this magical drug, and if you don’t take it, well then, you deserve what you get.”
Marilyn Wann, a Bay Area fat activist suspicious of long-term side effects stemming from weight loss drugs, lamented that they “creat[e] more work for fat activists.”
“People think that if everyone can just take this expensive, dangerous drug, we can get rid of fat people,” she told the WSJ. “These drugs are going through the same excitement-and-disappointment cycle we’ve seen with every method of intentional weight loss. It just creates more work for fat activists.”
Mann has a point. Weight loss drugs are expensive. For people paying out-of-pocket or whose insurance will not cover the drugs, Big Pharma still charges a steep monthly price, even after recent efforts to reduce costs. And they could also be dangerous. Ten years of shooting Wegovy into a thunder thigh may lead to unforeseen consequences that doctors and researchers cannot predict.
But fat activists are equally as shameless as the Big Pharma companies. Instead of peddling drugs, they peddle self-deceptive lies. The more humane message is this: Being obese is bad for your health, and although you should not be treated as less of a human because you weigh 300 pounds, you also should not be enabled.
I wouldn’t go near any drug being peddled at obscene prices — $500-$1,500 per month — by the same companies that assured us that their China Flu vaccines were effective and safe, but neither do I pretend that obesity is healthy or desirable. And there’s an alternative to both: I’m embarrassed to admit it, but, because of severe spinal stenosis preventing me from hiking, bike riding, even walking more than 50 yards for the past five-six years (and my inattention to how much I was eating) my weight ballooned from 180 lbs to 218 lbs as of July of last year.
Purely from vanity, I downloaded a cheap calorie-counting app (Lose It) and began to note and limit how much I was stuffing away every day. Nothing drastic, though I did, almost inadvertently begin eating a much healthier diet by cutting out cookies, ice cream and the like. Result? A year later, I weigh 165 lbs — dropped a pound a week — and as an unintended, but what should have been obvious side benefit, the back pain that two different surgeons a year apart had assured me could only be mitigated by undergoing a double spinal fusion, has gone now that I’m not putting all that weight load on the vertebrae (the legs are still numb, so I still can’t walk very far, but the pain has lifted and that’s enough).
That’s too much information for a public blog, but my point is that the key to losing weight is simply to consume fewer calories than you burn — that’s it. No drugs, no gastric banding (and for you cops out there, no donuts). Eat less, weigh less, all to the distress of Big Pharma and the fat activists alike, and that’s a good thing.
