i changed my mind

i was anti glp-1s until i wasn't.

{if reading about weight, body image, or glp-1 medications is is triggering for you, you might want to skip this post.}

want to listen to this essay instead of read it? scroll down to the bottom, and hit play—i’ve recorded the entire piece, along with a little intro, for paid subscribers.

why are you crying?

i was on a video visit with my primary care physician of 18 years—the doctor who has seen me in every stage of my adult life, the doctor who has been mine since i moved to new york way back in 2008. the doctor who has seen me gain weight and lose it again, seen me try one workout fad after another, who has watched as i’ve morphed from a person who believed herself inherently un-athletic to a person who ran (legitimately ran!) an entire 5k on a frigid february day. a doctor who knows me, even when i don’t want her to. even when it feels embarrassing to be known.

i was crying because i had—after years of ruminating, weeks of agonizing, and an entire lifetime of feeling like i was never at home in my body, like my body was something i had to constantly apologize for, like i was at war with it—gotten up the courage to ask her what she thought about my trying a glp-1.

i’ve written extensively about body image here on big feelings. my body is, in many ways, the thing i have the most big feelings about. more than my career, more than my (lack of) love life, more than my sensitivity or my desire to be seen, body image is—and has always been, for as long as i can remember—my thing. my body is the shell that carries me through this life, and it is the thing that impacts every single aspect of that life.

i imagine i’m not alone in saying i can recall a slate of things people have said to me about the way i look.

i’ll pay you $10 for every pound you lose. my grandmother, when i hit puberty and started gaining weight (i was unhappy and secretly binge-eating candy i purchased with my allowance at the convenience store down the street from my piano lessons, then stashing the wrappers under my bed so that no one would see them). this same grandmother had told me repeatedly as a child that she survived as a dress model in new york on “1/2 a cup of buttermilk and little else.”

move your fat ass! a stranger on the m23 bus, when i didn’t get down the aisle fast enough. i remember this moment distinctly, viscerally, like a photograph i can superimpose myself into at any given time. i was wearing a pair of men’s jeans i had purchased at the salvation army and cut into shorts, because i felt menswear to be more forgiving. i had never before thought of my ass as particularly problematic, it was my stomach i had always hated (it is still my stomach that i despise today).

sit ups. you should do some. one of the earliest messages i received when i downloaded tinder. sent without explanation, because was an explanation really needed?

why was i crying?

the better question, perhaps, was how could i not cry in this moment?

how could i not cry when this single statement (i’ve been thinking about trying a glp-1, and i wanted your take on it) held an entire lifetime of fear, and disappointment, and shame?

this single statement was the scariest possible thing i could say aloud, because it meant admitting that i, too, had fallen prey to the oldest trick in the book. that i had given into patriarchal framing that my body was a tool to be whittled and wielded as a means of power (if only i could get it to obey).

it is hard to explain to people who have not been heavy what it is like to move through the world in a bigger body.

what it’s like to question every single bite of food you put into your mouth.

what it’s like to eat something and then immediately berate yourself for doing so, to berate yourself literally while you are chewing, and wonder if it’s too late to spit it out.

what it’s like to go out on dates, or go out with your friends, and analyze not just what you order, but how much of it you consume.

what it’s like to look at your friends and marvel.

at the friends who can eat anything they want, eat more than you, and never gain a pound.

the ones who do not constantly pull at their clothes or suck in their stomachs.

who raise their arms without thinking because what does it matter if their tops ride up?

it is hard to overstate just how much my body has weighed on me.

how much brain space it has taken up over the course of my 40 years on this earth.

how mindful i am of every wrinkle, fold, and skin tag.

how conscious i am of the way i move in a yoga class or on a spin bike, of the way my chest bounces when i run along the east river, of the way my cellulite jiggles when i deign to go to the beach.

it is not that i haven’t worked hard to accept my body—accepting my body is the work of my life—but that it is hard, hard work.

this is why i was crying at my breakfast bar at 8am on a friday morning in late june. because this question wasn’t just big. it was the biggest.