Beyond the scale

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, September 18th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: problems with weight loss.

Ozempic. Mounjaro. Wegovy. Zepbound. You’ve probably heard of these injectable weight loss drugs. Some 33 million Americans have tried them, and many of them have lost lots of weight.

REICHARD: But how should Christians think about weight loss and body image in the midst of the weight loss obsession? WORLD Senior Writer Kim Henderson brings us this report.

SOUND: [MEDICAL CLINIC]

KIM HENDERSON: Ochsner is a state-run family medical clinic in Monroe, Louisiana. Charles Norman is here for an appointment. He’s explaining how he injects himself with the drug Mounjaro.

PATIENT: Real easy. Just put it to your side right hand and click it on and pop it. That's it. It'll click back when you finish.

Dr. Amy Givler is seeing Norman for the first time. She says another practitioner put him on Mounjaro for diabetes, not weight loss, even though he was on the heavy side.

GIVLER: You lost a good amount of weight, and now you're normal. Your diabetes is in perfect control, which is fantastic, yeah.

Dr. Amy Givler talks with Norman in an examination room. Photo by Kim Henderson

Givler has seen it over and over. The wonder-working power of GLP-1 drugs, as they’re called.

GIVLER: I'm just going to say for diabetes, it has been amazing.

This class of drugs is great at controlling diabetes, and great at shedding weight.

COMMERCIAL: Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic…

And it’s that weight loss component that’s turned drugs like Mounjaro and Ozempic into superstars.

MONTAGE: Everyone’s talking about a new class of game-changing drugs… Ozempic, Ozempic, Ozempic … Major potential breakthroughs in the booming world of weight loss drugs … Part of that weight loss comes from the way Ozempic works … Doctors say they work by mimicking hormones in the gut…

Our society prioritizes thinness. So when injectable drugs that make you eat less became available, Americans ate them up. They spent an estimated $71 billion for GLP-1 medications in 2023 alone.

But what are the real costs of a drug like Ozempic?

MINTLE: There's just so much pressure on the internet, when you're looking at billboards, when you're shopping, I mean, everywhere you look, you know, weight is significant.

That’s Linda Mintle. She’s the chair of behavioral sciences at Liberty University’s college of osteopathic medicine.

MINTLE: We have all these influencers now, social media gurus who use the drugs and show how different they look. And all of this is just adding pressure to an already obsessed generation.

Mintle isn’t against GLP-1s. She thinks they may be a good tool for some patients fighting obesity. But using the drugs to drop weight when it’s not medically necessary? That’s a problem.

MINTLE: This is not going to treat all the emotional issues that a lot of people eat out of.

Dr. Ben Bikman agrees. He’s a metabolic scientist who goes as far as labeling some Ozempic use as “drug abuse.”

BIKMAN: There are perfectly lean women, who are very healthy, who have leveraged these weight loss drugs in order to get even skinnier than they already are because they have an eating disorder, and this has made it even easier...

Dr. Ben Bikman Photo courtesy of Ben Bikman

Bikman is a professor at Brigham Young University. He says it’s naive to ignore the problem, especially when it’s so obvious.

BIKMAN: They start to look like zombies. It's very sad. It's sickening. It's disheartening. Even to see it happening in 18 or 19 year old college students whose parents are enabling it. I get extraordinarily incensed about the whole thing.

CREEKMORE: I think the church needs to back away from what I would call diet culture.

Heather Creekmore is a Christian body image coach and self-described “recovering comparer.” She wants Christians to think differently than the world does about their bodies and dieting.

CREEKMORE: We've demonized bread, and Jesus calls himself the bread of life. Like, isn't that confusing to anyone? So I think we need to stop and question, why have we bought into this?

Creekmore believes that a lot of people who are grabbing Ozempic to lose 20 pounds have the wrong perspective on food and identity.

CREEKMORE: God created us to eat, right? Food is a good gift from him. I was made on purpose, for a purpose, and that purpose is more than just weighing a certain amount or looking a certain way.

Linda Mintle agrees.

MINTLE: The real solution is a spiritual one. We need to value what God values, and take care of our bodies, be healthy, to do the work that God has called us to do, but not to obsess and be preoccupied with them and define ourselves based on our weight.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in Monroe, Louisiana.

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