I gave up on weight loss a long time ago. For pretty much all of my thirties and my early forties, I was a good fifteen to twenty pounds over what my doctor considered a healthy weight for me. But as I moved into my mid-forties, I quite suddenly dropped all the extra weight, pleased my doctor, and was described by one of my aunties as “svelte.”
Why am I telling you this?
I was intrigued by a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post by Kate Cohen (who I got to interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast). Cohen looks at the advent of semaglutides: weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which have the potential to help millions struggling with Type 2 diabetes but also may exacerbate an already-egregious cultural anti-fat bias. As the treatments become more affordable, writes Cohen, “Being thin will no longer be an accident of birth or a perk of wealth; it will be a requirement of being middle class. Is this what we want?”
The part that really stuck out to me was the fact that these drugs work, in part, by making food unappealing. “For someone who loves cooking, eating and sharing food, these aren’t just weight-loss drugs,” she writes. “They are pleasure-loss, comfort-loss, joy-loss drugs.”
In my case, I didn’t need to take any weight-loss drugs because I already had the requisite joylessness. The sad fact is that I lost all that weight because I was, well, sad. Depression had deadened whatever pleasures I may have derived from snacking on unhealthy foods. I generally lost interest in eating, beyond the bare minimum to stay alive and alert. My slimming was an accidental byproduct of a deficit of joy.
So there’s a bit of a paradox here. I am (currently) happier and healthier without the extra weight. But I’m not happier because of my weight loss, I’m happier now because I have since improved my mental health. I got therapy, for one, but probably most importantly, I did the things I needed do to address my neurochemistry: I engaged in more activities, including returning to theatre, which got me interacting with other humans on a regular basis for the first time in ages; I embarked on more creative projects that had no prospect of making me any money or winning me any legion of fans but fulfilled me simply for having made something from nothing; and yeah, I exercised a little more, not to lose weight or become physically stronger but because exercise helps reduce depression and anxiety. In other words, I got physically healthier (and keeping most of my excess weight off was one part of that), because I was pursuing better mental health and because I was pursuing and discovering more joy.
Look, I’m still a sad, anxious mess. But I have found that what was once a paradox can be rejiggered into a virtuous circle, an “upward spiral” as neuroscientist Alex Korb puts it. The problem is that what many (if not most) Americans are faced with today is what I just this second decided to call the Misery Vortex™, in which the easiest and most affordable options for food, entertainment, and activities are the very things that make us less healthy. We indulge in them in the pursuit of joy, but they actually leave us joy-deficient, so we indulge more. As we get sadder, more isolated, or more anxious, well, there are plenty of products to address that too.
We might, for example, invest in some “wellness” lifestyle, which might have some positive benefits, but may also make us poorer and more anxious as we struggle to live up to nigh-unreachable ideals of health and happiness, which in turn make us feel even worse, so we spend more money and make more sacrifices of our time and our joy.
There’s no conspiracy here. I don’t think the makers of Ozempic are running some kind of elaborate scam, but they will be more than happy to take our money. And like Cohen, I worry about a generation of kids brought up to feel even more pressure to be thin than they already face (if you can imagine), and their reward for sporting a socially acceptable physique will be a dampened sense of joy, all the while continuing to consume the food and media that diligently keeps the Misery Vortex™ a-swirling. I don’t have any answers here, but I have had a glimmer of an upward spiral, and I wish there were more cultural forces trying to stir the vortex in the other direction.
A version of this article was originally posted at Free Inquiry.
Near-Earth Object 