Strega Nona is an illustrated children’s book about an Italian witch with a magic pasta pot. One day, a young neighborhood deviant named Big Anthony learns the spells required to turn on the pot and accidentally makes so much pasta that he floods and destroys the village. His punishment is being forced to eat it all, which is supposed to be a terrible curse. Both then and now, however, this story just makes me jealous.

I first read Strega Nona when I was 9 years old, and unlimited spaghetti was the thing I wanted most, as well as the thing I most needed to avoid. I love pasta to a ridiculous extent—I love how much bite it has, how it’s inherently rich and sweet and delicious and hefty even when served plain. It is impossible to know, though, whether I love it for its extraordinary taste and texture or if it’s a love born out of scarcity. I can never remember eating pasta without feeling as though I were doing something wrong.

When I was a kid, my parents were terrified that I was fat and made their concerns clear. Food obsession runs in the family. My parents’ parents—both pairs—are also fixated on weight: I have never seen my maternal grandmother eat dinner, and her sister died of anorexia in her 50s. My dad’s parents drink only low-sugar wine. My parents always said their concern was for my health or, in my teens, my “body image”—a curious phrase, since worrying about someone else’s body image implies they must already be ashamed of it.

And I was definitely a chubby kid. I’ve been approximately 30 percent fatter than I should have been—according to a handful of doctors, pseudoscientific BMI calculators, and the imprinting of modern Western culture—since I was 9. Still, it was obvious that my parents were terrified not about my diet, or my “body image,” but about my fatness. My sister, on the other hand, has always had extremely low (11 percent) body fat and eats 3,600 calories a day—1,200 of which are usually, say, Gushers—but instead of giving her the “eat less and slower” look in front of family friends at the dinner table, humiliating her as they did me, they would just laugh. But no one laughed when I ate sugar. My babysitter once pried my jaws open to see if I had any chocolate chips in there.

It should be obvious by now that I have never had an intuitive, “natural” relationship to food, hunger, and fullness. My desire to eat always begot restriction, which begot desire, which begot more restriction. In the darkness of my parents’ kitchen, I made pasta for myself like Big Anthony—secretly, late at night. I was so paranoid they would find out that I made stove-popped popcorn directly afterward just to mask the smell, even though plain pasta is, for all intents and purposes, odorless.

When your metabolism doesn’t operate at lightning speed, and your first understanding of your body is that it is somehow wrong and that what you eat should be carefully considered so as not to exacerbate your fatness, and you’ve begun to learn explicitly and implicitly that thin equals pretty, and you are an adolescent girl who wants to be pretty, because it’s the most important thing in the world—when all of this is true, food and exercise become all you think about. My general sexual invisibility for a lot of my teen and young-adult life was verifiable evidence that any whiff of fatness was enough to render me undesirable. I couldn’t, and still can’t, shake off the fact that skinny girls with plain faces and so-so personalities will almost always get male attention more easily than fat girls who are gorgeous and interesting.

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I never learned how to like, or even feel neutral about, my body. I have been in a constant war with it my entire life, squinting and posing and contorting in front of the mirror to avoid confronting the reality that I was a little fatter than I wanted to be, and I couldn’t think my way to feeling sexy the way all of the think pieces in women’s magazines told me I could or should be able to do. I couldn’t attempt weight loss without driving myself to insanity, unable to even go for a walk without thinking about how one mile would be 100 calories burned.

That changed a little over a year ago.

In January of 2025, I started using an off-brand compound of semaglutide, a GLP-1—cheap Ozempic. At the time, I was 24, single, the most depressed I had ever been, unemployed, spending my days watching Vanderpump Rules and playing Fruit Merge, an iPhone game where you combine fruits to make increasingly larger fruits. And devastatingly, disgustingly, my primary concern was what would happen if, on top of all of that, I also gained weight. I couldn’t handle that possibility, and I didn’t have the internal wherewithal to expend any emotional energy forcing myself to hit any sort of step goal; I couldn’t even get out of bed. I knew, largely due to my Instagram algorithm, that off-brand GLP-1s were becoming more widely accessible, and using them was a silver bullet at a time when nothing except maybe benzodiazepines would make me feel as good as losing 20 pounds.

After spending a lot of time on Reddit, I came across Beauty With Bubbly—a medspa based in Northfield, Illinois—and requested a virtual consultation for off-brand GLP-1. The various direct-to-consumer companies that offer GLP-1s, along with a host of other peptides, have websites with portals, sans-serif fonts, and an interface that is inherently comforting to young people because it looks and feels native to an iPhone. Beauty With Bubbly’s website, on the other hand, was reminiscent of the early 2010s Internet: It was janky, with small white text over a black background, and I knew that if I called the number, I would immediately be connected to a real person and not a robot.

I called the number. The nurse was nice and knowledgeable enough to reassure me that by going on these drugs, I was not going to fuck up my health, at least not terminally so—something that genuinely had me scared. Ironically, my mother is a doctor and probably could have answered any question that crossed my mind, but I was entirely unwilling to have that conversation with her. The shots would run me $125 a month, which I agreed to pay.

When the drugs arrived, I ripped the label off the extremely tiny glass bottle of red liquid. It was no bigger than an AirPod, so my roommate wouldn’t identify it in the fridge where it needed to be stored. I hid the needles and the antibacterial wipes in my dresser. I don’t remember the experience of my first injection because I don’t think I was even emotionally present, unable to square how ashamed I felt with the fact that I was doing it anyway. All I remember was watching the instructional video the medspa had sent of a little blond nurse walking her viewers through the steps, vlog-style, in a kitchen that looked like Ina Garten’s.

I tolerated the injections relatively well, but I was nauseous a lot of the time, and the once erotic and sensorial process of eating became something that hurt and made me feel sick. It didn’t matter: As I started to see the pounds drop off my body, I felt sexy, so I felt good. The amazing part was that it didn’t happen through a years-long process of restriction and compulsive exercise and obsession with everything that I consumed. This route was so much more pleasant than the ones I’d tried in the past. People noticed that I’d lost weight, but it happened slowly enough that I could shrug and chalk it up to new antidepressants.

I recently revisited an essay by the young writer Rayne Fisher-Quann on her Substack newsletter, in which she cites Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed, a memoir that includes a portrait of an elderly woman who spent decades struggling with anorexia. Fisher-Quann reflects that the woman’s diary contains “decades of pages full of carefully-logged calories and I feel fat, I ate today and I feel fat in her own handwriting again and again, and is humiliated, most of all, by the banality of this obsession—by the plain cliché of looking back and seeing so clearly that her weight and her body were her life’s greatest passions, her most dedicated field of study.”

Before I started taking a GLP-1, my body was almost certainly my most dedicated field of study. I was convinced that my lovability and sexual market value hinged on my weight. I got a boyfriend immediately after I lost 25 pounds on this drug. For most of our relationship, he didn’t know. I was afraid to tell him, because the body he was attracted to was not the one with which I’d been naturally endowed. It is hard to say whether his attraction was purely due to my new body, the new confidence that accompanied it, or both. But the idea that thinness has improved my ability to get what I want from the world has been empirically reinforced not only by a pretty significant body of evidence, but also by my experience as a young woman—a conclusion too painful for any choice-feminist body positivity to override.

Once I lost weight, my brain was freed up to think about literally anything else: I read and wrote more, exercised only when I felt like it and didn’t self-flagellate when I didn’t—better yet, I was able to notice that exercise actually did make me feel good for reasons other than caloric expenditure. I had better sex because I wasn’t concerned about whether or not I looked fat the whole time. I fell in love. I never thought about food and was cool with whatever I managed to eat, which was often pasta, because I was full after three bites. I chemically obliterated the rush of erotic pleasure I’d get at the mere thought of Big Anthony’s unlimited spaghetti. I let people take pictures of me in a bikini. I took nudes and liked them. I had never felt that way before.

But whatever shame I shed along with those pounds only reinforced my predetermined notion that getting thinner would change my life for the better. Worshipping thinness this much is decidedly antifeminist, if not almost fascist. But I do not currently have the power to resolve the fact that my intellectual understanding of what is good and right and available to me conflicts with what my lived emotional experience tells me about what I can and should want and have: to like myself, to feel desired, and to not have to worry about my weight, a freedom with which I had not been acquainted for my entire life. To be honest about my use of weight-loss drugs without the explanation I’m giving here would be to admit how desperately I wanted to be thin, a humiliation I have simply not been able to stomach because of the way it comes up against my own notion of how beauty should be defined. I don’t want to conflate body and personhood at all. I wish, after all, that I felt good in the body I used to have.

Instead, I have internalized something of a cultural hierarchy. At the top of it are people who are inherently thin and eat whatever they want (my sister, the thin one, eats so much that her friends call her “Porky,” which maintains even the possibility of being funny—it isn’t—only because her thinness affords her a charm where a fat person’s overindulgence would induce revulsion). After them are the people who are thin and who restrict their eating and maintain regular exercise habits to stay that way—who work in a dark silence, where bites of dessert are still taken and exercise is done because it makes them “feel good.” (I know that exercise does feel good, but I find that this refrain severs the act of exercising from its aesthetic ends, which is often a lie, or at least a conflation.) Next are the people who are fat and who make themselves thin through sheer force of will. At the bottom are the people like me—who now number about one in eight Americans—who use these drugs to lose weight, the ones who “can’t control themselves.” I have, at many times in my life, paid for thinness in more covert ways, either in the form of healthier foods or exercise classes or going to a gym, and it hasn’t ever really worked. What makes using these drugs more harmful and dystopian?

The people in my social and Internet circles, people I love and respect, generally oppose GLP-1s. When the drugs first entered the cultural lexicon in mid-2022, there was controversy about people like the Kardashians using them for aesthetic reasons when diabetics—the intended beneficiaries of the medication—couldn’t even get their prescriptions filled. Fitness TikTok influencer Janelle Rohener was flamed online for continuing to sell her weight-loss plan—which was basically just stuffing cream cheese in raw bell peppers—when she suddenly lost weight, not due to the peppers but to Ozempic, and didn’t tell her followers. Many well-meaning critics have also opposed GLP-1s from a political position, emphasizing the materialist dystopia they present (read looksmaxxing).

This discourse is complicated by the fact that opposing GLP-1s requires a kind of collective agreement to pretend that fatness has no bearing on how the world treats people, which of course isn’t true. It’s almost impossible to admit out loud that being fat makes you less legible as attractive—not because it’s true in any absolute sense, but because that admission would concede that our homogenizing culture is right. I know that weight has bearing on the lives of many, many people, myself included, even as I wish that it didn’t and resent every motor of the cultural machine that has made it so. I think the leftist, feminist critiques of GLP-1s are all correct, but I took the drug anyway.

The truth is that I do like myself more now. And it completely sucks that this is the case. I have never been prohibitively fat—I always fit into airplane seats and have always been able to buy conventionally sized clothing, for example. I’ve been pursued by men even when I couldn’t bear to look at my own naked body in the mirror, and the fact that my body image is probably the most painful element of my existence will be entirely uncompelling to many people—maybe even offensive. I can also trace where my own delusion began: with misguided parents who were taught to be so by the misguided parents before them, in a misguided society that will invent an endless stream of reasons to make money off of people who hate themselves, or that invents reasons for people to hate themselves in order to sell them even more products. But everything I learned about my body annihilated my desire to live in it. I never understood my body to be inherently desirable regardless of what it looked like because I was only ever taught that it wasn’t.

What would you like me to do about it?