For half a century, psychotherapist and social critic Susie Orbach has observed the relentless pressures on women to conform to narrow physical ideals. While pockets of rebellion have emerged, she argues a pervasive culture of troubled eating and body anxiety persists, now turbocharged by the advent of a new pharmaceutical phenomenon.
The False Promise of a Pharmaceutical Fix
Today, Orbach identifies a new wave of troubled eating sweeping across society, directly fuelled by the explosion of GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. These medications, produced by major pharmaceutical firms and relentlessly promoted on social media, offer a seductive promise: psychological peace from obsessive thoughts about food and body size.
With prices falling and online prescriptions becoming commonplace, their reach is expanding rapidly. The imminent arrival of a pill form, replacing the current injectable, is set to make them even more accessible. The core appeal is the notion of managing appetite and silencing the internal “food chatter,” alongside the powerful longing to transform one’s body into a socially “acceptable and admirably thin” form.
Industries Profiting from Distress
Orbach warns that this pharmaceutical “solution” dangerously bypasses the root causes of why troubled eating is so widespread. The very industries that help provoke the distress—beauty, fashion, and food—are left unchallenged and free to continue peddling products that undermine self-image.
The food industry, in particular, faces little censure despite its business model relying on ultra-processed, appetite-stimulating “non-food foods.” Ironically, this same industry is now adapting, creating "GLP-1 friendly" products to cater to shrunken appetites and protect its market share.
The cycle of profit extends further. Rapid weight loss from GLP-1 drugs can lead to the so-called “GLP-1 face,” characterised by gaunt cheeks, creating a new demand for costly cosmetic interventions to “re-plump” faces—a stark departure from medicine’s principle to “first, do no harm.”
The Unaddressed Realities and a Path Forward
Orbach highlights critical, overlooked consequences of the drug craze. Significant muscle loss is a known side-effect, and a new form of discrimination emerges against those who cannot or choose not to take the medications. Crucially, studies indicate that most people regain all the weight lost within two years of stopping treatment, as the drugs do nothing to re-educate long-term appetite or eating habits.
While acknowledging the short-term relief these drugs provide is welcome for many, Orbach contends the fundamental heartache—the search for a sustainable and reliable sense of bodily self—remains unaddressed. The cycle, she notes, begins early, with anxiety around food and bodies often infusing pregnancy and postpartum periods, where the pressure to “get back” to a pre-pregnancy shape can complicate feeding both oneself and an infant.
Orbach calls for a whole-body, life-cycle approach that starts at the beginning of life, allowing babies and parents to relish hunger and its satisfaction. The ultimate goal, she proposes, is to cultivate a relationship with food that is pleasurable, wholesome, and unconflicted. Such a cultural shift would directly contest the power of the industries hellbent on inducing body anxiety for profit. Achieving this, Orbach concludes, would be a victory worth far more than any temporary pharmaceutical fix.
