i really hate the wegovy ads in grand central

Every day when I emerge from the 4/5/6 platform at Grand Central and go to my office I face a specific visual assault: a barrage of posters plastering walls and poles and every blank space possible, showing people injecting their thighs and stomachs with Wegovy. In one ad a girl who is probably about my age and my size, a 14 or a 16, is smiling serenely and injecting herself. She looks beautiful, I think. Obviously, this is a model. Certainly she does not need to be injecting herself with a drug being advertised, prescribed and sold by a telehealth company to lose weight. I walk through a Wegovy injectible-branded turnstile to leave the station.

Wegovy is one of several GLP-1s being prescribed to treat obesity. Wegovy is FDA approved for weight loss, while Ozempic is approved to treat diabetes but is prescribed off-label for weight loss. Patients inject themselves with the drugs at home. GLP-1s mimic the feeling of satiety and slow the rate that food empties out of the stomach, effectively suppressing your appetite. On last year’s year-end earnings call, Novo Nordisk, which owns Wegovy and Ozempic, said it saw 50% growth of its worldwide market, and had almost 40,000 new Wegovy prescriptions being written weekly.

I guess I should say here that I don’t care what anyone does with their body. If you’re fat and you want to take Wegovy to lose weight and your doctor’s fine with it, go off! I’ve read a couple anecdotes from people who have taken the drug as prescribed and it genuinely seems to have improved their health conditions. I certainly cannot fault anyone for doing that—what I resent is having this marketing implying there’s something wrong with me and normalizing an aesthetically pleasing solution to the apparently existential and horrible problem of being fat plastered all over the subway.

I try to honor my body (with varying degrees of success) with body neutrality, which is different from body positivity. When I mention in a neutral way that I’m fat and someone says “don’t say that! You’re NOT fat,” that’s body positivity at its most unhelpful. You don’t need to love your body, which body positivity preaches. To me, body neutrality is not having to be 100% fine with your corporeal form, and for me is usually a mix of honoring and tolerating it, and really mostly eliminating self-worth from my physical appearance altogether as much as possible. I am grateful that my mind does not torture me with negative thoughts about my body as much as it used to, which makes body neutrality much more achievable for me now than it once was.

Anyway, the way these drugs are being written about is breathless but not surprising. “Weight-loss medications like Wegovy and Saxenda are flying off pharmacy shelves, given their ability to shave nearly 20% off one’s body weight with a single weekly jab,” Fortune crows. Don’t get me started on the New York Mag piece about ozempic that read like the gleeful, anonymous pro-anorexia blogs I pored over in middle school.

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I went to see a new primary care physician a few months ago for an annual checkup. I did some research before deciding on her, having found some people on a health-at-any-size doctors forum online who had recommended her. This was enough for me. But before even taking my vitals or asking a single question about me, she looked me up and down and said “you need to be exercising and eating healthily.” I explained that I exercise several times a week — a mix of cardio and strength training — and I eat a balanced diet. “Oh, well, that’s great,” she said. “But your BMI is so high.” 

I felt a little stupid explaining to a doctor that BMI is known to not be a reliable health indicator, and that unless further diagnostics revealed any red flags — high blood pressure, high cholesterol — I was disinterested in losing weight. I had a history of disordered eating and exercising, I continued, which I would have happily explained sooner if given the chance. She dismissed me. “We’ll see how your blood work comes back,” she said. My blood work came back. It was normal. I just broke a new personal record weightlifting. I walk 10,000 steps a day. I eat my vegetables and not too much red meat. I have been doing all of this for long enough for it to matter, but none of it matters if you’re going to be written off by someone who’s supposed to be advocating for you and your health. I decided to find a new doctor that day.

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Part of my job — arguably the most fun part of my job, the thing that energizes me the most every week — is working with our founders on things like positioning, messaging, and communications and press for the companies they’re building. I used to tell stories about startups as a reporter, and now I help startups tell stories about themselves. How do you set yourself apart and clearly communicate what you’re building to an indifferent or even skeptical audience? How do you become memorable? How do you position yourself relative to your competition? 

I have some notes for Ro, the company behind the Wegovy injection ads in Grand Central and Times Square, which wrote a blog post to try to explain them, titled “Why we’re putting ads for our Body Program on the subway.” “Body Program” is an interesting way of saying “drug prescribed for weight loss,” but the euphemisms do not stop there. The blog post did indeed change my perception of the subway ad campaign, but not for the better.

Ro says it’s trying to educate people who might benefit from GLP-1s—adults with Type 2 diabetes or weight-related medical problems. Its messaging is steeped in mission-driven babble. “Our new marketing campaign, supported by clinical research and conversations with our patients, aims to start an important, sometimes difficult, conversation focused on de-stigmatizing obesity as a condition and highlighting a new, incredibly effective treatment that may, for the first time, be a real solution for millions of people,” the company writes on Medium. Selling people a drug that makes them lose weight is, I guess technically, one way of stopping obesity stigma. I mean, I wouldn’t put my name to that, but we all have rent to pay.  If Ro was one of my clients I would drop them, but short of that I would advise against the subway campaigns and tell them to say in marketing directly what it is they’re doing: capitalizing on the GLP-1 craze. The thing that is possibly more offensive to me than the implication that fat people need weight loss drugs is trying to make it seem that shilling Wegovy is a noble, social justice-oriented cause cloaked in words like “destigmatization.”

Borrowing from the parlance of Donald Trump, Ro claims that “many people” say that when they seek treatment for weight loss, in-person physicians judge them. “No one has to feel guilty or embarrassed for seeking treatment. People can feel empowered to do so — it’s not cheating, it’s science. Our hope is that folks feel they can seek obesity care and treatment without bias or judgment,” the company writes in its blog post. I can relate to this, of course — I don’t want to lose weight, but I felt judged by that doctor who I saw in the fall nonetheless. I guess the difference is that the only thing that makes me feel like shit more than my doctor making judgments about me is a telehealth company innovatively finding new ways to tell me my body sucks. I hate these Wegovy ads and I don’t have a smarter way to say it! I can’t wait until a B2B SaaS startup with too much marketing budget comes along and inoffensively markets a database solution in a quirky way on the subway instead.