Losing My Friend Over Wegovy
She hid her semaglutide use, knowing that I would spiral. She was right; we haven’t spoken since.
I wasn’t supposed to be at my friend’s apartment that day, but she asked for a last-minute favor:
Could I watch her unruly foster dog while she ran errands? Of course.
Her home felt like an extension of my own. We had recently lived together there (she let me move in after I lost my job and had to sublet my own place to make rent), my cat stayed over whenever I traveled, and she often referred to her office as my bedroom. So I didn’t think twice about opening her fridge.
When I saw the
box of Wegovy, my first thought was:
It’s for the dog. I slammed the fridge door shut as if I’d seen a ghost or a picture of my ex with someone prettier than me. I opened it again, leaning forward: wegovy™ (semaglutide) injection. All lowercase, as if to say, “i’m friendly and approachable!” Seeing a
weight-loss drug in my dear friend’s fridge felt like being cheated on, a confounding betrayal.
I’m not oblivious; I know
GLP-1s are everywhere. But as prevalent as semaglutides have become, I’ve been equally vigilant about avoiding them. I avert my eyes from Ro ads on the subway and fast-forward podcast promos. What scares me most about their accepted ubiquity is the underlying belief that we cannot be trusted with our own appetites. That our bodies — working tirelessly on our behalf — warrant control. I’m scared because I used to believe this, too.
I refuse the world of weight loss now because, for more than a decade, my life epitomized it. I was anorexic; I was bulimic; I was diet culture’s star student, and it led me to the brink of death. I thought I could condition myself to surpass food and growth, reaching “perfection” like it was a room I could lock myself in. Which is to say, my fantasy was a version of myself who was not alive.
From 9 to 22, my memories are not of lived experience but of frenzied secrets: shoplifting laxatives, casing medicine cabinets for amphetamines and diet pills, feigning ingestion by folding food into napkins to discard later from car windows. All that mattered was what I was or wasn’t eating. At night, starved, I would inhale anything I could find, pawing through kitchen trash for leftovers like a suburban racoon, only to purge it all before dawn.
So more than uncovering her secret, I had stumbled on a quarry of kryptonite.
I stood frozen in the kitchen. I looked at the dog, who was not on Wegovy.
What now? I considered saying nothing, leaving with a tight-lipped smile. And then what? Ghosting her? Without thinking, I texted: “wegovy… You’re not in trouble but what is going on.” When I looked up from my phone, the dog was standing on the kitchen counter. Nothing was as it should’ve been.
“I can explain,” she announced when she got home. The two of us sat on opposite ends of the couch with our feet tucked beneath us. I tried to listen but it was hard to hear over the sound of the blood boiling in my head. “I can’t believe you found out,” she said, laughing a little. “You’re the one who
really couldn’t find out.”
“I know.” I smiled because I didn’t know what else to do. “I’m the worst person for this.” We sat in silence for a moment, until I told her I loved her but I had to go.
I left in a daze of disbelief. On my walk home, I had a brief but violent fantasy about breaking and entering her doctor’s office.
Later that day, I remembered all the times in the past six months my friend had canceled on me — due to nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, all common side effects of Wegovy. I’d started teasing her every time she texted about it. “Your poor body!” I’d typed more than once.
When I entered eating-disorder recovery in my early 20s, I was face-to-face with a dead end and I felt trapped. My every day was an excruciating cycle of restricting, bingeing, and purging — all I knew of adulthood was treading water, exerting every drop of energy trying not to drown. Diet culture keeps you constantly planning for a future in which you repent your past; it’s an ingenious enterprise built for miserable longevity. It took 13 years and one great therapist for me to even consider that I was not broken for wanting to eat when I was hungry.
Since starting recovery, I’ve been rigorously mindful about the people with whom I surround myself. I quit a job that was
great on paper because the entire staff did Whole30 together and, when my birthday rolled around, our manager opted for a communal snack of Halo Top ice cream and berries instead of the usual Magnolia cupcakes. My favorite ex-boyfriend used to do a sweep for bathroom scales whenever we spent the night somewhere new. As silly as it sounds, scales are my version of Chekhov’s gun: The mere sight of one portends a violent end. The longer I’m in a room with a scale, the higher the likelihood I will step on it to self-flagellate, ricocheting my nervous system backward in time to mandatory weigh-ins and the threat of being inserted with a feeding tube against my will. If he found any, he would hide them for the duration of our visit, poking his head out to report when it was “safe to enter.” Every time, it felt like a remarkably loving gesture.
On bad days, any jagged shard of diet culture glints with potential threat. My loved ones know this, which is why the Wegovy was kept secret from me.
In the weeks that followed, my own eating turned feral in a way it hadn’t for years. I stalked my kitchen like an animal: up late, eating compulsively, opening and closing cabinets as if they had wronged me. As far as my body knows, diet culture is its apex predator, so seeing a weight-loss drug activated a scarcity response.
A month after I opened her fridge, my friend hosted a book club for Miranda July’s novel
All Fours. It was my favorite book of the year, about a woman rediscovering her body as a vessel for pleasure and choosing to indulge her appetites — no matter the mess. I’d dog-eared my copy and was giddy to discuss it with a group. But as the day approached, an unfamiliar anger engulfed me. The thought of discussing someone else’s unconditional indulgence, with the unspoken weight of an appetite suppressant in the room, made me want to pull my hair out at the root. I imagined myself attending and, in a fit of frustration, involuntarily blurting my friend’s secret aloud.
So I texted her, “I’m really sorry but I don’t think I can come today. I know this sucks but the wegovy of it all is just too triggering for me right now.”
“That makes me very sad but I do understand,” she replied.
Our friendship always felt fated. We met in an online class and got coffee after learning we lived in the same city, only to learn we lived on the same block. We were born the same year, two days apart. Even our height and shoe size were the same. We had multiple pairs of the same clogs, and when leaving each other’s apartments, one of us would invariably say, “Are these yours or mine?” “Who cares!” the other would shrug. At the end of the day, it’s her body and her choice, but it’s hard when she feels like an extension of myself.
A few weeks after book club, we wished each other happy birthday in lowercase. We haven’t spoken since.
From mutual friends, I’ve gleaned that we both feel similarly — something like, “It’s a gigantic bummer but I get it.” In many ways, I’m being a baby. But eating-disorder recovery is a process of relearning how to feed yourself — tuning back into the body’s most basic needs, which
is the stuff of babies. If I could keep the friendship and compartmentalize the fact that she is orienting her life toward thinness, I would. But my brain doesn’t work like that. In the same way a recovering alcoholic is ineligible for a glass of wine to decompress before bed, I am ineligible for regulation regarding my body: no counting, weighing, or food rules. Left on autopilot, I fiend for control, veering toward the self-objectification that drained my life of delight for so long. The allure of looking “perfect” is a siren call that will always turn my head. I’d love to reach a point where the tune disinterests me. In the meantime, I do what I can to plug my ears.
I don’t fault my friend for any of this. Of course I don’t. We live in a world replete with signals that thin is good and fat is bad; if society — if your
doctor — offers a silver bullet, why wouldn’t you take it? No one is immune, especially me.
I miss her. But of all my breakups, this has been the least painful — not because our love was platonic, but because it was an act of self-protection. My boundaries are unforgiving because they have to be.
Torturing myself for more than a decade radicalized me. I know what it feels like to live under a reign of restriction, and I know how it feels to choose allowance instead. Now, when my appetite crests, I feel grateful. What a treat, to look forward to eating. Hunger is the body’s announcement that it is alive and wants to stay that way.