SPEAKER_13 0:00

I worry that GLP1s are simply going to make us more fat phobic.

SPEAKER_02 0:07

There's just this baseline assumption in society that just because you are big, you must also dislike yourself or feel bad. I'm Michelle.

SPEAKER_13 0:20

I've spent over 25 years in media and education.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

I'm Gina.

SPEAKER_13 0:24

I've spent over 15 years in Taekwondo Policy. We met because we were both working to make social media a better place to be from different angles.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

I had just started Meta's Global Information Ecosystem Program.

SPEAKER_13 0:35

And I was the executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

We became friends because we're both obsessed with media. News, books, films, TV, and yes, digital content. We talked for hours about it, not always agreeing, but always learning from each other. There is so much media these days. And we wanted to create a space to process it and work through what it all means for our culture, our politics, and how we understand the world. And we're hoping you do too. This is Did You See with Gina and Michelle. Hi Gina. Hey, Michelle. I'm loving your raspy voice today. I have a little raspy voice because I was late stay out.

SPEAKER_13 1:16

I was at a laundry day concert last night and I sang a lot, forgetting that we had a podcast record today. So this is what you get. Oh I love it. This is what you're gonna get today.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Yeah, I love it. More concerts, please. So, Michelle, did you see that Nathan Fielder made a film about Elizabeth Holmes?

SPEAKER_13 1:38

I did see something about that on Instagram, and I'm kind of excited about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Nathan Fielder is this writer, comedian, filmmaker. His whole thing is about playing this awkward persona and blurring this version of himself with real people and real life scenarios. And Elizabeth Holmes, if you don't know, she was the founder of a company called Theranos in 2003. She was 19 when she founded the company, got a ton of buzz. And the whole idea was to revolutionize blood testing by using finger prick blood samples. She raised over a billion dollars from a lot of famous people. Some of the big name investors were Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Henry Kissinger was on her board. It's insane. But the thing is, the whole thing was a fake. Yes. The technology didn't work at all. Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of fraud. She was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison. And this film is the 34 days before she goes to prison.

SPEAKER_13 2:45

I have mixed feelings because I feel like she's gotten a lot of media attention. And I've read books about her, I've seen documentaries about her, and it's really like, okay, have we said enough? But Nathan Fielder is a really unique voice.

SPEAKER_02 3:02

I understand why people are fascinated by the story of Elizabeth Holmes, but it also bothers me in a way that people find her story so fascinating. She gets picked on a lot because she spoke with a lower register like this. And she wore Gina. Thank you. Thank you. I've been practicing my Chad voice. And she wore this black turtleneck to emulate Steve Jobs, who was a role model for her. In a lot of ways, she was just a product of that time and that culture. She's not the only one who took on this ethos of fake it till you make it. She's not the only one who idolized some of these founders. So there's something about the fascination that she was a traditionally attractive woman. She was young. That's the mystique about her. And there's something about that that just doesn't sit right with me.

SPEAKER_13 3:56

I do think, though, the level of the fraud is kind of incredible to observe because of the level of like money that was made, the way she was able to manipulate so many individuals. To me, it also speaks to the conversation around miss and disinformation and propaganda and all of this. So I like to look at her story through the lens of media literacy and how do we get swept up in a narrative. It's a weird little fascination that we have. And there's no doubt her persona, her looks, her being a woman, all of that impacts the way we are kind of obsessed with her.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

So much of the commentary about the trailer that was released was about how she looks, that she's got crazy eyes. Crazy eyes, yes. That's kind of what they focus on in the way that they release that teaser. It's interesting. I probably will watch the film.

SPEAKER_13 4:59

I'm gonna watch it. I think it's intriguing enough to want to know what it is. But speaking about being obsessed with people, tell me. Did you see Harry Stiles is doing a 30 show residency at Madison Square Garden? I did. He's been doing this in a few different places, right? Yeah, this is a big one though. So basically from August 26th to October 31st, he'll be at Madison Square Garden. His tour is the Together Together World Tour. It's supporting his most recent album called Kiss All the Time, Disco occasionally. It's the longest solo pop artist continuous arena run, as opposed to Billy Joel, who did 150 shows at Madison Square Garden and 90 consecutive monthly shows. This is 30 shows continuously. The residency has really changed the model for touring in the music industry. The residency used to be a final step for older acts. We're gonna go to Vegas and we're gonna start to fade out of relevance in Vegas. And it's totally changed now. Started with Britney Spears, and then we have people like Adele and Lady Gaga, and then we see it going in other places like Bad Bunny just had his long residency in Puerto Rico and Celine Dion's doing something in France. And now we have Harry at MSG. The model for touring has changed, and this is obviously really good for the artist. They have less travel, they can maximize the production costs and create a show that can stay in one arena, and that's really beneficial, but it changes the game for fans too, because now fans have the financial burden of getting to the show. People are traveling from all over to get to MSG. They're also spending an incredible amount of money on these tickets. They end up feeling like they are a part of something big. And there's a whole new term for this in the industry called fan tourism. Oh. And so it's been a lot of like interesting discussion about it. I was looking up about residency and how it's changed models. And within like the past couple of weeks, there's been articles in Box, articles in New York Times, articles in the Hollywood Reporter. So it's definitely something that people are thinking about. Box said that residencies have become a high-profile example of how the economics of entertainment are changing how we experience culture and who can even afford to have that experience.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

I can see both sides, definitely from the perspective of the artists and the crew, that this is just way more sustainable for everyone involved. And it allows you to be able to put on a different kind of show. For me personally, I don't need a lot of spectacle at music concerts. I like to just enjoy the music. But I can see that being in one place enables you to be a little bit more creative than you could have been if you were on the road, but it does push the cost to the consumers and the fans. And I worry that this is creating another class divide. Live concerts are incredible ways to get off of your phone and to go have a shared experience with people. And this is just going to become accessible to those with resources, to those with flexibility, or to people who already live in larger, usually wealthier places. What I worry about is that in real life experiences and shared connections with people is going to start to become kind of like a luxury good. And that's the trend that I find concerning.

SPEAKER_13 9:04

Well said. And I think it's a real trend. You're right. I think that it becomes a luxury good. And what does that impact have on culture itself? But I love Harry. I just want to be clear about that. I love Harry. I don't know a lot about him, to be honest. We'll talk. We'll talk, Gina. Okay, let's get started. Let's do it. Gina, did you see that the body positivity movement is fading?

SPEAKER_02 9:34

There have been so many evolutions to these conversations about weight and body image. It's such a complicated topic because it's driven by media, but also it's more than media. It has real life impacts on how people experience healthcare, on your work and your earnings prospects, and just how people go through life. This is a huge topic. And if I'm honest, I'm nervous.

SPEAKER_13 10:04

Yes, we are nervous about having this conversation, but our goal with this podcast is to bring up what is happening in media culture and have sometimes tough conversations. The cultural noise around body positivity, around GLP1 drugs, around weight loss, around body image is incredibly loud right now. And so we decided we need to talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

Yeah, but we want to be clear, we are not here to talk about any individual's choice to go on a GLP 1. We are talking about the cultural conversation about weight, weight stigma, body size, and how the GLP 1 drugs have complicated the discourse. We thought we'd start with some personal reflections on this topic. Michelle, do you want to go first?

SPEAKER_13 10:56

Absolutely. Like many women, I have had a long up and down journey with my thoughts about my body. I was probably eight or nine when people started commenting on my weight and my size. I remember an uncle asking me at a family event during a meal, are you eating again? And another time a family member walking in and mistaking me for my sister, but then saying, Oh, you're not her. She's the thin one. I was in eighth grade. The first time a doctor told me that I needed to lose weight. And that led me restricting my food intake for many years in high school and getting really thin. I spent most of my adulthood on Weight Watchers, cycling up and down, including two pregnancies. And most of my adult life, I can admit that I'd weigh myself every week, labeling food good or bad, valuing thinness as the beauty ideal. And this is despite being a media literacy educator, knowing how we objectify women, knowing how we construct beauty values, and how media messages often warp or body image with unrealistic ideals. And then during the pandemic, I actually started reading a lot about diet culture and intuitive eating and body positivity. And I made a decision to stop, stop weighing myself, stop making the goal weight loss, focus on my health, focus on movement, leave diet culture behind me, free myself from any number on the scale. And so now it's 2026. I'm gonna be 55. I'm knee deep in perimenopause. I've leveled out at a body that's still bigger than I've been most of my life, but not as big as I was a few years ago. I eat my veggies, I don't eat meat, I do my yoga, I don't really drink at all. I don't smoke, I'm active. Sometimes I want to be in a smaller body because I know weight can be a risk factor. And I want to be conscious of that, but my focus is not on weight loss anymore. It's about my health. You know, my blood pressure is good, my cholesterol is good, I am healthy. I'm just really saddened by the cultural conversations that have arisen since GLP ones have become mainstream because I worry personally and culturally about the elimination of progress we've made about body acceptance and body positivity. I worry that GLP ones are simply going to make us more fat phobic. And I fear it's just going to get worse and worse. And I do worry about the younger generation and what messages they are going to receive about their body. Just yesterday morning, I went on Instagram and I saw a post about an article from The Telegraph whose headline was Slim, beautiful women are back in fashion. Thank God for that. After years of using inclusive models to appease the woke crowd, advertisers have realized that people are attracted to attractive people. And I paused looking at my phone and thought, oh my God, am I back in sixth grade?

SPEAKER_02 14:13

Well, and how can that be published? I had to look this guy up because I found the whole article just completely appalling. Google calls him a right-wing political journalist. And I saw another article he wrote recently called Fathers Shouldn't Have to Tell Their Children They Love Them. So I think this guy clearly has his own agenda.

SPEAKER_13 14:33

Oh gosh, that is priceless research, Gita. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. So his opinion does not matter. The point of that being in the cultural conversation, it frightens me and it does trigger me because then it becomes if I decide not to go on these drugs, what does it say about me? And that's really, really hard to reckon with.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

I'm sorry about the experiences that you've had, especially in the doctor's office. There's still so much weight stigma in healthcare, and a lot of that shame does start in the doctor's office, in pediatrician's office. We need to remember that doctors and scientists are also people in the world who can develop biases from media and culture, and those are things that we need to keep in mind, all of us. For my experience, I struggle with participating conversations about weight, because these aren't necessarily my experiences. I've never felt comfortable with figuring out the role that I should be playing. I want to be a good listener, I want to support people, I want to lift people up, but I never want to pretend that I know this experience firsthand. I do have issues with looks and how I look. I know what it's like to be outside of society's beauty standards. My family is from Taiwan. I'm a first generation American in my family. I was born and raised in Alabama, surrounded by people who don't look like me and surrounded by Eurocentric beauty standards throughout my life. Whiteness, fair coloring, tall, skinny. I am none of those things. I know deeply the experience of looking different, of being judged by someone the second they see me, of wanting to hide, of wanting to change things about how I look and not being able to. I don't get a lot of diet or weight messaging in my social media, and I don't really see GLP1 ads. But honestly, I saw more of that in YM and 17 magazine and MTV back when I was young than I do now on social media. I care a lot about the people in my life who have these experiences, and I care about people's well-being generally, but I never want to portray myself as an expert or someone who has direct lived experience in this.

SPEAKER_13 17:23

I do think that if you zoom out, it really is about how we think of ourselves and how we value in our society how we look. That's the bottom line. I get an incredible amount of content that tells me I need to be doing more to look different. The messaging to older women is relentless about dropping the 20 pounds we gain during perimenopause, the wrinkles that show up, the gray hair that shows up. And it is daunting. I have made a choice not to listen because I think aging is the point of all of our lives, and I'm proud of wrinkles that show up. The conversation around weight is what triggers me.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

I get plenty of content about skin and anti-aging and makeup tools. My trigger point is definitely my nasal labial folds. So to your point, I mean, we all get it, it's different in different ways.

SPEAKER_13 18:34

There's so much messaging everywhere about our bodies and specifically how we think about these GLP1 drugs. This is kind of the moment in time where these drugs are now mainstream, they're available, people are using them, right? And we want to handle this topic sensitively and think about some of this messaging through a media literacy lens. So we're gonna structure this conversation like this. We've pulled a variety of clips from ads, from podcasts, from social media posts, and we're gonna play them, discuss them, because we want to give examples of the messaging that exists. Of course, this is not exhaustive. Consider this a buffet, right? So we're gonna actually start with an ad that appeared during the Super Bowl earlier this year for the drug Wagovy.

SPEAKER_08 19:31

Big news, America! Wagovy now comes in a pill. So adults with obesity can lose weight and keep it all along with diet and exercise. Yes, thank you, DJ Khaled. Be honest. If there was a pill that made other helpful things possible, you'd take it. If there is a pill that can help me pill apart, I'd take it. If there was a pill to make me a pill rescue.

SPEAKER_13 19:54

If there was a pill that helped me rescue more kittens, I'd take it.

SPEAKER_04 20:01

If there was a pill that made people stop being so judgy about how to lose weight.

SPEAKER_08 20:07

Maybe we don't need a pill for everything, but for managing weight, there's Wagobi, the first and only GOP one pill for weight loss.

SPEAKER_13 20:14

This is what I would do in class. I would look at this commercial with my students, and I would say, what does this want me to think about? And what does this want me to do? If you think about it that way, I think it's really confusing. Because what is it saying, right? Right. What we have here are a series of celebrities, Keenan Thompson, DJ Collin, John C. Riley, all of these celebrities are now spokespeople for Rogovi. They're basically framing it as a helpful drug, and that it is as simple as if we wanted to be a wrestler, we would take a pill to be a wrestler. How am I supposed to think about weight loss in that context?

SPEAKER_02 21:02

I think that what they're trying to do is destigmatize taking a drug for weight loss, but at the same time, they're equating it with things like parallel parking, which have nothing to do with health or really deep stigma. It's a strange equation that's happening there. It's almost like they're trying to minimize the fact that this is a health decision to take a drug.

SPEAKER_13 21:31

Absolutely. And then what's really interesting is that they bring in the judginess of people on weight loss drugs. Right. That in itself is an interesting choice. Yes. This is just an example of the way that we are being messaged around these GLP1. This is like an important choice that people have to make for their health. Right. It isn't as simple as the things that they're equating it with.

SPEAKER_02 21:59

And Ad that's targeted to men because all of the celebrities you mentioned are men, and it was an ad during the Super Bowl. So that makes me feel like the stigma part definitely was something that they were wanting to address with this. Yeah, that's really interesting. This makes me think a lot about advertising about prescription drugs. There are only two countries in the world that allow consumer ads about prescription drugs, and they are the United States and New Zealand. Every other country doesn't allow direct-to-consumer marketing for prescription drugs.

SPEAKER_13 22:34

That is really astounding information to people that live in the United States. Yeah. We are so numb to being advertised about prescription drugs. And what you didn't hear, of course, when we played that commercial is the 30 seconds that comes after the creative part that it's all about the side effects.

SPEAKER_02 22:56

Well, that was a big part of the FDA approval in the 90s to allow prescription drugs on TV. They allowed the commercials if they provided this list of risks. What's interesting now is how social media is changing the nature of ads. Obviously, social media advertising works totally different than TV commercials, but also ads regulation doesn't apply to organic content. It only applies to ads, which are paid for. If I'm making a video on TikTok and I'm just posting it, but I'm not paying to boost it, that's not regulated. Got it. We're really going to have to think about the rules of advertising and advertising through creators and through our social media posts and what that's going to mean because the current regulations just aren't up to date with the way it actually works.

SPEAKER_13 23:52

The conversation about GLP1 drugs would be so different if we weren't inundated with this type of messaging. I think that we just ignore that in the United States, right? We're so numb to this conversation about pharmaceuticals that just come on our TV during sporting events and TV. Like we just so used to it.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

It's so much. And Novo Nordisk, who makes Ozempic and Wagobi and Eli Lilly, they were both fined in France for campaigns they were running around GOP1s. There were two issues with it. One was that they were advertising at all, but also that they were promoting the drugs for off-label uses. So Wagobi, for example, is only approved in France for treating certain patients that meet certain criteria. But the message that the company was putting out there was positioning it as a general weight loss.

SPEAKER_13 24:47

You were bringing up such important points, but let's keep going. Yeah. There has been an incredible pickup of podcasts talking about this and conversations between people that have discovered GLP1s and those that are struggling with it. And one of the most potent ones was from the Oprah podcast when Serena Williams came on. For those of you who don't know, the Oprah Podcast is a weekly video podcast series. It features Oprah in conversations around what matters most to people. So in January of this year, she hosted a conversation about GLP1s. The title of that episode is Serena Williams and Oprah on Deciding to Take GLP1 Medications. And this episode was recorded in front of a live audience in New York City. Now, Oprah's main guest is Dr. Ania Jasterboff, who is the leading endocrinologist and associate professor at Yale School of Medicine, who recently authored a book called Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It's Like to Be Free. In this episode, they talk about how transforming this medication has been for Oprah, which she's been very vocal about. They talk about the science behind obesity being a disease, why these new medications are effective for many people to lose weight. I want to share this section from the episode description because I think some of the wording is really important. Oprah shares her decades-long public struggle with her weight and reveals how her experience with a JLP1 medication has given her a freedom and energy she never thought possible. Plus, 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion Serena Williams joins the conversation and opens up about her own battle with weight, calling it, quote, the one opponent she couldn't defeat, unquote. So in this segment that we're gonna listen to, an audience member talks with Serena about how Serena's decision to go on a GLP one helped her make the choice to do the same thing. Shade, what did you want to say?

SPEAKER_11 26:57

Oh my gosh, Serena. I was on the subway on my way to work when I read that article about you being on the GLP 1. And I immediately signed up with Roe while on the train. Because given that you are the GOAT and your career is evidence of that, I just knew I could see myself in you and just know that it's been working. I mean, since August, I've lost over 20 pounds. Wow. And as a psychologist by trade, I've always appreciated how you've just showed emotional strength and vulnerability throughout your career. It's really helped women like myself and my clients be able to understand that like resilience is not about, you know, not meeting challenges, but really meeting yourself with self-compassion and grace. And while being uh with Roe on these GLP ones, I've just had so much compassion for myself.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

It's not having compassion for yourself when you only have compassion when you're making progress. I feel like we're conflating things there.

SPEAKER_13 27:54

This is a complicated conversation because Serena and Oprah are two women that have had to battle with public comments on their bodies their entire lives completely unfairly.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Grotesque, racialized abuse, really, about their bodies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_13 28:15

Awful. Yes. And so this is a really empowering moment for both of them. And I want to acknowledge that. I think it is absolutely fascinating that this particular audience member had the reaction to Serena Williams going on row that she had, because I had the exact opposite initial reaction. I was absolutely overwhelmed with sadness. If Serena Williams is not satisfied with her body, how the hell are any of us going to be satisfied with our body? Serena Williams shouldn't be the role model for every single person, but there is a pressure when you're in the public eye. And what you do does matter.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

It all really blew me away. Serena, in particular, is a really effective spokesperson for this. Absolutely. Because she is a picture of health, because she is the goat. She's also known for being an advocate for her health through her post-delivery trauma that she had with her daughter. The language that she's using might be a result of the system that she has lived and worked in for so long. She has endured so much commentary and abuse about her body. Multiple things can be true that she really genuinely feels more satisfied, more happy. She can really believe in the message. And at the same time, she's perpetuating the problematic messaging that she herself has experienced.

SPEAKER_13 30:03

Yes. And let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is nowhere in this interview does she speak about the fact that her husband was one of the founding funders of this medication she is now promoting. There is a lot of financial incentive for her for people to be on Roe.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

And that is something that you can't ignore. Right. And Roe has included that disclosure in some of their posts, but not all. On some of the Roe ads, there is some fine print that says that Serena actually lost weight on different GLP ones and is using Roe to maintain, but that's not fully transparent in this Oprah podcast or in other times where she's spoken about Roe because her husband is an investor, and I'm sure she got some kind of cash or stock compensation for being a brand ambassador as well. I don't necessarily think that having a financial interest necessarily negates your credibility. A lot of people invest in companies because they have a direct experience with a certain problem and they want to support addressing that problem. But I do think that transparency and disclosure is important.

SPEAKER_13 31:22

I agree that just because they have financial gain doesn't negate the positives and their choice, but the lack of transparency worries me. I agree. But I want to go back to the words that were chosen for the episode description that I read. This idea that Oprah says that she has a freedom that she never thought was possible. And then Serena referring to her weight as a battle and the one opponent she couldn't defeat. I think these words and the way that we're describing weight loss as a battle are really something that we have to look at. There's a lot of conversation about these drugs dealing with obesity, which is a disease, but not enough conversation about what is the difference between obesity and just some extra weight that we're not comfortable with. This comes up for me a lot in the conversation with older women and perimenopause. There is a fact that women in their 40s, 50s will gain somewhere in the range of 20 pounds during this period of life. We made a decision at some point to resist that, as opposed to saying that the female human body needs and wants to gain a little bit of weight at this time in life. And we've just battled that as opposed to just being that's what happens to our body. And that's okay. But then there's the mental judgment and the mental pressure that we put on ourselves. And that I don't think is discussed enough in the conversation about the difference between obesity and having some extra weight on us. I think those are different conversations. Yeah. They definitely are. I worry about the message that the only way I'm going to feel free is to be on medication.

SPEAKER_02 33:30

There's definitely an assumption being made across the board that being big means that you are also not confident. And I have listened to people say I don't feel bad, but I'm being told that I should be feeling bad. And then it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. There's just this baseline assumption in society that just because you are big, you must also dislike yourself or feel bad.

SPEAKER_13 34:06

And I think that is the personal struggle that I go through is that I was feeling pretty good about myself. As you should. And I feel like I'm supposed to feel bad about myself. I don't, because I don't think the goal is thinness. I think the goal is health.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

And I'm struggling with the distinction. If our bodies are saying this is the size that I need to be at, and we're just constantly trying to make it something different, those actually don't align at all.

SPEAKER_13 35:00

The next clip is from the Ezra Klein Show. Now, the Ezra Klein Show is an opinion podcast hosted by guess what? Journalist Ezra Klein, produced and distributed by the New York Times. For the record, neither Gina and I listen to Oprah or the Ezra Klein show. We're doing our research, people. So this episode from May of this year is titled GLP Ones and the Wild West of Wellness. He opens the episode by quoting a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll that said one out of eight American adults is taking a GLP one, like Ozempic or Zeppelin, according to this poll. So one out of eight. And the description of the podcast says GLP1s are the biggest pharmaceutical story since antidepressants, but there's still so much we don't know. In this episode, his guest is journalist Julia Balooz, who is a seasoned health and science reporter and a co-author of a book called Food Intelligence. And she's been reporting on GLP ones for years. And in this part of the episode, they discuss, quote, possible social side effects, unquote, to GLP ones. So let's take a listen.

SPEAKER_06 36:17

I want to talk about a possible social side effect, which is the our culture's expectations for what people's bodies should look like have been punishing for a long time, um, particularly punishing for women and girls. I think we're we've interestingly been entering an era where they're increasingly punishing on boys and men, and there's this whole thing of like male looks maxing, and uh, you know, the guys in the Marvel movies are completely jacked now and on all kinds of things you probably shouldn't be taking. And, you know, if you're obese or overweight and you're taking a GLP1 to lose weight, you know, great. Um, or to you know, protect your cardiovascular system. But I think a lot of the cultural effect of them has come from celebrities and influencers who all of a sudden show up and are much thinner, at times skeletal now in ways that you know when you have the body's natural hunger signals coming back at you, it's harder to do. You know, there was like this big body positivity movement, and that was always going to be a very uphill climb in this country. But how do you think about GLP1s as possibly uh like a like a pharmaceutical accelerator of fairly dangerous body expectations because now it's like well, if you want to look thinner, why not just go on a GLP one?

SPEAKER_00 37:45

I think that's uh that's absolutely a straight um in this conversation and in this in this moment that we're living in. Um the place that it freaks me out the most is um I talk to pediatricians who are prescribing the drugs in children. There's no screening yet for drugs and eating disorders in young people and anecdotally people yes, for exceptional eating disorders and and kind of exacerbating eating disorder behavior. One of the underlying assumptions of the health at every size or fat activism or body positivity movements was that you can't control your body size, therefore you must accept it. We had surgery before it wasn't as accessible or scalable, but now we do have this medication where people do have the option, right?

SPEAKER_06 38:32

Well, at least the ones who are sensitive to it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

And the ones who can afford it and access it and all of that.

SPEAKER_13 38:38

So I think this clip speaks to what we've been talking about. I think it's important to mention the male part of all of this. The other thing I think is really important is this idea about children and young people being exposed to this medication. What about the people that are just figuring out what their body is like and their body image? What about the younger people that don't have that long quote-unquote battle with their weight? How does this change how they're thinking about their health?

SPEAKER_02 39:11

Yeah, and their bodies are still growing and developing themselves. And it's one of those things where it's not just you, but it also impacts your social circles. If I'm a young person, I know that I have a friend who's taking some drug and they're looking in a way that looks very attractive, according to whatever my community considers attractive. That's going to just add to the pressures that I'm already feeling it's just going to compound and add to all of that and lead to these really unrealistic expectations of what my body as a growing and developing body is supposed to end up looking like.

SPEAKER_13 39:54

I think about that all the time with that doctor's appointment that I just remember so specifically being in middle school and being told that I needed to lose weight. There was a different conversation that I could have had with my pediatrician that day. My body is changing, it's growing. It's absolutely normal to put on weight at this age as you, you know, go through puberty. And what you want to just pay attention to is your health. And, you know, let's not worry about the scale right now. It's natural weight gain. If that had been the conversation, what would have my path been?

SPEAKER_02 40:29

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a conversation that needs to be had, and I'm sure is happening within the healthcare field and specifically medical training for so long. The first thing you do when you go to a checkup is you step on the scale. We get tips on how we can manage if we don't want to step on the scale. But what I've been reading and learning about is how much weight is a defining factor in how many healthcare providers approach the care that they give their patients. Weight can be a distraction and actually prevent a provider from seeing a deeper issue.

SPEAKER_13 41:17

I read so much about that during the pandemic. It really opened my eyes to the bias against fat bodies in the medical field. It's astounding and it's dangerous. Yes. So I want to continue because we have another clip that I'm gonna go to now. This is from Rethinking Wellness. So Rethinking Wellness is a podcast that's hosted by Christy Harrison. She's a longtime health and science journalist and a registered dietician. She specializes in intuitive eating and disordered eating recovery. She published her book, Anti-Diet, in 2019 and the wellness trap in 2023. Full disclosure, anti-diet was one of the books I read during the pandemic that had profound impact on me. We're going to play a clip from the episode entitled The Dangers of Diet Drugs Behind the GLP 1 weight loss hype. On this episode, Harrison talks with Reagan Chastain, who is a writer, speaker, and weight-inclusive health and fitness professional. They are talking about the downsides of these drugs, the influence manufacturers are having on the cultural conversation about these drugs and media coverage and how it doesn't always tell the whole story. In this clip, Harrison and Chastain are going to talk about media coverage of these drugs and the conflict of interest between the companies and the doctors who benefit from their SAP.

SPEAKER_04 42:51

Why do you think the media in the US have been generally unskeptical about the influence of these drug companies? You know, because like I've spoken with some outlets over the years, over the last several years, that usually don't take my recommendation to look into the financial influence of these companies. And I think if they do disclose that someone has, you know, financial ties to a drug company, the attitude is sort of along the lines of like, well, all quote unquote obesity experts take funding from drug companies and that's just how things are done. And it's not a big deal kind of thing.

SPEAKER_10 43:22

Yeah. And I think that's a big piece of it, right? That they're like, oh, well, yeah, you know, doctors take money from drug companies, but like everybody does that. Like that doesn't make it good or okay. And actually, research shows that even small amounts, like less than $20, impact doctors' prescribing behaviors. So when you look at doctors who are taking hundreds of thousands of dollars, right, we have to start really asking questions. Even if someone doesn't believe that can impact them consciously, we have to ask about subconscious bias as well. And so I also think in our media, I think there's an issue with a 24-hour news cycle that has to be fed. I think there's an issue with there being less and less even survival-paying jobs for reporters. And so reporters are being asked to report on science who never wanted to report on science and have no particular interest or skills there. And also the weight loss industry has done an incredible job of constructing a paradigm where fat equals bad, weight loss equals good is considered beyond settled science, like religion. And so if somebody says like fat bad, weight loss good, then the reporter goes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_13 44:34

I think this clip brings up a really important point on how journalists cover these drugs who don't have necessary a health and science background. Right. And then the episode goes on to talk about how a lot of coverage of these drugs and these studies around these drugs come from press releases. Don't even come from the full report.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

It's interesting because they mentioned the 24-hour news cycle that needs to be fed, but now it's a million second news cycle. And the whole news industry is in crisis right now. They are having to figure out how to adapt to the new media model. And I have a lot of empathy for needing to contribute and to be president to feed and be part of this cycle. And maybe there are some things like a single press release from a company that's insufficient research on a topic, but they're in this system that makes it difficult for them to actually take the time to do the research. They raise a good point also about the funding of the research. I used to be a funder in the tech industry funding research about online safety and digital literacy because there were no other funders who were supporting this research. There is an interesting conversation, too, about whose responsibility is it to fund research and support research. If we don't want corporate interest in it, then somebody else needs to fund the studies. And who's going to do that?

SPEAKER_13 46:18

One of the things that I want to point out is that I spent a little while listening to these podcasts and I listened to the Oprah podcast, and then I listened to this Rethinking Wellness podcast. The difference between those two is astounding. As I was listening to both of them and I finished, I thought to myself, how is anyone supposed to make sense of all of this?

SPEAKER_02 46:44

It's also hard to track because everybody's getting their own messages. It's hard to know what people are even seeing.

SPEAKER_13 46:51

Your feed is very different from my feed. And you brought up while we were prepping for this this trend of what I eat in a day. Yeah. And I had never seen a single one of those videos. I want to talk about them.

SPEAKER_02 47:08

It's very interesting that you are not getting what I eat in a day videos, and I'm not getting weight loss and GLP videos, but somehow we're on the same platforms in the same places, right? Yes. What I eat in a day, it's a trend where people post literally what they're eating from the moment they wake up through all their meals throughout the day until they go to bed. It's one of those things that's not necessarily explicit about diet and weight, but it can easily veer that way. I started getting this content because I like food content. I like cooking content, baking content, eating content. I also watch day in the life videos, which is kind of this voyeuristic thing where people film their day from the moment they wake up to when they go to bed. Got it. What I eat in a day is sort of a natural extension of the interests that I have shown through my behavior online. And the first one that I saw was a professional ballet dancer who explicitly says in her video that she doesn't count calories.

SPEAKER_07 48:12

After rehearsal, I went home and had rice, beans, chickpeas, kale salad, broccoli, bico de gallo, and avocado. I was still hungry afterwards, so this was my second plate.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

There was a lot of positive reaction to her video and the fact that she is a ballerina and that she still eats and that she views food as sustenance. There are a wide variety of what these what I eat in a day videos can look like. Many do go much deeper into diet and body image.

SPEAKER_09 48:45

How I eat my body preference for myself is to be thin, and my eating will significantly reflect that. Let me show you guys how I eat.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

I eat the same thing for breakfast every day, and I absolutely love it. We have some pasteurized eggs, some glizzy, some refried beans. Lately I found this black pepper spread on toast, and it's absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_05 49:02

For making my chicken salad plate, I make when I have more time. I season my chicken with all my favorite spices for the salad: field greens, cucumber, carrots, apple, avocado, and our chicken, topped with pomegranate seeds, pistachio, Caesar dressing, and chili oil on the chicken. Colorful meals like this make me so happy.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

And celebrities are getting into it too. So there was a viral clip going around recently with the model Miranda Kerr. She was on the podcast with Chris and Cavallari talking about what she eats or more precisely what she doesn't eat.

SPEAKER_03 49:36

I don't do eggs. Okay, so what's a breakfast for you? I do protein. So I eat meats like venison, bison, lamb. I eat all the meats that aren't mass produced. I don't eat kale. You don't eat kale. Hey, you eat spinach? You really, I mean, you are super healthy.

SPEAKER_02 49:56

To me, the diet conversation has evolved so much. For some, it's about how you look and about specifically being thin or being strong and building muscle. For others, it's about health and having good nutrition. There's this new element that's coming into play now about wealth and status. And there's an implication being made that the foods that are widely accessible to people are unhealthy. And somehow showing that you have access to scarce items. That's now being framed as healthy, but that's actually just wealthy. We're living in this society with massive class problems that are getting exacerbated and getting made worse. And that's being connected to food and weight and health care. There are a lot of people who are calling out this podcast, and I'm really glad they did. Because the flip side to this very cacophonous media environment that we're in right now is that people are able to push back on some of these messages that they're seeing that aren't necessarily productive or helpful.

SPEAKER_13 51:17

The issue with what food is accessible to what people is a key part of the conversation about obesity in our country. The idea that we ever talk about obesity without talking about food deserts and access to healthy foods is a disservice to all of us. We're not going to address those issues now more than ever because you can be in those food deserts, and now there is a medication that can help you with your weight that does not solve the problems of our food systems.

SPEAKER_02 52:03

Right. But also the GLP1s also have limited access to people who are able to go see a doctor and to go get a prescription and to pay for the prescription. Good point. It's all driving a broader identity around class and status.

SPEAKER_13 52:25

Absolutely. This is such a dense topic. Whether or not you think you have an answer for yourself is different than do we have the right information for society as a whole? That's, you know, something that we need to continue to think about because this conversation, I think, is just going to get louder.

SPEAKER_02 52:54

So, Michelle, this is such a big topic. Do you have recommendations for people who would want to dive in a little bit more?

SPEAKER_13 53:03

During research for this podcast, I came across Dr. Joshua Rollrick. He is on Instagram at Dr. Joshua Rolrick, and he considers himself weight neutral nutritionist, right? And he comments a lot about cultural conversation around these issues. I just found his content very accessible, very interesting, and thought-provoking. So I think that if you want some interesting conversation about this on your feeds, I would follow him. How about you, Gina?

SPEAKER_02 53:43

I have two podcasts to recommend. The first one is called The Full Plate Podcast. It's hosted by a nutritionist named Abby Atwood. The specific episode I'm recommending is a conversation she has with a size-inclusive physician in Philadelphia named Dr. Mar Gordon. They talk about weight stigma and healthcare, diving really into how that's perpetuated in medical training and how that impacts patient experience, if patients even want to come back to see their doctor, and the impact that that can have on outcomes in patient care. The other one is an episode of NPR's Code Switch, which is a podcast I just love generally. This episode is a conversation with Dr. Sabrina Strings, who's a professor and the chair of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She also wrote a book called Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. And this episode discusses some of the history about how BMI became a standard measure in medicine and how GLP ones are being advertised specifically to Black women. And spoiler, AI is involved. So I thought this was a really great episode if you are interested in some of the intersectional and racialized issues related to body positivity and healthcare access.

SPEAKER_13 55:10

Those are great suggestions. Well, Gina, I just have to say, I think you're brilliant. And I love having conversations about these things with you. So thank you for being my friend.

SPEAKER_02 55:21

The feeling is 100% mutual. Thank you, and I'll see you next time. Michelle Chula Lipkin has been a media literacy educator and advocate for the last 25 years. She teaches at the City University of New York and writes, presents, and consults on topics related to media and tech. You can find her at Michelle Chulalipkin.com.

SPEAKER_13 55:42

Gina Wu spent 15 years in tech, building Uber as the first person on the ground in European and U.S. markets, and founding Meta's Global Information Ecosystem Program. Today she is the author of Feed for Thought, a newsletter that explores how digital platforms are reshaping standards for authority, expertise, and trust.

SPEAKER_02 56:02

Did you see with Gina and Michelle is produced by Stevie Starr. Our theme song is by Lange Day.