Every generation has its own miracle weight-loss treatment, rarely have they come with a doctor’s prescription. Semaglutide medications sold under brand names like Ozempic (designed for people with diabetes) and Wegovy (for people with obesity) have been heralded as breakthroughs in metabolic science and potential solutions to the nationwide obesity epidemic.
Delivered via syringe, semaglutide suppresses appetite, inducing people to eat less. Many people who have taken the drug report remarkable weight loss, often after years of trying and failing to slim down. Culturally, some have derided these medications as quick fixes—a form of cheating without having to commit to healthier lifestyle habits.
For this installment in our series on The Secret Lives of Men, we interviewed Christopher*, who started taking Wegovy earlier this year. So far he’s lost more than 30 pounds. But he’s keeping it to himself that he is using the drug to slim down.
* Subject’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity.
Christopher, 41, Florida
I did club swimming growing up. That’s where my body image issues started. I grew up in California, in a surf town, and all the kids on the team swam, surfed, did water polo. I was the only kid on the team who didn’t have six-pack abs. I felt very jealous, starting at 12 years old. My body was different; I was active, but I was always a bit chunky, even when I was 15 and swimming 4,000 yards a day.
Even from a young age, I had specific ideas about how I wanted my body to look. I hear similar things from a lot of other gay men. I got the idea from movies, from magazines, from Abercrombie & Fitch. I always remember everybody talking about Brad Pitt in Fight Club, that famous scene with his shirt off. You’d have to be like 3 percent body fat to look that ripped. We’ve expanded our definition of what attractive is, but the ideal male body was more twink-like then—Leonardo Dicaprio, Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Very skinny. I never had that slim build.
I didn’t have any disordered eating, though. I ate a ridiculous amount of food, but I was a pubescent boy, growing an inch every couple of months. Always hungry, always eating.
After college, I married a woman because I always wanted to have a family. It was a different time when I grew up. There were no out gay kids at my high school. I messed around sexually with boys at my school, but we had this feeling we weren’t gay, we were just horny.
I yo-yoed during my twenties. My wife’s family, they all struggled with weight and were always dieting. One week they were doing Weight Watchers, the next they were eating fast food. I grew up eating meat and vegetables, no processed foods, for each meal, so I gained quite a bit of weight during that phase. I’m 6’2”, so I can put on weight really easily. I got up to 240, which is the most I’ve ever weighed.
I remained active, though. I took up running—10Ks and half-marathons—and went to the gym a lot. I have a lifelong exercise habit; it’s always been part of my weekly agenda. But if you look at the math, it takes a tremendous amount of exercise to really move the needle on weight loss. You can’t outrun your fork.
When I was 28, my wife caught me having an affair with my coworker and his husband while she was pregnant with our daughter. We had been together 10 years, since our freshman year in college, at that point. She outed me to my family, and six months after our daughter was born we separated.
I was finally out, living in the gayborhood, making gay friends, and the body image stuff started to ramp up a bit.
Most people, even other marginalized groups, are born into their tribe. Gay men have to find their tribe. It’s emotionally dangerous because you never know who’s your friend, who just wants to use you for sex, who you can trust, and people can be very mean.
I had a lot of men saying mean things about my body. I’ve always been pretty muscular, but without lots of definition and cuts around the muscle. I’ve always disliked my armpit area, I’m a little squishy there. I’ve never had a flat stomach. People on Grindr and the dating apps were despicable. One guy told me, “You need a breast reduction,” after we had sex. It was the worst year of my life.
My appetite went away almost instantly. I’ll eat one bite of something and be full.I took up swimming again and joined a gay swim team, but there’s a body-centric social hierarchy in sports. I went to Iceland with the swim team for a meet. All the gay swimmers in the world converged on this one country. I thought I was gonna have such a great time. We had this mixer and I met this Icelandic guy that was really cute. He was being nice to me and seemed interested. I thought we were gonna hook up. We went to a party at the Blue Lagoon, and I swear I could see the expression on his face change when he saw me with my shirt off. He ignored me the rest of the night.
The last straw, the thing that got me started on Wegovy, was a weight-loss competition I started last December with my best friend. I lost weight then plateaued, as usual. My friend’s wife is a 100-pound Asian woman who eats literally as much as me and nothing happens to her. It’s frustrating, you know? There’s this sense of injustice. I work harder on my body than most people, and yet some people have an easier time with their weight.
Ozempic was all over the news—I heard Jimmy Kimmel’s joke about it at the Oscars, too—so I looked into it. I was able to get a prescription for Wegovy, a different semaglutide drug, because, technically, I’m obese based on body mass index.
I took my first dose of Wegovy on March 31. I weighed 230 pounds. I’m down to 198. It’s the first time I’ve weighed less than 200 pounds in my adult life.
My appetite went away almost instantly. I’ll eat one bite of something and be full. I can eat a full meal, but I eat more slowly. I take minutes between each bite. I’m struggling to eat 1,200 calories a day. I don’t enjoy drinking as much, either. Drinking was a big part of my social routine. I used to have 20 to 30 drinks a week. But I’ve gotten comfortable having just one drink at a bar before switching to soda water. My drinking was habitual before.
My insurance doesn’t cover it, so it costs about $1,200 a month. That’s about $100 per pound lost, but it’s money well spent considering how long I’ve been struggling with this.
I didn’t get on it purely for aesthetic reasons. I’ll be healthier if I don’t have this much weight. I can’t run 20 miles a week when I’m 240 pounds; my joints won’t take it. My A1C crept up in recent years to pre-diabetic levels. For somebody who exercises a lot and watches what they eat, why the fuck do I have high blood sugar?
I haven’t told people I’m on Wegovy. That guy I had the weight-loss competition with, I sent him an article about semaglutide drugs, and the article mentioned the Ozempic shortage. “That’s so immoral,” he said, “taking a drug to lose weight when other people need it for diabetes.” I didn’t really see it that way. Being overweight is a health problem, too. I’m preventing myself from becoming diabetic in the future.
One of the side effects is I get tired way more easily when I’m working out. I struggle to keep my pace under 10 minutes per mile, whereas last year I did a 10K at a 7:53 per mile pace. I feel like a teenager; I’m sleeping an hour more each night. But I also feel like everything is a bit more heightened. My sense, being touched. Just the feeling of getting into bed at the end of the day feels more awesome now. I feel happy and content in a way that I didn’t before. At least in clothes, I never look in the mirror and dislike how I look, which is a pretty big milestone. I’m pretty confident that I’m gonna get there with my shirt off, too.
I don’t have a goal weight in mind, it’s more of a goal body fat percentage. I want it to be like 12, 13 percent. That should be about 190, 185 pounds. Hopefully I can transition to maintenance at that point and stop taking it.
I’m curious if I get to the point that I have abs, will people treat me differently? Will I be invited to more dinners, more parties? I have a feeling they will.
John McDermott
John McDermott is a writer in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to Esquire. You can follow him on Twitter at @mcdermott
