My Two Cents on Weight Loss Drugs

A whole lot of people in the United States are unable to buy enough food to feed themselves and their families, while working at jobs that do not have salaries high enough to pay for the necessities of life. And people who rely completely on SNAP benefits might not have the time or the cooking knowledge to live on the $6 per day (per person in a household). Shelf-stable foods that can be bought in bulk like peanut butter, and Ramen noodles, lentils, beans, and rice could keep a person from starving. Those staples could be augmented occasionally with longer-lasting and inexpensive root vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and onions, but how much of your six dollars per week can be devoted to creating and maintaining enough food to make buying in bulk make sense when you have (as a single person) limits. And what if you need to pay rent, pay for a car, go to a doctor, take medication.

And what happens when SNAP benefits are stopped because of a government shutdown? Local (non-federal-government) organizations help. As a species, most human beings seem more than willing to help.

So in the middle of all this lack of adequate food for adequate nutrition, we have weight loss drugs being made more affordable for people to try and achieve a BMI that fits a profile that the medical establishment has deemed healthy.

I have had, as many people with the ability to have a life where food insecurity has never been a problem, times when my BMI has been thirty or forty pounds above the "normal" range on the chart (eating to excess for pleasure, eating to excess for emotional reasons, eating after concerts).

I remember encountering "the chart" in the Junior High School library, and though I was a healthy seventh grader, my weight fell into the "obese" range for my height. It messed me up, for sure, and for decades.

But I am not "wired" to be a thin person, and, through eating three healthy meals a day filled with foods that I really like, I weigh pretty much the same as I did when I was in seventh grade. I have no desire (or ability) to achieve normalcy.

Back to weight loss drugs. I don't have a problem with people using them if they feel they need them, and are in a position to afford to use them for the short term (until they figure out how to eat less and exercise regularly in a way that works for their bodies) or for the long term (for the rest of their lives).

It's the "rest of their lives" thing that gets me. It becomes a dependency that drains money from the pocket of the person who needs the drug into the pocket of the company that makes it.

Doctors can (and do) perscribe weight loss drugs because of the benefits that being out of the obese range on the chart can have on the general health of the body.

I'm not so sure that "fashionably thin" is the healthiest way to be. But I'm not a doctor. I have a good one, though. She says I’m just fine.

Paying even the reduced price for the drugs that the current occupant of the White House negotiated in exchange for quicker approval of the drugs, means that you are paying a price to a corporation in order to make the state of your body conform to some kind of otherwise impossible-to-maintain ideal.

There's something wrong about that. Opiates and alcohol are addictive. Weight-loss drugs don’t seem to be, but the psychological toll that stopping them and regaining lost weight seems enormous.

And what if there has not been enough research done of the long-term effects of putting a chemical into your body?