The age of Ozempic (shaming)

Editor’s note: With the patent for Ozempic having expired, a flurry of generics at affordable prices have flooded the market. The business of weight loss will never be the same. Is this boon or bane for millions of chana bhatura-loving Indians? Founding Editor, Lakshmi Chaudhry, looks at the heated debate over Ozempic and how it has reshaped our fat-shaming culture (or not).

(This article, originally published on January 3, has been updated to reflect new information.)

Written by: Lakshmi Chaudhry 

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The big O is here! 

In December 2025, the Danish giant (Novo Nordisk) set up shop on our shores to hawk its GLP-1 weight-loss. It was a defensive move in anticipation of the expiry of its patent in March 2026–when a tsunami of generic drugs were guaranteed to flood the market. Pharma giants like Cipla, Dr Reddy's, Biocon, Zydus, etc. already had their versions lined up, ready to take not just India but the entire global market. Within a month of the patent running out, the market for generic versions of semaglutide, the GLP-1 drug jumped by 75%. Total sales skyrocketed from 25,000 units in February to 170,000 units in April. 

Weight loss drugs are now ubiquitous and—most importantly—cheap! At least five domestic drugmakers cut the original price of the weight loss drugs by up to 80%. The Sun Pharmaceutical version costs as little as Rs 750 for a weekly injection, or about 3,400 rupees per month—compared to Novo’s minimum retail price of Rs 8,800. A weight loss jab is now cheaper than your average Swiggy order.  No need to diet or hit the gym when a weekly injection can lop off around 15% of your body weight. 

 The Ozempic revolution–which has single-handedly upended the junk food industry, diet programmes, and even the booze business— has finally hit our shores. So has the raging debate over the virtues of Ozempic, which is no longer a ‘rich people problem’—but a very real quandary for millions of overweight Indians who can now afford to get thin quick.  

Fat shaming is dead… 

Since the birth of the first ‘fat farms’, losing weight has been consistently (and cruelly) framed as a problem of willpower. The corrosive idea that overweight people are lazy, greedy, and weak—’you are fat because you can’t resist the urge to eat’. The greatest gift of Ozempic is that it cuts that cord. We now know that hunger is a hormone—and willpower can literally be bottled. The drugs mimic the GLP-1 hormone that tells your brain that your stomach is full. Here’s how it works:

The basic pathway of GLP-1 in the gut goes like this: When a person eats a meal, a cascade of hormones, in­cluding GLP-1, is released to aid food ab­sorption and di­­gestion. As the food gets bro­ken down into glucose and other molecules in the digestive tract, GLP-1 gets re­leased from the intestine. Levels of the hor­mone rise slowly, then spike to sig­nal fullness.

Voila, your appetite shrinks and you stop experiencing what experts call ‘food noise’—as in, “distracting, ruminative thinking about food—a near-constant background hum of unwanted food-related thoughts, feelings and desires that may contribute to making poor food choices.” And our inner chana bhatura-loving devil is vanquished within a couple of bites. Let’s be honest, relief is real for many:

One day her son was eating popcorn, a snack she could never resist, and she walked right past the bowl. “All of a sudden it was like some part of my brain that was always there just went quiet,” she says. Her eating habits improved, and her anxiety eased. “It felt almost surreal to put an injector against my leg and have happen in 48 hours what decades of intervention could not ac­complish,” she says. “If I had lost almost no weight, just to have my brain working the way it’s working, I would stay on this medication forever.”

Then there are all the other health benefits such as lower risk of cardio­vascular disease—and perhaps even cancer. All of which sounds marvelous except… 

Long live Ozempic shaming! 

The great Ozempic hope is that GLP-1 drugs will decimate the moral value attached to low body fat. The virtue of ‘temperance’ possessed by the mythical thin person who doesn’t even feel tempted to overeat eat:

While the continent person experiences many tempting desires and successfully resists them, the temperate person doesn’t face temptations in the first place. A temperate person’s appetites are in perfect harmony with her judgments about what it is best to do. If a temperate person believes that she should eat only a single piece of cheesecake after a big dinner, then she will want only that single piece, and will be satisfied once she’s eaten it, even when faced with a dessert tray full of other delicious treats.

Thanks to Ozempic, all of us can be exemplars of temperance—wrinkling our noses in disdain (more likely, nausea) at the very sight of cheesecake. If we can all be skinny, surely we will also be rid of the weight of shame.

Sadly not. Once the Ozempic revolution got truly underway in the US, it soon triggered the inevitable backlash—the rise of ‘Ozempic shaming’. In main, it is the same old willpower baloney weaponised in a barely new form. Anyone who takes the drug is a weak person who is ‘cheating’ because they haven’t “earned” the right to be thin by dieting or going to the gym. What is new is the online sport of targeting celebrities who were once role models for body positivity. Example: Meghan Trainor, who sang “I won't be no stick-figure silicone Barbie doll” in her 2014 anthem ‘All About That Bass’—but is now 60 pounds skinnier. Their Ozempic bodies have become a badge of betrayal. One of the popular body-positivity mantras—’Not everyone is meant to be skinny’—is now used to mock Trainor, Mindy Kaling et al for ‘losing their looks’ along with the weight. 

As a result, the shame among those who take Ozempic is so bad that patients in the US often hide it from their own doctors—even when they are going in for surgery. It’s why some celebrities have ‘come out’ of their Ozempic closet—like Oprah, who went public to release “the stigma and the shame and the judgment" of using these drugs. All this while, Ariana Grande fans fiercely attack anyone who suggests the obvious—that she looks positively skeletal—as unfeminist. The Ozempic firestorm has exposed the core dilemma of the body positivity movement. It has never quite figured out how to uphold a woman’s freedom to make choices about her body and call out the damage women do to their bodies in the name of that freedom. 

As Dr. Mara Gordon points out, much of the Ozempic cheerleading slyly reinforces the ecosystem built on weight-shaming:

When life gets tough or the news gets unbearable, we're told to work on ourselves, squeeze in a little self-care: a little Peloton here, a little intermittent fasting there. Ozempic fits in perfectly, a medical solution to all the problems that are assumed to come with being fat. Rather than fixing discrimination against people with bigger bodies, we tell patients to fix themselves.

The over-sized focus on weight also hides the far greater problem of self-loathing. All of us—men and women—are being taught to hate our bodies. Teenage boys and young men today routinely cycle through ‘bulking’ and ‘cutting’ seasons—overeating and dieting—in the quest for the 12-pack. A perfect recipe for eating disorders and so-called muscle dysmorphia. Middle aged women are using every means necessary to shrink their bodies—even as they ‘plump’ their faces with fillers and Botox. Our body is horrorland— too much fat, too little muscle, too gaunt, too round, too flat—all at the same time. There is no Ozempic for the “casual self-hatred” that is part of daily life—as the good doctor notes:

For my patient who asked for Ozempic the other day, I told her that it's normal for bodies to change shape and size over time. She met my eye, through tears, and confessed that she felt like her authentic self – her thin self – was just waiting to emerge. "What would it feel like to love your body the way it is?" I asked. My patient didn't have an answer.

For now, neither do most of us.