Parenting in the Age of Ozempic

Weight-loss drugs and eating disorders: Part 2

During Eating Disorders Awareness Week, colorful ads for weight loss were popping up right alongside colorful infographics about eating disorder death rates. The juxtaposition of these messages on my “feed” was pretty disturbing.

So it felt like the perfect time to follow up on Part One of the discussion about weight-loss drugs and eating disorders. If you missed that piece, you can find it here:

An injection that gives people anorexia symptoms—what could go wrong?

Today I want to explore some of the ways these drugs can affect kids—and to consider our role in helping them navigate a world that tells them thinner is better and weight loss should be pursued at any cost.

Parenting without diet culture was already tough enough. The frenzy around these new medications has made it feel even more challenging.

I hope I’m wrong, but it seems inevitable that the popularity of these drugs will increase eating disorders, especially among children and young adults. While these illnesses affect people across the lifespan, adolescence is a particularly vulnerable time.

Thousands of kids got prescriptions for these medications in 2023, and no doubt the numbers will continue to rise. They are currently approved for ages twelve and up and are now being tested in children as young as six. (Let that sink in.)

I’m heartened to see that most news coverage about kids taking these drugs includes concerns both from eating disorder professionals and from doctors worried about the impact of calorie restriction on growth and development.

Remember these drugs can cause significant weight loss not through some mysterious mechanism but by tricking your brain and body into not wanting food.

Starving isn’t great for anyone; for growing kids, calorie deprivation is especially risky.

We don’t have longterm data on how these medications will affect growth, nutritional status, and other health factors. And that’s in addition to concerns we already have about the heightened risk of disordered eating, eating disorders, and weight cycling.

And here’s the kicker:

Kids don’t even have to be taking these drugs to be harmed by them.

Young people will suffer disproportionately from the collateral damage that comes with relentless marketing of these drugs. Kids are coming of age surrounded by increasingly lucrative anti-fatness, a proliferation of before-and-after photos, and the normalization of severely restricted eating.

When the new American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines about weight came out last year, it felt like the weight-loss industry was entering into an arms race with anti-diet parents. I know the authors of the new guidelines weren’t in some evil lair, but this is how it felt to a lot families: Body-positive parenting and intuitive eating are taking off? We better reverse our stance on prescribing diets for kids—and let’s throw in a brand new celebrity-endorsed appetite suppressant.

Swimming upstream in diet culture got even harder, especially if you’re parenting a child in a larger body. I have empathy for families who choose to put their kids on these medications or start “intensive lifestyle interventions” (aka diets) because they’ve been told it’s their best or only option.

If you’re trying to protect your child’s relationship with food and their body, the new reality can feel pretty daunting. But I don’t think we need to construct an entirely novel approach in order to respond to these latest cultural headwinds. The strategies I have found to be effective pre-Ozempic can be applied in this context, too.

While there is no easy five-point plan to eating disorder-proof your child, there are some overarching approaches that can help protect kids:

• Having open conversations about weight stigma

• Making your home a safe haven from diet culture

• Modeling a healthy relationship with food and your body

• Building kids’ critical thinking and media literacy skills

• Getting support right away if your child is struggling with food or body image

With the barrage of weight-loss ads and suddenly-thin celebrities who were once viewed as plus-size icons, you may decide to talk directly about these drugs, especially with older adolescents. But where to start?

You may have noticed my title uses “Ozempic” as the catch-all term even though it’s a diabetes drug prescribed off-label for weight loss. Ozempic has become the Kleenex of GLP-1 receptor agonists, which are used in diabetes medications and—at higher doses—in drugs approved for weight loss.

The name itself can be a low-stakes way in to a conversation with kids, depending on their age and developmental stage. When you and your adolescent (almost inevitably) hear an Ozempic ad or reference,¹ the conversation might start with some something like this:

“Why do you think ‘Ozempic’ is the brand name everyone knows?”

Depending on their answer, the conversation could go in so many different directions: The power of music in advertising? Why certain words in English can be more memorable and fun to say—and that marketing experts are hired to identify catchy names with specific sounds? (Hello, Amazon.)

We might even ask them: What are some potential consequences when a diabetes drug becomes synonymous with celebrity weight loss?

Getting a sense of their awareness of these drugs and what questions they may have will tell you a lot. And you don’t have to have all the answers in the moment. This can be one of many smaller conversations, which tend to be a lot more productive anyway. Building awareness of—and resilience to—diet culture takes time.

And it’s not just about eating disorders.

I care a lot about preventing and treating eating disorders. And, thank goodness, the majority of children won’t go on to develop a full threshold eating disorder.

But that doesn’t mean those children aren’t going to struggle with subclinical disordered eating and body image distress. Think about how many adults you know who have a fraught relationship with food or their weight. Now consider what this younger generation is facing.

Our kids are growing up surrounded by not only weight-loss drugs but also predatory social media algorithms and school curriculum that teaches disordered eating. It’s a lot. And so they need our support and guidance.

Remember: parents have influence, too.

Feeling a sense of safety, belonging, and unconditional love can’t block out all the anti-fat noise or inoculate against eating disorders, but it lays a foundation our kids can always come home to. Talking with our children—and listening to them—can be a powerful antidote to the poisonous messages from our culture.

1. It seems every comedy and awards show now has a required Ozempic joke. We’ll see if the Oscars broadcast continues this trend….