Before I took my first shot of Zepbound a year ago, I assumed that going on a GLP-1 would force me to trade appetite for weight loss, divesting me from my love of flavor and cooking a good meal in exchange for bringing the number on the scale ever downward (if I had owned a scale, that is; the truth is, I haven’t had one in my home since the anxious, soft-anorexic days of my early 20s, preferring instead to do my weigh-ins at my doctor’s office).
This chronic loss of appetite when taking a GLP-1 is absolutely the case for some people, but it hasn’t been the case for me—at least not yet. Like so many other people dealing with disordered eating who go on GLP-1s, I find “food noise” of the intrusive variety to be dramatically quieted, but I’m still excited to make ravioli at home or go out for a steak dinner with friends or get In-N-Out (with a pup patty on the side for my dog) on a road trip. I haven’t experienced negative side effects of any kind, and honestly, I experienced more appetite-zapping and anhedonia from increasing my Vyvanse prescription a few years ago than I have from Zepbound thus far.
This is the part where I start to panic about sounding like a shill for Big Pharma, and also where I come out to you, the reader, about how I’m paying for my GLP-1s. The answer is simple: I’m not, my mom is. Zepbound currently costs me about $400 a month, which is an amount of money I simply don’t have to spare; no version of the medication is covered by my insurance (which I’ve confirmed with an endless stream of stymying calls with representatives who always need me to know that they’re “trying to help”).
At first, I was hesitant to accept my mom’s generous offer to cover the cost of my medication for the same reason I was hesitant to fill the prescription in the first place; I didn’t want to feel like a failure, to admit to myself or to anyone else that I couldn’t (1) keep fighting for a solution to my menstrual woes that didn’t stem from weight loss, (2) lose weight the so-called “natural” way, or (3) even afford my own GLP-1s as a supposedly independent and fully employed 32-year-old adult. Does it feel complicated and sometimes infantilizing to need a monthly influx of cash from my mom, who—together with my dad—supported me throughout my upbringing and should, by all rights, be done with that part of her parental duties? Absolutely, but the truth is, she has the money, I don’t, and at a certain point, refusing her help—or, for that matter, refusing to try GLP-1s out of some sense of apprehension that was vaguely but not quite rooted in fat liberation—began to feel churlish.
Let’s circle back to the Big Pharma and fat-liberation parts, because they’re important. There are many, many valid reasons to be skeptical of how GLP-1s are currently being mass-marketed in the U.S. and around the world, but you’re never going to hear me argue against the drugs becoming more affordable; I believe all health care should be free (or, failing that, at least not ruinously expensive), and I know most people don’t have the luxury of texting their mom for a Venmo’d cash infusion when they’re prescribed a drug that might help them but that they can’t afford on their own. In no way do I think Lilly, the manufacturer of my Zepbound, cares about me or any of the other patients it makes a profit off of, but being put off by the omnipresence of thin-is-in rhetoric in GLP-1 ads (which, to be clear, I very much am) doesn’t feel like a reason to hope that anyone else’s path toward getting the medications—if, indeed, they find them to be beneficial—should be any more difficult than it has to be.
