Does being on a GLP-1 make you a bad feminist?

This post was inspired by a recent Scary Mommy article, I Love My GLP-1. Does That Make Me a Bad Feminist? The author talks about the relief she has experienced from taking a GLP-1, particularly from what she describes as “food noise”, while at the same time wrestling with what that means for her beliefs around feminism and body acceptance.

It got me thinking, because I don’t think the answer to this is remotely black and white, and I really don’t think women need another thing to feel guilty or ashamed about.

Are you a bad feminist for taking a GLP-1? I don’t think it is my place to tell another woman what she should or shouldn’t do with her body. But I do think we need to look at the much bigger system those choices are being made within, because none of us are making decisions about our bodies in a vacuum.

We have been taught from childhood that our bodies are a problem

We live in a patriarchal world completely steeped in diet culture. From such a young age, particularly as women, we are taught that our bodies are something that need to be watched, controlled and fixed. We learn that smaller is better, foods are good or bad, hunger should be controlled and losing weight somehow makes us more disciplined, attractive, healthy or worthy.

Many of us then spend decades cycling through restriction, weight loss and regain, while becoming increasingly disconnected from our bodies and often increasingly preoccupied with food.

We also need to acknowledge that existing in a larger body in our society is genuinely hard. Bodies naturally come in all shapes and sizes, but our society does not treat all of those bodies equally. When someone loses weight they may suddenly be praised more, treated differently, taken more seriously by health professionals, find it easier to buy clothes or fit into physical spaces, and generally experience less stigma.

Of course that can feel good. That doesn’t mean there was something wrong with your body before, it says more about the world that your body exists within.

And that world is also one where pharmaceutical companies are making billions of dollars from GLP-1 medications. These drugs are being heavily marketed and we need to be able to critically examine the enormous commercial interests involved in defining weight as a problem that needs lifelong treatment. I really recommend checking out @exposingobesityincorporated and their work looking at industry influence and some of the tactics being used to shape the way we think about weight, health and “obesity”.

But GLP-1s are not simply weight-loss drugs:

This is where I think the conversation needs nuance, because GLP-1 medications are not simply weight-loss drugs and I don’t think we should pretend that they are.

For some people these medications have genuine clinical benefits, including cardiometabolic benefits, and some of those benefits cannot simply be reduced to weight loss. Acknowledging this is not incompatible with weight-inclusive care.

For me, being weight inclusive doesn’t mean believing that weight can never change, that weight loss can never accompany improvements in health, or that medications such as GLP-1s can’t have clinical benefits. It means that people are entitled to respectful, evidence-based healthcare regardless of their body size, and that weight loss isn’t prescribed as the treatment for living in a larger body.

So if you have looked at the potential benefits and risks and decided with your healthcare provider that taking a GLP-1 is right for you, I don’t think you are to blame for making that choice. You are making decisions about your body within the world you actually live in, not some imaginary world where weight stigma and health inequalities don’t exist.

What I do think people deserve is proper informed consent about what we know, what we don’t know and what taking these medications might mean long term.

We have decades of evidence showing us that intentional weight loss can be achieved in the short term, but maintaining substantial weight loss long term is incredibly difficult for many people.

We are already seeing important questions around this with GLP-1s too. In the STEP 1 extension, participants regained around two-thirds of the weight they had lost within a year of stopping semaglutide.

Real-world studies also show high rates of discontinuation. In one large US study, 64.8% of people using these medications who did not have diabetes had stopped their GLP-1 within a year, rising to 84.4% by two years (Rodriguez et al., JAMA Network Open, 2025). If these medications are being presented as revolutionary long-term treatments, we also need to be asking why so many people aren’t able or willing to stay on them. There can be many reasons for stopping, including side effects, cost and access, but if maintaining weight loss requires ongoing medication then people deserve to know that when they start.

We really need to talk about “food noise”

This was probably the part of the Scary Mommy article that made me think the most, because the author describes the enormous relief of no longer experiencing constant hunger and “food noise”.

I hear people talking about food noise all the time now, particularly in relation to GLP-1s, and I worry that it is increasingly being presented as though thinking about food is simply evidence of a biological problem that needs to be switched off.

Food noise is much more complicated than that.

One of the strongest drivers of food preoccupation is restriction. When we don’t eat enough, our brains become more interested in food. We notice food more, think about it more, plan around it more and often crave higher-energy foods more strongly. That isn’t a lack of willpower or evidence that your appetite is broken, it is a survival response. Our brains are doing exactly what they are designed to do when they perceive that food is scarce.

And restriction doesn’t only mean literal starvation. It can be years of dieting, skipping breakfast because you are trying to “be good”, cutting out carbohydrates, saving calories for later, intermittent fasting, ignoring hunger or spending your life trying to eat as little as possible.

There is also psychological restriction, which can happen even when we are technically eating enough. If foods still sit in the category of “I shouldn’t eat that” or “I need to be careful with that”, they can become more mentally important, not less. Tell yourself this is the last chocolate I’m having because the diet starts tomorrow and suddenly chocolate matters a lot more.

Food moralisation adds another layer. Many of us have been taught that salad is “good”, cake is “bad”, eating less is virtuous and eating more means we have failed. That constant judging and negotiating creates more food noise.

Unconditional permission to eat means allowing ourselves to eat what and how much feels right, without moral judgement, while tuning in to what actually feels good in our body. When food comes with rules, it can start to control us. When we know food is genuinely available, we have much more space to decide what we actually want and how much feels good in our bodies, rather than being driven by the unconscious fear that the food will be restricted again.

I’m hungry but I shouldn’t be. I’ve already eaten enough. I can’t have that because I had something bad yesterday. If I eat this I should probably exercise later. I’ll be good tomorrow. I may as well finish it because the diet starts again on Monday. That is food noise too.

Scarcity can play a huge part as well. Sometimes that is very real financial food insecurity, but dieting can also repeatedly create psychological and physiological scarcity. If your brain has learnt that certain foods are going to be taken away again tomorrow, it makes complete sense that they become more important today.

Weight stigma adds another layer. If you have spent your whole life being told that your body is too big and therefore you should always be trying to eat less, every eating decision can become loaded with guilt, anxiety, shame and self-surveillance.

Of course there are biological contributors to appetite and food preoccupation too. Genetics, sleep, stress, medications, hormones and individual physiology all matter, and neurodivergence can influence things such as interoception, reward, sensory seeking and eating patterns. The point is that food noise isn’t one thing with one cause.

We also need to think about eating disorders and disordered eating. These medications are being prescribed in settings where eating-disorder screening may not be routinely undertaken, and are even being used or proposed as a treatment for binge eating. We still have very limited evidence about their longer-term psychological impact, particularly for people with a history of restriction, chronic dieting or eating disorders, and I think this is an area where we need much more caution and research.

Muting food noise and healing our relationship with food are not necessarily the same thing

GLP-1 medications can dramatically quieten appetite and thoughts about food for some people, and if you have lived with relentless food preoccupation for years I can completely understand why that silence might feel incredible.

And I think we need to distinguish between muting food noise temporarily with a medication and understanding what was creating it in the first place.

If some of that noise has developed through years of dieting, deprivation, food rules, weight stigma and fear of gaining weight, suppressing appetite doesn’t necessarily heal those things underneath.

For some people, reducing food preoccupation can actually involve doing almost the opposite of what diet culture has taught us. Eating enough and eating regularly, allowing previously forbidden foods, removing morality from food, responding to hunger and gradually teaching our brains that food is reliably available and isn’t going to disappear again on Monday morning.

It can also mean addressing body shame, trauma and weight stigma and learning how to care for a body you may have spent your whole life being taught to hate. And that work is bloody hard.

This is the work I do every day in clinic, supporting people to understand where their food noise, restriction and food rules have come from and slowly rebuild trust in food and their bodies. It isn’t quick or easy work, particularly after decades of diet culture, but I see how much our relationship with food can change when we stop treating our appetite as something that needs to be controlled.

It also requires a level of privilege that we don’t talk about enough. Therapy costs money. Dietetic support costs money. Food costs money. Having the time and capacity to cook, move your body in ways that feel good, sleep, attend appointments and work therapeutically on your relationship with food and your body is not something everyone has access to.

Maybe we need to look at the system rather than blaming women

All of this is happening while we are trying to exist (or survive) within patriarchy and capitalism, alongside increasing inequality, racism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia and gender inequity.

Women are still expected to carry huge amounts of paid and unpaid labour while often being paid less. Many people are living with chronic stress, trauma and financial insecurity, sometimes spending huge amounts of their lives simply trying to survive.

Then we tell people to eat well, cook from scratch, exercise, sleep eight hours, reduce their stress and practise self-care as though everyone has equal access to the time, money, safety and resources required to do those things. They don’t.

And when you add a lifetime of being told that your body itself is the problem, it can become incredibly hard to care for that body from a place of compassion rather than constantly trying to fix it. So does taking a GLP-1 make you a bad feminist? I don’t think so.

I don’t think feminism is served by judging individual women for the choices they make about their own bodies, especially when those choices are being made within systems that have spent our whole lives telling us what our bodies should look like. For me, feminism and body autonomy also mean that we don’t replace one set of rules about what women should do with their bodies with another. We can critically examine the systems influencing our choices without blaming individual women for the choices they make within them.

You can take a GLP-1 and experience genuine health benefits from it. You can appreciate the relief of having less food noise. You can enjoy living in a smaller body while also recognising that part of why it may feel easier is because our society privileges smaller bodies. You can decide that the benefits outweigh the risks for you, and someone else can make a completely different decision.

At the same time, we can question an industry making billions of dollars from these medications. We can question why we are so comfortable defining body size as a disease. We can question a culture that has spent our entire lives telling women that smaller is better. We can talk about weight stigma, food insecurity, trauma, inequality and the social determinants of health rather than continually locating the problem inside an individual person’s body.

Those things can all be true at the same time.

So if you choose to take a GLP-1, I don’t think you are a bad feminist and I don’t think you are to blame for making that choice. We are all trying to make the best decisions we can while living within systems that have shaped how we think about food, health, weight and our worth from the time we were children.

Perhaps instead of asking whether women taking GLP-1s are failing feminism, we should be asking why so many women have been made to feel that changing their bodies is necessary in the first place.

Our bodies were never the problem.

The fucking system is.

This piece was inspired by Morgan Flaherty's Scary Mommy article, “I Love My GLP-1. Does That Make Me a Bad Feminist?” I recommend reading the original piece that prompted these reflections.

If you want to dig into this conversation in more detail, I’ll be joining Dr Beth Shore and Dr Morgan Edwards this September for Understanding Ozempic: Beyond the Hype, A Shame-Free, Evidence-Based Conversation.

We’ll explore what the evidence actually tells us about GLP-1s, including their benefits and risks, food noise, weight regain and longer-term use, as well as how to protect your nutrition, muscle mass and overall health if you choose to take them.

This isn’t about telling anyone whether they should or shouldn’t take a GLP-1, it’s about giving people the information they need to make that decision from a place of genuine informed consent.

Find out more and book Understanding Ozempic