Old Habits Die Easy

Weight-loss drugs are reshaping people's habits profoundly

The availability of new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro is reshaping people’s habits profoundly, a new survey suggests. I’m not surprised.

Thirty-seven percent of American Zoomers say they’ll skip going to the gym as their new year’s resolution for 2025 and instead start taking a weight-loss drug to reach their desired weight.

Already, then, it would seem, these drugs have become a first rather than a last resort.

Women are more likely to choose this strategy straight away: 30% of women, as opposed to 20% of men. Again, I’m not surprised.

Part of this change in habits, of course, is prior failure. By which I mean, prior failure losing weight by conventional methods: calorie restriction and going to the gym. The survey reveals that 49% of Americans have previously abandoned new year’s weight-loss goals, with 31% giving up as soon as February. Again—I’m not surprised.

But with the younger generation, that 37% of Zoomers, prior failure is less likely to be a motivating factor, I’d wager. Ozempic and its competitor drugs are all over social media, especially Tik Tok and Instagram, which have become two of the principal channels for Big Pharma to sell directly to customers, and barely a week passes without some new miraculous celebrity transformation courtesy of Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly.

I’m increasingly sanguine about GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs, to give them their full technical name. Or, rather, I’m less stone-cold against them than I was before. I think it’s almost certainly the case there are large segments of the population that simply will not be able to lose weight without them. I’m talking about the real landwhales. These people are just too fat to do it any other way.

I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I’m sure it will prove less expensive to have these people on Ozempic, even if at public expense, than it will be to pay for a lifetime of chronic disease, disability and uselessness. In the UK, the Labour government is carrying out a trial, sponsored by Eli Lilly, to get overweight unemployed people back into the job market by giving them Mounjaro.

It’s worth emphasising, though, that these people will be taking the drugs for life. That’s been firmly established already, through studies, and admitted by Big Pharma executives. We’re talking about lifelong costs either to the user or, more likely, the taxpayer.

Then there are the side-effects—gastroparesis (stomach paralysis), chronic diarrhea and digestive issues, probably also thyroid cancers—which will prove costly, even deadly.

Still, on the whole, I think these new weight-loss drugs really do have a role to play in easing the enormous burden of obesity and chronic disease.

My problem remains that it won’t just be this minority of otherwise hopeless cases. It’s going to be everyone: including massive numbers of people who could lose weight by conventional means, and should be encouraged to.

This is dangerous, in large part, because it means handing yet more power to Big Pharma, as if it didn’t have enough already. Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic, is now Europe’s largest company, valued at $200 billion more than the entire economy of its native Denmark. Novo will probably be the world’s largest company within the next decade, I predict, if uptake of its weight-loss drugs follows even conservative projections.

Remember: There are a billion obese people in the world today.

But the power goes beyond money.