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Hearing people praise appetite suppression can bring up old eating disorder thoughts.

GLP-1 conversations can make it harder to trust the hunger cues you worked to reclaim.

You can set boundaries around weight-loss talk without explaining your eating disorder history.

Feeling envy or wanting to lose weight doesn't mean you've lost the progress you've made in recovery.

You're planning your birthday dinner and text the group for restaurant ideas. One friend writes back that she's excited to celebrate but doesn't care where you go, since she probably won't eat much now that she's on Zepbound. Another suggests somewhere with "lighter options" because she started Wegovy. Someone else jokes that you can all split an appetizer.

You've worked hard to be able to sit down to a full meal and enjoy it. Now you're bracing to be the odd one out at your own birthday. You feel irritated and hurt. A couple of these friends know your history, and you can't understand how they can talk on the thread about their medications and how little they eat. Then you notice a voice you rarely hear anymore. Your eating disorder voice is back for a moment, bringing a twinge of envy and the thought that it's not fair. You remind yourself how dark that part of your life was and how much the illness took from you.

Diet Talk in the Age of GLP-1s

Weight-loss medications have been around for decades. In an earlier post, I wrote about their history, including the amphetamine “rainbow pills” handed out at diet clinics in the 1960s and the fen-phen boom of the 1990s. The pattern has been remarkably familiar: A medication arrives with promises of making weight loss easier, enthusiasm grows, and widespread use eventually reveals risks or limitations that received less attention at first. By then, another medication may be on the horizon, offering renewed hope that the results will be different this time. Today, much of that enthusiasm surrounds GLP-1 medications such as semaglutide and tirzepatide.

While weight-loss........

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