Hollywood's Latest Diet Craze? Ozempic, the Insulin Drug With Vanishing--Literally--Side Effects

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THE THIN LINE
DEC 2022/JAN 2023 Issue
Hollywood’s Latest Diet Craze? Ozempic, the Insulin Drug With Vanishing—Literally—Side Effects
Originally marketed for diabetics, Ozempic has become an It Drug in Tinseltown, even at $1,500 a pop.
By Emily Jane Fox
December 1, 2022


Under a rehearsal piano in a studio on the MGM lot in Hollywood in 1952, Debbie Reynolds crumbled. She was in the middle of preparing for Singing in the Rain, which would be her first leading role for the studio, alongside Gene Kelly, and the first time she’d have to dance, really. She was 19 years old, had three teachers, and was spinning around eight hours a day. It hurt everywhere, she wrote in her autobiography 60 years later, “most of all my brain and my feet.” She lay there, under that piano, until Fred Astaire materialized to coax her back up. She wasn’t going to die, he told her. If you’re not sweating, you’re not doing it right. So she shot “Good Morning” from eight in the morning till eleven o’clock that night. When it was over, she collapsed. For days, she didn’t get out of bed at her doctor’s behest. The studio had its own MD, who wanted to administer what they called a “vitamin shot”—amphetamines. Possibly, the same ones, Reynolds wrote, that “ruined Judy Garland.”

Since its inception, Hollywood has been the land where unrealistic beauty standards collide with financial pressure that hinges on its stars keeping thin, energetic, and always ready to make more hits. And there’s always been a quick fix or two. Since Reynolds’s era, the nature of the fixes have evolved from “vitamin shots” and “pep pills” to phen-fen to Adderall to clenbuterol—a medication used to treat breathing problems in horses. That’s to say nothing of the extra-medicinal aesthetic boosts by way of CoolSculpting, injectables, and Brazilian butt lifts, which suck pockets of fat from one part of a body and insert them into another, in order to create a generation of Instagram-age Jessica Rabbits.

It should have been no mystery, then, that when the people of Hollywood started dropping dozens of pounds in a matter of weeks, it wasn’t that everyone had suddenly started practicing moderation and logging 10,000 steps. It seemed like overnight everyone knew someone who was injecting semaglutide, whose brand name is Ozempic. The insulin regulator, developed by the Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk in 2012, won FDA approval to treat type 2 diabetes five years later. It works by stimulating insulin release, which helps lower blood sugar levels and slow down food leaving the stomach, in turn making Ozempic users feel satiated for longer periods of time. When doctors noticed that patients using Ozempic were losing weight as a side effect of the drug, Novo Nordisk saw opportunity, conducting clinical trials on obese and overweight individuals to find that its drug did, in fact, lead to weight loss of about 15 percent of body mass in a few weeks or months. Soon the manufacturer started marketing a higher-dose semaglutide, called Wegovy, to treat obesity. Injections, which, mostly, people give themselves once per week, usually take six to eight weeks to cause significant weight loss.

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There has been no long-term study of the drug for people without blood sugar diseases taking the medication. And less of a guide for those tired of feeling tired or nauseous or injecting themselves or paying thousands of dollars a year to poke themselves with a drug people don’t know much about other than it seems to work. Because the drug is relatively new, it is unclear what the long-term effects could be, particularly if someone is not diabetic. How long can someone using it off-label stay on it? As Bravo’s Andy Cohen tweeted earlier this fall, “Everyone is suddenly showing up 25 pounds lighter. What happens when they stop taking#Ozempic ????”

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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/11/ozempic-hollywood-diet-drug#intcid=_vanity-fair-verso-hp-trending_0bd7dd26-1bef-4624-96c0-c146f9a7c8af_popular4-1