Easy Sunday: My GLP-1 experience follow-up

"GLP-1 drugs are going to be a more impactful technology than AI.  

        I think GLP-1s are dramatically under-hyped and AI is dramatically over-hyped."

     Scott Galloway, investor and public intellectual

UPS delivered a styrofoam box that contained four of these little bottles of a GLP-1 drug. I have almost completed three four-week cycles, and I was ready for my next four-week batch. GLP-1 vendors set up a regular schedule of deliveries.

So far I am a happy customer of a GLP-1 drug, Zepbound.  It immediately changed how I thought about food.

These drugs are being marketed on social media and TV about as casually as any over-the-counter drug. There are dozens of vendors. Answer a few screening questions at their website, get approved by their in-house licensed provider, enter your credit card number, and you begin getting the drug. A shopper can now get the drug in various doses for about $200/month, all things included.

The drug changes something that I had presumed was my essential nature and personality: my appetite for food. I had a big appetite which, on reflection, was never fully satiated. Within hours of taking my first dose I realized it was dinnertime and I didn't particularly care. I wasn't hungry.  The drug changed how I thought and felt! And food didn't cross my mind as something particularly interesting or desirable. I liken it to the drug turning off an irritating itch. I feel relief.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported "More than 12% of Americans reported taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss last fall, up from 6% in early 2024, polling firm Gallup found. Women and people ages 50 to 64 reported higher usage rates."

Wall Street Journal gifted article

I first realized I was part of a movement when I attended a little neighborhood gathering where the hostess had set out some food, which I politely refused, mentioning that I was taking Zepbound. "Oh, so am I," the hostess said. "Isn't it great?" Then the woman next to her said, "I am, too. It is such a relief, isn't it?"  The cheese, crackers, and fancy cookies sat untouched.  

The drug isn't a diet drug, in my experience. It is an appetite drug. Weight loss takes care of itself. It is easy to cut back on food intake when you feel "full," even when you haven't eaten.

It prompts me to reflect on the chemical and hormonal nature of personality. I had considered myself mostly-rational. I had agency. There is an "I" inside my head that controlled my choices. 

Well, maybe not so much. I have a new perspective that hormones and chemicals shape that thing I call "I." I have new empathy for a Medford-area MAGA Republican troll who writes me daily complaining about this blog with angry references to his top-of mind-subject, homosexual pedophilia. He may not have genuine volition about what is on his mind. It may not be "him," exactly. It may be out-of-whack brain chemistry doing the talking.

A giant medical experiment is taking place in America. If there is a hidden health time bomb in the drug, it hasn't shown up yet. Maybe the time bomb is that the drug works so well it becomes a near-universal adjustment for people who need it, as eyeglasses are for people who need a different refraction. Then maybe Americans as a group end up living a few extra years and Social Security goes broke sooner than we had planned.

We Americans have gotten heavier over the past 50 years. Maybe this is an era-linked phenomenon, like iron lungs for polio or people living with big goiters in the Upper Midwest "goiter belt." Maybe 50 years from now children will ask their teachers why photographs of people in this 1970-to-2030 era showed so many people looking so big. Teachers will have to explain that it was the style back in the olden days before the invention of certain medicines..

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