Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay, and it's time for your February Extra Butter episode!

Listen to hear about:

⭐️ Anti-diet GLP-1 life

⭐️ Who gets left out when the tradwife aesthetic takes over influencer culture

⭐️ Interrogating the ableism of not wanting to be on medication your whole life

Plus, serious stuff, like:

⭐️ Corinne in a prairie dress

⭐️ How long Virginia will last in a zombie apocalypse

⭐️ Why hot cheese is in for February

To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you do need to be an Extra Butter subscriber.

This transcript contains affiliate links. If you're going to buy something we mention, shopping these links supports Burnt Toast at no extra cost to you!

Episode 232 Transcript

Corinne

Today we are talking about the state of GLP-1 discourse. A few recent media pieces have us wondering if the GLP-1 backlash is finally beginning, and if so, why is all of the coverage still so anti-fat?

Virginia

We're going to use two primary texts for this conversation, but I also want us to talk more generally about how we're seeing the conversation shift, because I feel like there's been an amorphous shift.

Corinne

I think the initial craze has died down and we're starting to see a more nuanced conversation.

Virginia

Which in many ways is good. There's more nuance on both sides, but there's still a lot of harm being done in the way the media is framing this conversation.

Corinne

For sure. 

Virginia

Exhibit A on that front is a piece by Dani Blum that ran on January 15 in the New York Times. The headline is The Hard Truth of Weight-Loss Drugs: You Probably Need Them Forever. Corinne what is your immediate first reaction to that headline?

Corinne

No shit, Sherlock. Why were people confused about this?

Virginia

I guess people were. It seemed obvious that if a drug makes you lose weight, and you go off the drug, you won't continue to lose the weight.

Corinne

Unfortunately, except for maybe antibiotics, that seems to be how drugs work. You have to stay on them.

Virginia

There's a lot that comes up for me in this piece. It's looking at new research, bringing to light the fact that when people go off the weight loss drugs, which many people do because they can't tolerate the side effects and it's too expensive, they just get tired of it. There are lots of reasons that people fatigue about being on a weekly injection drug. They're seeing now that people regain the weight. This is being framed as a grave disappointment and a surprise in the article.

Corinne

Not to me, but to Oprah.

Virginia

Oprah particularly. Oprah was surprised. They referenced the fact that even Oprah said that she had stopped taking a weight loss drug cold-turkey for a year and then gained back 20 pounds. "I tried to beat the medication," she told People Magazine. It was then she realized it's going to be a lifetime thing. 

Brilliant marketing for Weight Watchers, Oprah. She thought she could go off it, but you can't. You should be on it forever. So buy your GLP-1s from Weight Watchers. Of course she wants us to be on it forever. She has a business incentive to make that work. 

It gets into ableism. Why is it problematic to be on a medication for the rest of your life? I have asthma. I expect to use an inhaler to manage that for the rest of my life. 

I have sleep apnea. I expect to use a CPAP for the rest of my life. Most people with mental health conditions expect to be on an SSRI for the rest of their life. Why is that a problem?

Corinne

I think there's something about human nature where people think, I don't want to be on a medication for the rest of my life. I've heard so many people say that.

Virginia

Often it's the main resistance to starting a medication. Why? What is it about that that makes us sad?

Corinne

We want to believe that we're strong and independent and don't need pills to make us ok.

Virginia

You and I are going to wear glasses for the rest of our lives.

Corinne

I am extremely screwed. So many medications, so many glasses.

Virginia

If the zombie apocalypse comes, I'm out in the first week because if they break my glasses or I lose an inhaler, I'm sorry, I'm not going to try that hard to survive. Even my acid reflux medication - I don't have debilitating acid reflux - but it's irritating. I would be out.

Corinne

Same. 

Virginia

Take me now. 

Corinne

I take multiple medications every single day that I would be lost, if not dead, without.

Virginia

I don't understand the aversion to that because it's great that I get to breathe through the help of medication. I'm a big fan.

Corinne

I think what you're hinting at is it's ableism.

Virginia

It's ableism. We want to believe we can overcome these challenges. We see it especially in conditions that are weight linked in any way. This is why people get told to diet before starting a blood pressure or cholesterol medication when those drugs work really well to manage those conditions ...

Corinne

... and diets don't.

Virginia

And diets tend to not do so. Is it such a moral failing to have to go on a statin? I don't think so.

Corinne

The other thing they're not talking about directly is - and we've talked about this before - that studies show people who take these drugs for conditions like diabetes and/or insulin resistance, don't tend to stay on them long-term because they're hard drugs to be on. 

Virginia

Yeah.

Corinne

This article is so sad for people who got to lose weight on these because they will have to be on them forever if they want to "keep the weight off." It's also sad for people who need to take them to manage chronic conditions. These drugs suck in a lot of ways and people don't want to be on them.

Virginia

That's a valid reason to think, I don't want to be on a drug for the rest of my life if it's giving me terrible side effects. My inhalers don't give me terrible side effects. I just like breathing and want to do it all the time. I’m an oxygen addict. 

If it's a medication that's giving you side effects, I understand not wanting to be on it for life. For folks who are pursuing this just for weight loss, independent of metabolic health, maybe that's a reason to reflect on whether you need to do that. It is a depressing thing to say, "I will be on a medication that gives me diarrhea, fatigue or whatever side effects, but at least I can be a smaller size." That feels like something to reflect on. That reflection is nowhere in this article, however.

Corinne

The article doesn't mention side effects at all, does it? 

Virginia

It mentions that it's why a lot of people in the studies are going off the drugs. 

It's this Catch-22 where they're saying, Oh, people are saying, wow, it's so expensive, or, wow, I have terrible side effects, so I go off it. Then they're framing it like those people were quitters. That they gave up. 

On the other hand, some of this aversion around "you wouldn't want to be on this medication for the rest of your life" is another layer of anti-fatness. The message is we shouldn't let fat people get away with thinness this way. We don't want them passing for thin because they can stay on a GLP-1 forever. We want them to do the "real work" of weight loss.

The idea that you could only achieve weight loss by staying on the medication forever makes the weight loss feel fake to people. 

It's interesting because all intentional weight loss is fake to some extent. It's all manipulating your body in a direction it doesn't naturally want to go in. So why do we penalize medication-based weight loss versus excessive-running-based weight loss?

There's also a nice shout-out to RFK, Jr., who also thought the drugs would just be a short-term fix for people and then we'd go back to eating beef tallow to stay thin. Turns out that's not science, but I don't think we're surprised he's not science. 

Another flavor of anti-fatness in this piece is the casual normalization that you could do this the old fashioned way. In talking about folks who are able to lose the weight even after they go off, the article says:

It's not impossible, but it is extremely difficult. Dr Hauser estimates that fewer than 10% of her patients have successfully kept off 75% or more of the weight they lost after going on a GLP-1 without turning to another weight loss medication or undergoing bariatric surgery. "Those are the people that are working out two hours a day, tracking what they eat. They're working really hard," she said. "I haven't had anyone that just tapers off and isn't really putting that much thought into it and just keeps the weight off. I've never seen that happen."

That's just casual normalization of eating disorder behavior. Working out two hours a day and tracking what you eat is not a normal way to live.

Corinne

The choice is either drugs or an eating disorder.

Virginia

That's not interrogated by this piece, or in any of the discourse I've seen around the whole idea that you have to be on it forever. It's either you have to be on it forever, or we expect you to do this the old fashioned way, like a good fat person would.

Corinne

It's also getting into the Rosey Beeme of it all. She lost some weight with a GLP-1 and then was like, Well, I guess weight loss surgery is the way to go here.

Virginia

Right, to continue her health journey. I haven't checked on her in a while. Do you know how that's all going?

Corinne

No, I don't and I don't honestly want to know. I just think that will become a more common storyline where people are saying, I didn't want to stay on this drug. It didn't lead to permanent weight loss, but maybe bariatric surgery will.

Virginia

Well, that's depressing.

Corinne

Speaking of influencers, the second article that we wanted to discuss today ran at the beginning of January in Vulture. It's titled ‘Less People Click If You’re a Size 16’ How plus-size influencers are faring in a GLP-1 world.

Virginia

This one is paywalled. 

Corinne

I'm glad we're talking about this article because I saw so many people whispering about it on social media before I saw it, and then I saw a lot of folks sharing it. The gist of it is that plus-size influencers are not making as much money as before. They're not getting as many brand deals, etc.

Virginia

They're not getting brand deals from fashion brands and other lifestyle brands, which was interesting to me. The plus-size mom influencers, brands don't want them to show the car seat or the stroller anymore.

Corinne

I think a lot of plus-size influencers would make money from beauty skincare deals. That seems to be where a lot of the marketing money is. Even that area is slowing.

Virginia

The article talks about how one explanation, in addition to the rise of GLP-1s, is the rise of the tradwife aesthetic. An influencer named Joanna Spicer is interviewed quite a bit in the piece. She says:

People in the industry, according to Spicer, are “afraid to say anything. It’s being danced around. I’ve been told that I don’t fit the criteria to work with the brand because they’re more into the tradwife aesthetic. I’m like, ‘Got it.’”

With the tradwife aesthetic, a baseline of thin is a given, right? They're all willowy thin blondes like Ballerina Farm. It's interesting that it's not just thin, but the whole Little House On the Prairie conservative fundamentalist perspective. That’s what is trending right now. 

Corinne

It's very depressing. I like Joanna Spicer and that is not her aesthetic. There are plus-size influencers that lean more in that direction who are also suffering.

Virginia

Because they're not leaning enough in that direction.

Corinne

They're not living on farms in Utah. I also thought an interesting part of this was her saying that it's being danced around, that no one's straight up saying what's going on.

Virginia

On the flip side, we've also seen (and reported on) a lot of plus-size influencers becoming not plus-size, or attempting to become not plus-size by sharing their GLP-1 journey. While we've had valid criticisms of the way Rosey Beeme and others have articulated those journeys by using a lot of anti-fat rhetoric, I do understand that when you've made your body your business, and now the business is changing, you feel a lot of pressure to change your body to keep up with things.

Corinne

This article doesn't mention it, but there have been a couple of brands recently announcing they're not going to make plus sizes anymore, one of which is Christy Dawn, which is a big tradwife aesthetic brand.

Virginia

I never did get a Christy Dawn prairie dress while they made them in my size. Now I guess I never will.

Corinne

I did try one once. It's really not my aesthetic, but it didn't seem nice.

Virginia

I kind of wish you had photos. I really can't picture you in a tradwife dress.

Corinne

I put it on and was horrified.

Virginia

You had a reaction to that like I have to those boiler suit jumpsuits where I feel trapped, have a panic attack and I can't get them off.

Corinne

There was too much shoulder. I didn't like it.

Virginia

It's the whole milkmaid thing.

Corinne

I like my shoulders covered.

Virginia

Yeah, not your aesthetic. All of this tradwife aesthetic taking over influencer culture and who's getting brand deals also very much ties into how much this is driven by the political climate right now, which is obviously a dumpster fire. 

Here is another excerpt from the piece:

One vice president and an influencer marketing agency who asked to remain anonymous, said that while they haven't seen brands explicitly push back against working with plus-size creators. They are far more hesitant to sponsor any creator who gets even remotely political. What is acceptable now politically may not be in the future, and to avoid any issues, they don't want any voices that are not controlled internally from their side, he said.

That made me wonder if fat influencers are more likely to be left wing and progressive than thin influencers. We don't have any data, but my instinct is yes.

Corinne

They're probably more likely to be outspoken about size inclusivity, at least.

Virginia

People think fat liberation is not political or it's not considered part of political action, and it is part of it. They also wrote:

"The trend to move away from plus-size clothing aligns with the trend to move away from DEI. It’s all related,” says Monica Corbin, a stylist at a plus-size fashion brand. “We had this big explosion during COVID around inclusivity, and I just think there’s been the biggest backlash."

So what's happening in influencer culture is just a microcosm of our whole country right now?

Corinne

There is a part of this article that was so sad. Joanna Spicer was talking about how not being able to get work in your area of expertise makes you feel like a loser. That it's demoralizing and you feel like you've done something wrong. And you don't want to speak out about it because you don't want to screw yourself over in the future. It sounds so isolating.

Virginia

There's often a lot of pressure on influencers not to be transparent about the business model and the money, which is something we see in almost every female dominated industry. Anytime you have an industry that's majority women, people tend to be underpaid and you're encouraged not to talk about money, which is why all of my writer friends know I am extremely transparent about money. Because I feel like this is how any of us make any. It doesn't surprise me that people were so hesitant to go on record for this story because they think they have so much to risk if they say these brands are paying them less. But it also enrages me because these brands are treating you terribly. How else do we put pressure on them to do something different and make different choices?

Corinne

I don't know, but it's scary to do that now, especially when it feels like there's fear of political retaliation.

Virginia

Maybe this is me grasping at a strand of hope, but I do wonder if the fact that Vulture did this story is a positive sign. Will this kind of media coverage put pressure on brands to be more inclusive again? You could read this piece and think, What is Virginia talking about? There's no GLP-1 backlash. The fact that the piece exists feels like a tiny bit of backlash. Or am I just grasping?

Corinne

We'll see. It's probably going to take eight years, but I think at least some of the shine is off.

Virginia

It's hard to say that we're definitively in a backlash, or in a moment of change. I don't think we are. I think we are in a moment of increased nuance, and that's where we've landed. There's value in that. There's value in the conversations becoming more nuanced. 

The last piece we wanted to talk about was Amanda Richard's recent essay about her own experience taking GLP-1s and her take on where we are in this moment. It's called The return of thinness, without the reckoning. What are your thoughts on this piece?

Corinne

I thought it was really interesting. I read it this morning and haven't fully digested it. The most interesting part to me was this part near the end where she says:

What this moment reveals isn't hypocrisy, it's preference, preference for ease over effort, relief over reckoning, for changing bodies instead of changing the rules that they're judged by. Fat acceptance faltered not because it was wrong, but because it asked more of people than a weight loss transformation ever could.

She's getting at this moment in culture where people have lower tolerance than ever for friction. We want everything to be as easy as possible, myself included. That's not always what's best for the world, or even ourselves.

Virginia

She's arguing that we're not in a backlash, but that the rise of GLP-1s has legitimized the pursuit of thinness in new ways. She wrote:

What's changed isn't the desire to be thin, but the way that desire is explained. It no longer has to pass through shame, discipline or denial, instead arriving framed as care, responsibility and common sense. we've had moral alibis for thinness before diets, program, supplements, lifestyle changes, but they were always imperfect because they still smelled like wanting. They required visible discipline. They demanded effort. They asked people to accept failure when their bodies didn't cooperate. Medicine is a better alibi.

I thought that was pretty dead on.

Corinne

That's interesting, although we had health as an alibi before.

Virginia

We definitely did. But she's right that making it something that doctors prescribe, that you have to do, and you have to do in very specific ways in order to adhere correctly to it, does feel different from when doctors say, Try to lose some weight and, you know, walk more. It's vague and nebulous and pushes people over to diet culture.

Because you're accessing it through consumerism it feels more like something you want, like a choice you're making. There's aesthetic components. I'm doing this celebrity’s plan, you know. It feels legitimate now that you're doing it as a responsible choice for yourself because a doctor prescribed it. It's not to say that the medical choices people are making to do these drugs are always wrong, or that it's a bad choice for everybody. Again, it's a great medication for managing diabetes. 

Because all of the research dollars in the world go towards these drugs, they are discovering other new benefits of them, and that's great if we don't want people to not have those benefits. 

Corinne

We didn't mention that the whole premise of the piece is that she's taking a GLP-1 for a condition, and it has helped tremendously.

Virginia

She's had some weight loss as a side effect, but that wasn't the primary goal. Fat acceptance needs to keep making more space for those stories and that reality. That is why we added the Anti-Diet Ozempic Life chat room on Burnt Toast, because I was hearing from readers ashamed and confessing to me that they were on a GLP-1 and not having a place to talk about how to do that with integrity and in alignment with their fat liberation values. I was thought, Well, we're doing something wrong if we're making people feel bad about their own individual choices. That's what the other guys do. 

That's not what we're about. The conversations there have been fascinating and super instructive to me. I've learned a lot. Everybody who's navigating this, if you've identified that fat liberation is one of your values, you have a responsibility to interrogate this thing that Amanda's articulating, how much of this is a moral alibi for thinness, and what does that mean if you're using medicine as your alibi to achieve thinness because of all the other reasons that thinness is valued.

Corinne

Although, in our culture, how can you not? There's always some element of "Being thin is good? Being thinner Is better?"

Virginia

Being prettier? I'll have better access to things. I don't think wanting that for yourself is "wrong" because how could you not want it?

Corinne

It's the water we're swimming in. It's hard to make a neutral choice.

Virginia

There is no neutral choice. Articulating that tension to yourself is valuable versus just dressing it up in "I am doing this for x, y and z health reason. I don't care about being thin." Let's be honest. Of course we all care about that a little bit. 

We're in an interesting place with this stuff. I'm curious to hear what folks think. How you resonated with these articles and what else you're seeing in the discourse. I am glad for the increasing nuance and I wish mainstream media could spot its anti-fat bias even sometimes.

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Butter

Corinne

Do you have a butter for us?

Virginia

I have a very fun butter. My butter is that I just wallpapered my living room and I'm so excited. It's so pretty. 

Corinne

Oh, my God, it's beautiful!

Virginia

Isn't it such a pretty wallpaper?

Corinne

Wow. Where did you find that?

Virginia

It's a Graham & Brown wallpaper called Wallflower (affiliate link) from Wallpaper Direct. One of my home design influencer loves is Elsie Larson and she used this wallpaper in her house. I pinned it years and years ago. I thought I was not a wallpaper person and not a bold wall person. I've had white walls in all my homes forever because I change my mind a lot about color. I love color, but I like to be able to change things up. But this particular room does not get a lot of natural light. It often feels kind of gloomy and white walls were actually making it feel gloomier.

So I'm here to say, if you have a room without good natural light, go for some bold, saturated color, or a wallpaper that feels like it's going to make it darker, but it's actually going to make the room come alive.

Corinne

Wow, I love that. It's really pretty. It's like dark green background with pink and orange flowers on it.

Virginia

It feels like an English garden, which is all I ever want in the world, especially right now when my actual garden is under, I don't know, 14 inches of snow and ice. Being able to sit in my pretty, green, flowery living room is really helping my seasonal anxiety quite a lot. That's my butter. Put some pretty color on your walls.

Corinne

My butter is non-specific today, but I really want to recommend that anyone listening to this right now who needs something in their life goes and gets some queso.

I celebrated my birthday recently. I had some friends over for dinner and we got two different kinds of queso. It was so tasty, although the next day I did feel like I had a block of cheese in my stomach.

Virginia

There's always a little dice you roll with queso.

Corinne

It was fun to just stand around and dunk chips into hot cheese.

Virginia

You said there were two different kinds of queso. Say more, please.

Corinne

I live in New Mexico, and here we have our own specific culture, including our own specific type of food called New Mexican food. New Mexican queso is kind of liquidy. Don't think about what's in it. It's melted cheese and it usually has green chile in it. It's a little spicy and it comes with a bunch of chips. 

There's also Mexican food here, and I'm not a Mexican food expert, but Mexican restaurants have something called queso fundido, which is just straight up melted cheese. 

Virginia

No chile?

Corinne

No, and it's not going to be like liquid. It's the texture of melted cheese.

Virginia

Like if you scraped cheese off of pizza.

Corinne

Sometimes you can get toppings on it, so we had both New Mexican chile con queso and Mexican queso fundido.

Virginia

Oh, my God! Those both sound magical. Hot cheese sounds like something delicious we should all be eating.

Corinne

Hot cheese is in for February. 

Virginia

For February, be cozy in brightly colored rooms with hot cheese. What more do we need? There's weeks to go before the sun returns.

Corinne

Who needs sunshine when you have queso and wallpaper?

Virginia

Truly.

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Make sure you are following us in your podcast player. Scroll down wherever you're listening, tap the stars, five of them please, and leave us a review. That really helps us grow and helps new listeners find conversations like these.

Today's Indulgence Gospel is hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay. You can follow Virginia on Instagram at @v_solesmith and on Bluesky at @virginiasolesmith.bsky.social. You can follow Corinne on Instagram at @selfiefay, on Bluesky at @corinnefay.bsky.social and on Patreon at Big Undies.

This podcast is produced by Kim Baldwin. You can follow Kim at @theblondemule on all platforms and subscribe to her newsletter at The Blonde Mule.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Farideh.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!