Perhaps one of the animated show “South Park’s” greatest gifts is its incessant mocking of elite culture, and its new special, “The End of Obesity,” knocks it out of the park. The kids from Colorado are back at it with large doses of political incorrectness, highlighting the hypocrisy of the elite and the lies they tell about new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.
Celebs such as Mindy Kaling, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson have shed more than a few pounds in the past year, all claiming to have done it through lifestyle changes alone. Aguilera claims to follow a “rainbow diet,” eating only foods of a particular color on any given day. Simpson credits walking and cauliflower for her dramatic 100-pound loss after her third baby. If 10,000 steps and some cruciferous vegetable is all it took, I’d look like Marissa Miller circa 2008.
When one of the mothers of “South Park” compliments a “MILF” on her svelte shape, which all the MILFS flaunt throughout the episode with half shirts, she responds, “Oh yea, just working out a lot. Doing Pilates and stuff.”
I’m not a betting girl, but I’d put money on the fact that these celebs, like the MILFS of “South Park,” are using Ozempic or Wegovy, also known as semaglutide, the GLP-1 agonist that produces dramatic results quickly. They have gone beyond shedding a few pounds to looking as if they’ve lost control of their rapid weight loss. Late last year, Sharon Osborne warned of the downside of the drugs, saying she lost too much weight and expressed concern that they would lead to unhealthy habits in young women. “It’s just too easy,” she told the Daily Mail.
A licensed psychologist who specializes in eating disorders in New York City, Alexis Conason, says that she is seeing behavior similar to that of anorexia in those who take the popular weight-loss drugs. “We see [clients] consuming very, very few calories for the day and starting to veer into anorexia.” She is concerned with what the DSM calls “atypical anorexia” — a condition in which an individual exhibits all of the criteria for anorexia nervosa except that despite significant weight loss, the individual’s weight is within or above the normal range.
Exhibiting dramatic weight loss, Oprah finally came clean about her use of medication to drop pounds. She says she no longer feels shame about doing whatever she needs to shed the excess weight, stating willpower was not enough and enforcing the notion that obesity is a disease.
Good on her for coming clean, although I’m not sure her motives were altogether altruistic. A Reuter’s analysis reported that Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures both Ozempic and Wegovy, paid at least $25.8 million over a decade in fees and expenses related to its weight-loss drugs, specifically targeting an elite group of obesity specialists who advocate giving its powerful and expensive drugs to tens of millions of Americans. It wouldn’t be outrageous to speculate Oprah may have been a recipient of similar outlays.
Her popular special on weight loss in December of last year, “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,” was essentially an infomercial for the drugs, and she divested from Weight Watchers due to a potential “conflict of interest.” The popular weight-loss company recently launched a new membership program to prescribe Ozempic and Wegovy to clients.
Kelly Clarkson also recently came clean about her use of a weight-loss medication after denying it to the public. In her recent interview with Whoopi Goldberg, the singer-turned-talk show host said she didn’t realize how large she had become. Goldberg agreed, saying the drugs are “great for people like us who have issues.” Find me a woman who doesn’t have “issues” if they’re trying to lose weight, and I’ll show you one who really loves eating raw kale!
Rules for Thee!
This is all brought to you by the same cohort of people who previously blasted society’s diet culture and obsession with women’s bodies. The ones who always tell us to be comfortable in the skin we’re in and unashamed for not fitting into societal standards of beauty. “You don’t have to be skinny to be happy,” they say. “You just need to be yourself!” they shout. They then promptly turn around to inject their body with drugs, plastic, and lord knows what else to turn them into a caricature of a younger version of themselves.
Kaling was at the forefront of the body-positivity movement, reminding women several years back that “every body is a bikini body!”
In her more robust days, Aguilera told People magazine, “You got to be a strong, powerful, very confident woman,” and that “as long as I am happy in my own skin, that is all that is all [sic] the confirmation I need.”
Oprah wrote on her magazine’s website, “After spending the past 10 weeks in class with Eckhart Tolle, studying his book A New Earth, I know for sure that I am not my body.”
Elites in every field, from entertainment to politics, get paid millions of dollars to live a lie. Everyone knows about their duplicitous existences, yet they insist on promoting one thing in front of the camera and acting completely antithetical to the narrative they endorse. They lower the standards for everyone else, while they continue to strive for increased status, wealth, accomplishment, and yes, thinness. As Eric Cartman points out, “Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity,” hilariously exemplified by the new drug called “Lizzo.”
Honesty Is the Best Policy
I don’t take issue with people wanting to lose weight or taking Ozempic or any other quick trick weight-loss drug. We should celebrate healthy behavior. The fact that some women feel betrayed by other women who drop pounds like Adele did is ridiculous. Do I believe the GLP-1s are damaging to society as a whole and sending the wrong message to women young and old? Yes. But like everything else, I’m not in the business of preventing others from indulging in their drug addictions. (Until they push it on kids, which is starting to happen with these new weight-loss tools.)
Doctors have been very clear that to keep the weight off, people need to take these drugs long-term, possibly for the rest of their lives, insinuating obesity is an uncontrollable disease. It’s not. While it can be more complicated for some people, like many chronic illnesses, dedication to well-informed lifestyle changes will result in drastically different health outcomes for most. Pharmaceuticals like semaglutide often simply mask symptoms of disordered eating and body image without addressing underlying conditions.
Despite knowing all this, if I’m honest, I’ve considered shooting myself up with one of these quick fixes. While I’ve never really struggled with my weight, I have wrestled with my perception of my body. However, I realize that my feelings are grossly misaligned with reality. I take care of myself and by all objective measures, I am healthy. I know there are no shortcuts and that the long-term damage of taking pharmaceuticals would likely outweigh (pun intended) any short-term narcissistic satisfaction that will result from dropping from a size six to a size four. In short, logic overrides my crazy.
But if there is anything celeb culture encourages, it’s crazy. With every resource at their fingertips, rarely are elites the exemplary of restraint or critical thinking. Their money shelters them from experiencing the consequences of the terrible ideas they endorse. They can create an alternate reality for themselves, while most others live with the costs of poor decision-making.
Thus, they tell women to love their bodies just as they are and then turn around and enthusiastically support the mutilation of young women who don’t feel comfortable in their bodies in an impossible attempt to switch sex. Which is it? Love thyself or self-loathing? No wonder they’re so confused. Nothing they say is based in empirical truth.
I’d have more respect for them if they were just honest about reality. Humans enjoy beauty, whether it takes the form of a majestic mountain or a woman’s healthy physique. We celebrate discipline, excellence, and ingenuity. We all have an innate fear of death and pain and will go to extreme measures to avoid our descent into oblivion.
Instead, the elite live life behind a veil of lies. Every day, thanks to stunts like exaggerated body transformations and the genius of “South Park,” more and more people see through it.
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