In the three years since Ozempic entered the national consciousness, the brand name has become so ubiquitous that it is used as a shorthand for all GLP-1 receptor agonists (Wegovy, Mounjaro, et al), in the way that all vacuum cleaners are Hoovers and all sticky tape is Sellotape. The weight-loss treatment was hailed as a wonder drug, an era-defining medical intervention like the pill, or Prozac. It changed not just waistlines but markets: the stocks of Krispy Kreme doughnuts fell; jewellers reported a rush on ring resizing; Jefferies Financial Group suggested airlines could save millions in fuel because of lower passenger weight. It would change the way we view fatness, from a moral failure to a chronic medical condition.
Ozempic works by mimicking a hormone that reduces appetite and helps control blood sugar; users report the silencing of “food noise”(persistent, intrusive thoughts about food). It removes the hardest part – as “New Year, new you” hopefuls may be discovering – of any diet: willpower. The problem, studies now suggest, is this may only be temporary.
Data published in the British Medical Journal on 7 January shows that while users of weight-loss drugs lose about a fifth of their bodyweight, once they stop taking the drugs they return to their pre-treatment weight in a year and a half. Ozempic appears only to be the nation-altering drug that was promised if it is taken for life. This is a problem not just because of the cost of such an intervention (by one estimate, it would cost £10bn a year – or half the drugs budget – if used by every eligible patient in England), but because Nice guidelines recommend that some of these drugs should not be used for weight loss for longer than two years. Taking GLP-1s must be accompanied by lifestyle changes to have long-term benefit – the same “eat less, move more” lifestyle changes that have been central to the 689 unsuccessful anti-obesity initiatives the government has launched since 1992. In effect, Ozempic may be no different from any other diet, which ultimately fail in most cases. The difficult part is not losing weight, but keeping it off; any yo-yo dieter could tell you as much.
This is the predictable result of treating the symptom, not the underlying cause. The solution to the obesity epidemic cannot be individual resolve because its drivers are endemic, socioeconomic and psychological: poverty, advertising, fast food, smartphone addiction, sedentary childhoods… Ozempic users are protected from our obesogenic environment for a few short years, but will once again be subject to the forces that shape it, with only their own discipline as defence.
Today, 27 per cent of men and 29 per cent of women in the UK are obese. In 1980, the prevalence was 6 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. Humankind did not exist for 300,000 years with a statistically insignificant obesity rate only for its willpower to vanish in the 1980s. What happened? Industrialisation and the pursuit of convenience came with incidental activity costs. As jobs were mechanised, work became more sedentary. Cars, indoor plumbing, Hoovers, escalators – all eroded the necessity for movement, long before the era of fast-food delivered by bike.
Now, much of the world we would once have had to move to access – the supermarket, the bank – is ours in an instant, from our sofa, via a screen. A screen that, incidentally, we eat more while looking at. We have more leisure time than ever, thanks to shorter working hours and innovations that have reduced the time we spend doing basic tasks. Yet we feel time-poor – too time-poor to do anything so time-consuming as exercise or give up fast food. The endpoint of a convenience-driven society is that we can do anything at any time. Only this does not feel like freedom. In our always-on culture, the lines between work and play are blurred – a situation exacerbated by the pandemic, which, far from improving work-life balance, forced companies to build infrastructure to allow employees to work anywhere at any time.
Convenience also altered our food environment. Increasingly, food shifted from something we cooked for ourselves to something that was manufactured for us, to the extent that ultra-processed food now constitutes at least half of all daily caloric intake in the UK. This is food that is engineered with what the psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz calls the bliss point: the perfect ratio of fat, salt and sugar to trigger maximum pleasure in the brain, overriding the signals that tell us to stop eating. At least half of the food we eat is designed to be addictive, and the more we eat, the more money Big Food makes. This is all part of what the historian David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism”, a system of businesses that profiteer off our brain’s reward pathways as we seek escape – see also: social media, gambling, even porn. Early clinical trials suggest Ozempic may also be effective in treating such addictions. (What would a generation of young men, inoculated by drugs against porn addiction, mean for our sex lives, or for the birth rate?) But it is simply too dystopian to accept that the cure to the twin diseases of Big Food and Big Tech might come from Big Pharma.
The individual solution to the obesity epidemic has failed because obesity is not an individual problem, but a common one, requiring a common solution. Still, our response cannot be dejected acceptance. When others profit from our unhealth, choosing to cook your dinner, or even walk to the takeaway, becomes an act of insurrection. If the abstract pursuit of thinness is not motivation enough, perhaps rebellion might be.
[Further reading: There is no medical treatment for a radically altered body image]
This article was updated on 15 January 2026 to clarify that while Nice recommends Wegovy be prescribed for a maximum of two years, there is no such restriction for Mounjaro.
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This article appears in the 14 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Battle for power
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