THE OZEMPIC PANDEMIC

 

A drug which was originally prescribed for type 2 diabetic patients has turned into a weight loss drug which is now consumed by celebrities, has been picked up by influencers on Tik-tok and is constantly being advertised all over the place, allegedly leaving diabetic patients with scarcity of the drug to use.

 There is this frequent urge we have to loose weight and look slim or skinny and whose fault is it? When we begin to do the finger pointing, who or what will it land on?

~Is it the celebrities whose actions we pick on?

~Is it the companies that sell these products?

~Or is it the information that are being fed into our subliminals?

 

THE WORDS OF LOUISE FOXCROFT AND ITS MEANING

According to Louise Foxcroft;

 

“It is always the same old line, we could be thinner, younger and more loved if only we buy whatever new and improved diet food or regime they’re selling”.

 This quote is referring to the companies that advertise these products to people who don’t like the weight they’re gained and would like to loose it.

Companies going as far as creating and product and slapping weight loss on it just so customers would buy it whilst benefiting from their insecurities as seen in the beauty industry.

 Overweight people are often made to feel inferior, unattractive, unloved, insecure and they face a lot of discrimination at work, school, basically everywhere, the public and private space, environment and even online.

This constant fat-shaming has given millions of people out there reasons to feel insecure about their body, it has gotten to the point that slim people feel that they’re overweight and they need to slim down and this is because of the constant information that we are being fed about;

1.    Gaining and or losing weight.

2.    Dieting.

3.    How you should look like as an individual.

 

All these didn't just start happening now, it’s being going on for

Centuries. Different societies with different view point in how a person should look like and their diet culture.

Diet culture can be understood as a system of socially constructed and conditioned beliefs that thinness is synonymous with health and associated with a sense of moral virtue.

 

LIMITED FOOD EQUALS CALMNESS WHILE STARVATION EQUALS HOLINESS

In Ancient Greek times where moderation and regulation of food

In-take was promoted to attain calmness. It also represented a marker of supreme self-control which was one of the highest virtues.

In ancient Greece society controlling food intake was utilized as a means for the individual to attain not only health, but also an aesthetically pleasing body, which is clear that ancient Greeks had their beauty standards and body types they deemed to be acceptable.

The ancient Greeks considered fat/overweight to be ugly; anything associated with fat was seen a mentally unbalanced and he heavens knows what their definition of slim was. Well it is safe to say that the ancient Greeks had fatphobia. Fast-forward to 2022, a website called Dianeosis published an article titled ‘”OBESITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES” which stated that 44% of Greek men and 30.8% of Greek women are overweight.

 

 Hippocrates, a Greek physician who lived around 400BC, believed that overweight people suffered from unhealthy sleep, aches, pains, flatulence and constipation. He recommended that they followed a strict diet and increased their exercise.

This is to tell you that people consuming things to loose weight did’nt just start now.

When the ancient Christians did it, ‘to loose weight’ wasn’t their aim but something else.

HOLY ANOREXIA

Christians around the 600AD believed that the body is the enemy of the soul, they believed in holiness without eating.

 The founders of this practice are St. Jerome, St. Basil, St. Anthony, St. Augustine and the early Desert fathers these men would engage in painfully long fasts and self-deprivation as a means to attain communion with God and purify the body.

 This act is known as Anorexia Mirabilis or Holy Anorexia because of the intention behind the starvation is to attain holiness and purification of one’s body.

In a different context;

 Anorexia Mirabilis is a form of self-starvation that was common amongst religious women as a way to imitate the suffering of Jesus in his torment during the passion. Women were largely restricted to causing themselves voluntary pain by fasting.

 

LIQUID DIETS, THE 1500s AND DEATH DUE TO THE UNCONTROLLABLE URGE TO BE SLIM.

Fast forward to 1087AD when William the conqueror partook in the first recorded liquid diet and this diet was nothing but alcohol which didn’t yield great results.

Into the 1500s, it was still considered immoral to be overweight especially because most people did not have enough to eat. This shows a clear image of the economic crises that the people were facing at that time.

John Halle an English surgeon advised people to eat because according to him;

“More die of gluttony than the sword or the plague”.

During the 1500s, women wanted to look slim without dieting but using their corsets, and mind you back in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries corsets were made of whale bones and was not meant to draw in the waist and create an hourglass figure but rather it was designed to mold the torso into a cylindrical shape and to flatten and raise the bust line.

 The women in the 1500s didn’t draw in their corset for smaller waists, that was the least of their problems but rather drew in their in their corsets to look slim, looking skim was the goal and many women died due to the unethical way they tried to achieve their slimness. Their corsets cut into their skin causing sores that got infected.

 

HEALTHY LIVING AND VICTORIAN ANOREXIA

“The art of living long” was the first diet book that came out in1558 and it was written by Luigi Cornaro, the book contained his weight loss journey as an overweight Italian and he also titled “How to live 100 years”. The book talked about how to live his healthy lifestyle till you were a 100.

In 1614, another diet book was written by Giacomo Castelvetro titled “The fruits, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy”.

The second real diet book was published in the 1700s by Doctor George Cheyne apparently Giacomo Castelvetro’s book wasn’t effective or maybe it had a lot to do with the famine in 1660.

In the 1700s, Thomas Short came up with the theory that living near swamps makes you fat and in order for you to be slim, you need to move to the desert.

Between the 18^th and the 19^th Century, the ideal body type for both men and women were thin and frail and this led to something called “The Victorian Anorexia”. Women took the whole idea of looking thin and frail to the next level. Victorian Anorexia was a form of self-starvation that women practiced in order to look thin and frail.

 

Then came the diet books, one which was written in 1825 by Billat Savarin titled “The Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy”, another was written in 1830 by Sylvester Graham and the list goes on.

DIET WASHED RANDOM PRODUCTS

In the 90s and early 2000s up until today, advertisements of slimming down were all over the place promoting diets to make you loose weight within 24hours

Diet washed ads of the 90s and early 2000s are;

~ The sexy pineapple diet.

~ Smoking gives you a slender figure

~Eating grapes only diet.

~ Eating only meat.

~ Eating only beans.

~Eating lots of ice-cream.

~Sugar based diet ads

~Some went as far as ingesting tape worms.

~Books like ‘Pray your weight away’ were printed and publish.

~Eating cabbage soups

~A fat shaming book by Edward Podolsky was released.

~Drinking lots of alcohol as seen on the case of William the conqueror.

~Eating one or two cookies every two hours.

~Books like ‘The Master Cleanser’ was released telling you that lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup are all you need. (don’t try it)

 Let’s not forget about Kim Kardashian diet lollipop.

 

THE OZEMPIC DIET

Since its approval in 2017, ozempic has been widely used by diabetic patients and the constant urge to loose weight has been in existence longer than ozempic has. Weight watchers has tapped into the tele-health prescription drug space to connect themselves with doctors who can prescribe diabetic drugs as weight loss drug while some didn’t get the prescriptions but just went ahead to get the drug simple because influencer and celebrities did.

Ozempic is a weekly injection that helps lower blood sugar by helping the pancreas make more insulin and this is why it is used by type 2 diabetic patients. It has not been approved by the U.S food and administration FDA for it to be prescribed for weight loss.

 

HOW DOES OZEMPIC MAKE YOU LOOSE WEIGHT?

It works by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone. As those hormone level rises, the molecules go to your brain, telling it you’re full. It also slows digestion by increasing the time it takes for food to leave the body.

The hashtag #ozempic currently has over 1.2 billion views now on Tik-Tok, the use of the hashtag and drug has risen over the span of a few months.

There are people praising this drug and others are not, people have come out to talk about how good the drug is, how it has helped them while others are warning about the side effects and to beware of the OZEMPIC FACE.

 

Plastic surgeon reveals what Ozempic can what you look