Claudia Stearns spent most of her life dreading Thanksgiving. As a person who has struggled with obesity since childhood, she says, the annual turmoil of obsessing over every bite and the guilt of overindulgence was exhausting. That changed after she began taking medications including Wegovy, a new anti-obesity drug, and lost nearly 100 pounds. Last year’s holiday, she told The Associated Press, “felt so lovely to just be able to enjoy my meal, to focus on being with friends and family, to focus on the joy of the day. That was a whole new experience.”
The medications Stearns and millions of other Americans are now using belong to a class originally developed for diabetes. They include semaglutide, sold as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss, and tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro and recently approved under the name Zepbound. The weekly injections work by mimicking GLP-1 and related hormones that the gut releases after eating. Those signals dampen appetite and the brain’s sense of reward from food, leading to weight loss of 15% to 25% of body weight, studies show. Dr. Michael Schwartz, a metabolism and obesity expert at the University of Washington, explained that the drugs act by “reducing the rewarding aspects of food.”
For many people who have spent years fighting the physical and psychological burdens of chronic obesity, the change is a relief. Tara Rothenhoefer, 48, of Trinity, Florida, lost more than 200 pounds after joining a Mounjaro clinical trial in 2020. She says she is more selective at holiday meals but still eats what she enjoys. “I don’t care about the bread as much,” she said. Joe Sapone, 64, a retiree from Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, shed about 100 pounds with dieting and Mounjaro. He no longer needs what he called “the food orgy” of a holiday, though he admits the adjustment has been real. “Part of succeeding at this is disconnecting a good time with what you eat,” he said. “Am I still going to have fun if I don’t eat that much?”
Not everyone embraces the transformation. Some patients lose their appetites entirely or battle nausea, vomiting and diarrhea that strip the pleasure from any meal. Dr. Katherine Saunders, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medicine, has seen a handful of patients who were “really miserable because they didn’t enjoy food in the same way.” Still, she added, most people who have turned to these medications are deeply grateful to have the mental noise around food quieted and the weight lifted.
The shift can upend rituals that center on abundance. “It’s something that really changes a lot of things in their life,” said Dr. Daniel Bessesen, chief of endocrinology at Denver Health. “They go from food being a central focus to it’s just not.” The change also raises a philosophical question about altering a fundamental human drive. Dr. Jens Juul Holst of the University of Copenhagen, one of the scientists who first identified GLP-1, posed the issue bluntly at an international diabetes conference this fall: “Why is it that you’ve lost weight? That’s because you’ve lost your appetite. That’s because you’ve lost the pleasure of eating and the reward of having a beautiful meal. And how long can you stand that? That is the real, real question.”
For now, as millions settle into a medication-aided quieting of the body’s appetite signals, the holidays arrive with a different calculus — more control for some, more ambivalence for others, and an open question about what is gained when the draw of the table is deliberately muted.