People seem to have a paradoxical relationship to weight loss and obesity. On the one hand, many people struggle to lose even a few pounds. The reasons for this phenomenon are manyfold, ranging from food deserts, a sedentary lifestyle, genes, and the never-ending allure of chips and donuts.

Despite these struggles, people judge others harshly who struggle to lose weight just like they do. Studies (for example by Marlon Mooijman and colleagues in 2021) have shown that obese people have a harder time getting hired or dated and are generally seen as lacking willpower. Perhaps because of this paradoxical relationship, weight loss and thinness have become status symbols and consumers like to show others that they eat healthy foods (as studies by Touré-Tillery and colleagues have shown in 2022). Whereas centuries ago a round figure signaled wealth and access to food, now thinness signals access to healthy food and to time-consuming and expensive exercise regimes.

Now enter recently developed weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic. Despite significant monthly costs and side effects, consumers have begged their health care providers to give them these drugs. It seems that they can enable significant weight loss, albeit only during the time of administration. When consumers stop taking them, many gain their weight back.

Nevertheless, weight-loss drugs might change the psychology of how people judge others for losing or failing to lose weight. Whereas, previously, obese people might have been judged for their presumed lack of willpower, now they might be judged for their presumed lack of wanting to lose weight. After all, everyone could simply take weight-loss drugs and shed the extra pounds.

In reality, the story is not as simple, given the significant costs of weight-loss drugs that can be several hundred if not a thousand dollars per month. As a result of such costs, thinness might become a status symbol even more so than it had previously been.

Before weight-loss drugs, the relationship between money and thinness was somewhat indirect, as money enabled the kind of expensive and time-consuming health regimes of diets and exercise that often facilitated thinness. Money couldn’t buy thinness, but it could buy food and workouts that helped to achieve it if consumers added time, effort, and willpower. Now, the relationship between money and thinness is much more straightforward: Pay money for drugs and lose weight. Weight-loss drugs could thereby make weight discrimination worse, as one’s weight might be seen as even more of an indication of one’s general affluence and financial success. After all, if one has the means to buy thinness, people might wonder, why not do it? In this logic, thinness might be even more a status symbol and signifier of wealth.

What is forgotten in these judgments around weight and thinness is that we shouldn’t care so much about weight, but more about health. Weight loss drugs can improve health outcomes for people, and that’s a great reason to take them. Thinness itself doesn’t mean health and shouldn’t be used to judge people’s health. Weight loss drugs can be a helpful tool for many people to achieve their health goals, as can healthy food and exercise. I would rather live in a world where everyone is as healthy as they can be, and not as thin as they can be.