Ozempic is causing weird work conversations

As a group of Isabel Haneder’s colleagues sat down for lunch, the conversation quickly turned to saggy breasts and shrinking butts.

One person was marveling at how celebrities were able to drop large amounts of weight — due, they assumed, to GLP-1 use. Then, the commentator turned to the 52-year-old Haneder and asked: “You lost a lot of weight. What about you? What happened to your body?”

Haneder tells me she was “flabbergasted.” She knows her body has noticeably changed since she started on a GLP-1 a year and a half ago. Even so, she didn’t think her loose skin would become a water-cooler conversation at her job in TV production in Germany. She ended up stuffing her mouth with as much food as she could, simply so that she wouldn’t physically be able to talk further.

“Discussing my boobs over lunchtime?” Haneder says. “Sorry, I don’t feel like it.”

The prevalence of GLP-1s has opened a Pandora’s box of conversations around bodies and what we put in them. Body talk has always popped up at the office. Maybe you’ve encountered the coworker who remarks that they could never eat a lunch that rich, or subjects unwilling victims to conversations about their new diet. Still, there’s been at least some cultural (and, occasionally, legal) understanding that explicit comments about bodies and their sizes are a no-go. In the era of GLP-1s, those boundaries have become murkier: Nobody knows where the red line is, and it’s created a no-win situation for everyone involved. The new age of miracle weight loss drugs is creating workplace nightmares.

Emotions and health insurance

On its face, discussing a medication at work shouldn’t create too many complications. From a legal standpoint, David Holt, an employment lawyer, tells me, “an individual is always allowed to share whatever they want about themselves — that’s the superseding of all employment law.” The issue arises in the social and financial contexts of jobs. GLP-1s are inextricably intertwined with two very emotional aspects of our work lives: Health insurance costs and social relations.

One snag is money. Americans are uniquely tied to their coworkers through the cost of health insurance. If someone in your company has a costly ailment, that could push up premiums for everyone. A study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that health insurance premiums could increase by 10.4% when plans expand coverage to include overweight individuals. Even when a $90 copay is added to offset costs, premiums would rise 9%. The competing desires of cost and coverage can create tension between employees. Some want access to the drugs for their own weight loss, while others chafe at having to pay for what they perceive as someone else’s lifestyle choices. For employers and the HR specialists tasked with deciding on these benefits, it also means making what’s akin to a medical decision for their fellow workers, says Amit Shah, the president of metabolic health and benefits manager Virta Health. Benefits managers are often torn between the two warring groups, Shah says. One of the managers he works with has been making these kinds of calls for two decades, but recently said that the push and pull over GLP-1s made the last two years the most stressful and difficult of their career.

“From the employer side of the house, philosophically, a lot of clients are trying to balance empathy with economics,” Caroline Susie, a senior principal at healthcare consultancy MercerWell, tells me. GLP-1s aren’t the sole medications driving up costs for workers — new cancer treatments, Susie points out, have made a huge difference in outcomes and pushed up costs, as they’ve done for obesity treatments. But GLP-1s and their coverage end up eliciting more debate than those other treatments, something that can cause further discomfort in workplaces bound by premiums and plans.

“I do think there’s some of that — you make a comment about somebody living overweight, but you don’t make a comment about somebody living with cancer,” Susie says.

The second workplace issue is how we perceive our colleagues. Weight stigma can have tangible impacts on everything from mental health to getting passed over for a promotion. Research has found that women who have lost weight with GLP-1s are more likely to be hired or to find a partner. It’s no secret that the societal pendulum has swung from nominally featuring or acknowledging larger bodies to erasing them in favor of smaller ones. The ubiquity of GLP-1s in everyday life has “put a thinner ideal of appearance back on the agenda,” Alka Menon, a sociologist at Yale who’s working on a book about the social effects of GLP-1s, says. Those conversations are seeping into the workplace, and while they might have the sheen of a medical discussion, their impact is different from someone saying they started a new prescription drug.

After Melissa, a Gen X attorney, lost weight on a GLP-1, she moved abroad to pursue a new postgraduate degree. In the back of her mind, she wonders whether her changed body is the reason for what feels like a newfound deference in the classroom, as she walks among peers who never knew her as larger. “I certainly feel like I’m being accorded more expertise than I deserve,” she says.

The boundaries around how she talks about her body in professional contexts are multi-layered. Questions about her body often fall along the lines of “Are you happy?” With folks she knows, she’s more likely to be willing to talk about the underlying emotion, but for those she doesn’t know as well, her approach is more akin to “Oh, I know that you would never be asking to monitor my body shape.”

Coworkers may try to have conversations about diets and body issues as “a way of relating and connecting to others,” says Charlotte Markey, a professor of psychology at Rutgers and the author of several books on body image, even as research shows that doing so productively is nearly impossible.

“It’s hard to have them in any kind of a way that’s actually going to serve anyone,” Markey says. “We think we’re connecting, but really it’s more that we’re perpetuating concerns about eating in really specific ways or the size or shape of our bodies.”

What’s happening at work

When I speak with people about this topic, one thing is clear: Everyone feels bad.

That’s true in workplaces where folks are uniquely equipped to know exactly what GLP-1s do. Dr. Jessie Sims, a surgical resident in Chicago, has an acute understanding of the drugs’ benefits. She also grew up figure skating and saw firsthand the impact that an excessive focus on the body can have, especially in leading to eating disorders. She worries about how the prevalence of the drugs might further fuel disordered eating and a return to the thin-is-in culture — and feels uneasy with how accessible the drugs have become.

“I definitely know some people in healthcare who know the clinical indications that are still on the medication, despite not needing it,” Sims says. Sims also understands the almost “morbid curiosity” that folks have after noticing someone else’s profound weight loss.

“Because it’s a popular weight loss drug, people feel like it’s a more acceptable conversation point,” Sims says, “which I don’t think it is.”

Shah, the benefits provider, also chafes at the amount of direct-to-consumer marketing for GLP-1s — it’s easier for coworkers to discuss the prescription they quickly snagged from a telehealth provider than the in-depth conversations they had with their doctor.

All of these factors have pushed more coworkers to wade into the weight-loss conversation waters. One New York-based millennial told me she only sees her boss in person about once a quarter. The millennial, who works in a creative field, was prescribed a GLP-1 two years ago for various medical issues, and lost about 50-60 pounds. At their last meeting, her boss pointedly said how good she looked. When the millennial replied that she had gotten a haircut — hoping to deflect from body discussions — the boss doubled down and instead asked how she had lost weight. It felt like GLP-1 fishing.

On the flip side, one Gen Z man in media told me radical lifestyle changes — completely modifying his diet and starting an intensive exercise regimen — have helped him lose about 50 pounds over the past three years. His weight loss came right as Ozempic hit the mainstream, and coworkers kept insistently asking if he was on a GLP-1. When he said no, he heard whispers that some thought he was lying. The situation became so frustrating that he went to higher-ups to discuss his discomfort with the continual questioning.

Conversations like those can leave everyone on edge, not just the person whose body is being discussed, according to Maggie Unruh, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has researched the cultural discourse surrounding GLP-1s. “Simply hearing coworkers speculate about another person’s body can create anxiety for people,” Unruh tells me.

What’s unclear is where those conversations cross the line. Holt, the employment lawyer, says it can be hard to tell when the conversation tips into a hostile work environment. If someone speaks persistently about their own drug usage, for instance, and it makes another worker uncomfortable enough to speak to HR, it could become an employer’s responsibility.

“You’d certainly want to at least consider, are we creating a hostile work environment by not redirecting that individual’s talk?” Holt says. “Just as we would redirect if they were talking about porn or something … it’s not illegal to talk about porn, but it’s very weird to talk about that in the workplace.”

GLP-1s are already reshaping the workplace. A common set of HR policies or a new social framework could eventually tamp down the talk, but for now, we’re in the Wild West, with every worker left to fend for themselves.

Molly, a millennial who works in tech, has long lived in a bigger body. She feels that, subconsciously, her coworkers define hard work through exercise, with the expectation that it will yield body-shrinking results. She worries that her colleagues may view her as lesser because her body has remained larger. Many on her team have disclosed that they’re on some form of GLP-1. Molly has attempted to go on some form of the drug three separate times, but she had such extreme side effects — especially nausea — that, after all of that, she was so tired she couldn’t work.

“It’s incredibly paradoxical to be so exhausted from what you’re trying to do to fit in the workplace that you can’t fit in in the workplace,” she says.