Sharon Osbourne on Ozempic

In a lot of ways this article highlights what can never be tested in a clinical trial. The mental impact of these drugs. As she points out, it became addicting to lose weight, and I fear that will be the case for many people, especially children.

Children are so impressionable. What they experience in their youth sticks with them. If the message they’re getting is to be skinny by not eating, then that sets them up for a lifetime of battling food disorders. It’s not hard for it to happen. I know because it happened to me.

When I was getting into triathlon racing I had an image of what someone who wins races looks like. Long and lean (skinny), with minimal muscle. I by contrast was 5’7” and 165 lbs of mostly muscle (my girlfriend calls me “dense”). I knew if I wanted to compete I had to be lighter (skinny). And so I focused on shedding the weight.

I mostly did it through exercise bulimia (attempting to burn more calories through exercise than I consumed). I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I was working out really hard to achieve a goal (to be competitive). It seemed positive. Until it didn’t.

Over time I became tormented with every food decision. What to eat. How much to eat. When to eat. I’d have to convince myself that what I just ate was okay, or that I could always make it up later with more exercise. There wasn’t a meal or snack that didn’t get questioned in my mind.

I eventually got down to 140 lbs. The weight I thought I needed to be at.

By the time I got down to that weight I was in the deepest of my weight loss addiction throws, and I was realizing that it was no longer (never was) healthy. The only way to end it was give up racing. So around this time that’s what I decided to do, and I stopped racing and training so intensely. It had been over 2 years of torture, and unraveling my self-imposed conditioning was not easy.

It’s been over 2 years since I stopped racing, and I’m only now getting back to having a healthy relationship with my food. From the outside in no one would’ve ever thought I had a problem. I hid it well.

I went through this in my 30s. I came into it with 15+ years of healthy, balanced exercise and diet routines and experience. And it still got me. What chance will a child have who grows up thinking not eating to be skinny is healthy? The answer, is not much.