Last summer, on work trips to Portland, Oregon, and New York, and in the fall, while visiting London and Paris, I went out of my way to meet up with old friends, college classmates, and former colleagues, hoping someone would ask the question I’d waited so long to hear: Had I lost weight? I was prepared to tell them everything, starting with how strange it felt the first time I stabbed myself in the abdomen with a 34-gauge needle. This deeply unnatural act requires a degree of disassociation; for the longest time I just sat there staring at my hand. Once I tricked my body into violating itself, it was just a matter of pressing down on a small button to push a dose of semaglutide out of an Ozempic-branded pen dispenser, through the thin needle, and into my flesh.
By the time I bought my first Ozempic pen at the start of April 2025, one in eight American adults had taken semaglutide or some other GLP-1 receptor agonist. This class of medications, which are sold under brand names like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound, suppress the appetite and regulate blood sugar by mimicking the glucagon-like peptide-1 hormones our bodies release after we eat. Prior to 2021, when off-label use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss exploded among the wealthy and well-connected, they were used almost exclusively for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. In Japan, where I have lived off and on for over a decade, I learned I could get a prescription for GLP-1 drugs for the purposes of weight loss, provided my body mass index score fell within the ranges classified as “overweight” or “obese.” When I visited a Tokyo clinic specializing in these drugs in April, the doctor took one look at me and stated his diagnosis plainly: “Obviously, you meet the necessary criteria.”
If he’d asked me to step on a scale, it would have told him I weighed 291 pounds, which, at five feet ten, gave me a BMI beyond the 40.0 threshold separating class II obesity from class III obesity, putting me at the far end of the spectrum, which is to say the end where no one wants to find themselves. I’d been lingering there about a decade, and in all that time I had somehow never accepted the reality of my situation. It was a state of denial rooted in my unblemished record of bouncing back from previous bouts of plumpness. Once, in my early 20s, I’d gained something like 70 pounds in the course of two years, before obsessive distance running got me into the best shape of my life. I chalked this up to the excesses of early adulthood. As the child of addicts, I avoided drugs and alcohol, but moderation in diet and exercise didn’t come naturally to me. Later I took up competitive road cycling seriously enough to win the odd race on the elite amateur circuit, and grew accustomed to putting on a few pounds in the offseason, then losing it all in preseason training camps. I was still a lean, strong 165 pounds when I went back to college at age 30, and though I would gain 100 pounds by the time I started graduate school four years later, I told myself this was only temporary. I’d lost it all before, and once things fell into place I would lose it all again.
But things never fell into place. In 2019 I managed to lose 30 pounds after the publication of my first book, shamed by the unbearable permanence of a fat-faced author photo that will forever stare back at readers from its jacket. Then I put all that weight back on during the pandemic, which got me thinking about the chemical solution spreading from elite enclaves in Hollywood and Manhattan to less rarefied corners of the US. By 2023 there was a growing body of research to suggest the benefits of GLP-1 drugs outweighed the risks. I was also encouraged by the relative affordability of Ozempic in Japan, where $165 out of pocket would buy me a pen containing four of the weekly .5 mg doses recommended by the prescribing physician (compared to the US, where I would be likely to self-pay about $350 per month). What really pushed me over the edge, though, was the sudden death of my cousin Bob, who, like me, was in his early 40s with no serious health problems besides being very overweight. One night in early 2024, Bob went to sleep and never woke up.
Besides fear of death, there was also a creeping sense that I had become in some way discarnate. Any professional writer spends a good deal of time living inside his own head, but the intensity of my denial required taking up semipermanent residence there. It’s not that I was entirely unaware of my corporeal self: In 2016, when I traveled to China’s Zhejiang Province to report a magazine story on markets selling illicit counterfeit goods, I understood why so many vendors there addressed me, in Mandarin Chinese, as “fat brother.” But by clinging to my self-image as a fit man temporarily trapped in a fat body, I’d managed to achieve a Zen-like state of detachment from my physical being.
The unraveling of this decade-long delusion is not unrelated to my tenure as a GQ correspondent. Since 2022, when I wrote my first feature for the magazine, I’ve not been able to shake the sense that my interview subjects are somehow disappointed when I show up—that they are expecting to meet someone more stylish, more sexy, more in keeping with the image of a men’s fashion magazine. Instead, they meet a man whose sense of style is the result of a prolonged experiment in self-erasure; a man clothed in drab Carhartt pants, plain T-shirts, and the sort of pullover fleeces a fugitive might wear if his freedom depended on blending into a crowd in Seattle or a boardroom in San Francisco. They meet a man whose clothes say nothing about who he is, because to express that he would first need to admit he is no longer who he was or who he wants to be.
Before its atrophy, my sense of style, like my relationship with food, was an extension of an impoverished upbringing in the Pacific Northwest. In my household we ate what we could when we could, and wore what others discarded at secondhand stores. This set me apart from other kids, for better and for worse. Dressing in jeans and flannels from Goodwill and the Salvation Army made it impossible to fit in and follow trends, so I had no choice but to be myself.
I still remember the first garment that made me feel special: a pink Lacoste polo sent to me by an aunt when I was five or six years old. After growing out of it, I made a point of getting another pink shirt, this time a secondhand button-up oxford, because it had come to feel like I was the sort of person who should always own one pink shirt. Even at a young age I’d started to sense a distance between myself and other kids—I spent more time reading than all my friends, and had a burgeoning sense of what an intellectual was, and that I wanted to be one, and seized on the childish notion that oxford shirts and corduroy pants were an important part of living a life of the mind.
In sixth grade, my path to middle-school popularity was cleared by the zeitgeist-obliterating success of the band Nirvana, whose frontman, Kurt Cobain, was the first rock star to dress like I did. Suddenly, there was nothing wrong with wearing scuffed jeans and secondhand corduroys, old button-up flannels and cardigans, and T-shirts emblazoned with corporate slogans from the ’70s and ’80s. All that really mattered as a teen in those days was whether you played sports, what music you listened to, and how you dressed, so the accident of looking vaguely and authentically “grunge” gave me a place in the social order. That place remained secure as grunge gave way to alternative and alternative gave way to indie, not because I dressed so differently from one year to the next but because these subcultures tended to bleed into one another. Throughout the ’90s there were many different names for what amounted to the same aesthetic, partly because so many of the decade’s countercultural movements shared an anticorporate ethos that made a five-dollar secondhand outfit infinitely cooler than something from the mall. The most expensive part of my teenage look was the pair of Dr. Martens I had to save up for each summer: green shoes one year, red boots another, then one pair of each in basic black.
In retrospect, it’s amazing how much time I once spent thinking about clothes, and how much my high school life was shaped by the way I dressed. Countless friendships started with a conversation about some T-shirt one of us had bought at a concert or skateboard shop. As a freshman I lost my virginity to a girl who introduced herself by saying she liked my shirt. My first time being on the right side of widespread envy was when the only punk rocker at my high school went out with me, of all possible suitors, not because I listened to Minor Threat but because she liked the plaid golf trousers I’d altered to look like the skintight Vivienne Westwood bondage pants worn by Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols.
What most surprises me now is that my obsession with clothes was never overwhelming or unfun. In the ’90s, I now realize, it was easy to be style-obsessed without becoming self-obsessed, anxious, or self-critical, especially as a teenage boy of average height, weight, and appearance. One good look at my outfit in the changing-room mirror, and maybe the odd glimpse of my bleached or dyed-green hair in the window of a parked car, was all I had to contend with in terms of self-appraisal. At the outset of my 20s, when I started putting on weight for the first time, it might not have occurred to me at all if I hadn’t needed to start buying Levi’s with a 34-inch waist instead of a 32-inch waist.
My weight first became a source of real anxiety at age 23, when I discovered I liked running long distances and having sex with men. The former of these two hobbies enabled the latter as I reclaimed my 32-inch waistline and dived headlong into a world of wholly unreasonable expectations of how male bodies should look. Getting fat for the first time had made me more self-aware, but it took getting fit again for me to become truly self-conscious about my body. This was several years before the launch of the mobile app Grindr, when the closest thing to a beacon for gay men were Diesel jeans, so I stopped wearing Levi’s and started spending $200 on pants that were spiritually, if not aesthetically, equivalent to wearing assless leather chaps in the ’70s. Little else about my wardrobe changed. In many ways the journey, both sexually and sartorially, felt like taking a single step that just happened to place me on the other side of an imaginary fence. Clothes that were vaguely queer in straight life registered as charmingly straight in queer life.
I put on a bit of weight as years of casual sex gave way to the comforts of a long-term relationship, then lost it all after my boyfriend dumped me. Was it a coincidence, I sometimes wonder, that my most prolonged period of weight gain started just after this, when I went back to dating women? It was a certain softness I was chasing, and an opportunity to be vulnerable in ways I’d found difficult with men, but women were also more lenient, in my experience, when it came to policing their partner’s waistline. Soon after going back to school at age 30, my slowing metabolism and a hectic schedule conspired to touch off a decade-long slide into obesity. Next came graduate school and my first newsroom job, and through it all I worked long hours, ate poorly, and soothed my anxiety and depression with snacks and way too much soda. Before long I was heavy enough that knee pain thwarted periodic attempts at getting back into running. Still, I thought, next week, next month, next year will bring the day when I finally turn things around. This procrastinating optimism left me with a strange retail habit I’ve never been able to shake; in my heavier years I would sometimes buy shirts or pants that were too small for me, as if the accumulation of clothes that didn’t fit might precipitate a decumulation of the excess mass that kept me from wearing them.
I bought things for my slimmer self that my fatter self would never wear. A few years ago, in Helsinki, I stumbled across a vintage clothing store reminiscent of the secondhand shops I frequented in high school and couldn’t resist buying a Korean Coca-Cola T-shirt that was both too kitschy and too small. It looks like something a shopping mall Santa might once have shot out of a cannon, with red Hangul print on bright yellow fabric. When shopping for clothes that actually fit, I prioritized comfort but also a sort of blandness, as if I hoped to disappear beneath layers of black, gray, and navy fabric. With clothes that were too small I took the opposite approach. It was like my imagined self was still a teenager trying on new outfits, hoping to find one that would surface some hidden aspect of my personality. Mostly, in high school, I shopped in secondhand clothing stores, earnestly seeking to comprehend myself through clothes other people had given up on. But I would also, as a teenager, go to the mall just before the end of summer break to try on clothes I couldn’t afford, craving a glimpse of what my trend-compliant middle-class self might look like. Each time I left feeling like ordinary existence suited me as poorly as the baggy Calvin Klein jeans and hooded flannels I left piled up in changing rooms at Zumiez and JCPenney. Like the art that moves us and the people we desire, there is an element of mystery in why certain clothes feel right or wrong from the moment we put them on, and an undeniable thrill in flirting with the boundary. Even as an adult I sometimes wonder which metaphorical changing room I’m standing in when shopping for new clothes. In 2012, when I bought a polka-dot T-shirt designed by Comme des Garçons for the streetwear brand Supreme, was I trying on the same middle-class trends that didn’t feel right as a teenager? And years later, after I’d gained too much weight to wear the Supreme T-shirt, which I never wore much anyway, was spending $800 on a mohair Marni cardigan that was two sizes too small some sort of aspirational gesture? Or was it just insane?
A few years ago, while Japan’s borders remained closed to overseas tourists due to the pandemic, I took the opportunity to stroll the eerily empty backstreets of Harajuku, the center of Tokyo fashion culture. At the flagship outlet for Neighborhood, a Japanese streetwear brand, a line of summer offerings had just been unveiled. Among those in the window was a short-sleeve Hawaiian-style button-up shirt in shades of green and brown that playfully evoked camouflage, which I liked enough that I ducked into the store to try it on. The clerk brought me the largest size they had, as I’d requested, and explained that extra-large garments, in Japan, are equivalent to large garments in the US—a very polite way, it seemed, of suggesting the shirt I was about to try on wasn’t going to fit. I could think of no better way to end the awkwardness for us both than by saying the shirt, whose buttons would not meet when I tried it on, was a gift for someone else. Two years later, after taking my first dose of Ozempic, I realized this lie could now be made true, if only I managed to lose enough weight to accept it as a gift from my old self.
My first experience with life-changing weight loss was easier than the next six words will make it sound: I ran 50 miles every week. It helped that I was in my early 20s, with a raging metabolism and boundless energy. It also helped that I had recently become a queer-sex maniac—to feel so desirable, and so in control of my body as an instrument of desire, awakened a dormant narcissism that drove me to near-monastic feats of self-restraint and self-discipline. If I’d discovered buggery and bicycle racing a decade earlier I might have gone on to win the Tour de France.
By middle age my resolve was as weak as my knees, so it was surprising to rediscover a modicum of self-restraint after just a few days on Ozempic. It wasn’t only that I felt less hungry and got full more quickly, though these were the most obvious effects of the drug. Over the course of the next few weeks, there was also a dramatic shift in my sense of what it means to experience and satisfy an urge. It was as if my cravings—for sugar, caffeine, sex—were a soundtrack that had been playing at maximum volume until a weekly dose of semaglutide quieted them. Every desire became something to consider rather than an itch that desperately needed to be scratched.
This shift started with an overnight end to my yearslong addiction to Coca-Cola. Then it carried on in ways that felt increasingly distant from anything I might have expected of a weight-loss drug: I paid off my credit card debt. The compulsive shopping habits that led me to spend money I didn’t have on clothes that didn’t fit abated. Over the summer, I surprised myself by walking away from an opportunity for casual sex, simply because I could imagine its aftermath being tedious for both of us.
A study published in January 2025 suggests these changes are probably not coincidental. Using data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, researchers found that diabetics who had been long-term users of GLP-1 drugs had a reduced risk of substance-related disorders; one researcher said it could be because GLP-1 receptors suppress centers of the brain that are involved in impulse control. The issue is far from settled, and one other research commentary, while less rigorous in its methodology, suggests GLP-1 drugs may induce other forms of impulsive behavior—the authors noticed individuals got divorced, moved from their homes, and made other major life decisions soon after they started taking one of these drugs. What does seem clear, in either case, is that widespread use of GLP-1 drugs, which cross the blood-brain barrier to affect neural pathways associated with both satiety and reward, may soon leave large swaths of the population reckoning with changes that go far beyond their waistline and their wardrobe.
For me these changes brought on a mild identity crisis. As a child I coped with misfortune by embracing the idea that it was fundamental to my being; that difficult times had helped make me who I was, and so, having not endured them would mean ceasing to exist in a sense that felt both abstract and very real. When the urge to misbehave abandoned me, it prompted a trip down the tributaries of this line of thinking: Stripped of my appetites, I wondered, what would become of me? It’s one thing to accept that we are more than our flaws and vices. But if we are not shaped in some fundamental way by our desires, and delineated from one another by our propensity for either avoiding or wandering down dark alleys, then I can’t imagine what it is that does shape us.
The changes to my body were less ambiguous than whatever was going on in my head. In my first week on Ozempic I lost seven pounds. The next week I lost four pounds, and the week after that I shed three more. This strong start was no doubt due in part to giving up Coca-Cola, which I’d been drinking every day for years. My craving for all processed sugar subsided so much, in fact, that I stashed some of my favorite candy bars in my kitchen cupboard to see how long I could resist them. They sat untouched for months. When I did finally start eating the candy, it felt less like I was treating myself than abandoning an experiment that had become boring. This is both the miracle and the horror of semaglutide, which makes the irresistible ordinary, so that pizza and broccoli are equally enticing, and fucking in an elevator sounds no more thrilling than sex in one’s own bed. To the same extent that the itch is less irritating, so too is the scratch less satisfying.
I began to understand the plight of professional athletes for whom eating is a math problem that needs solving. Though not totally joyless, eating did feel less animalistic. Less instinctive. I kept a weight-loss diary and became the kind of person who stockpiles quinoa and protein powder, and buys enough avocados and eggs each week to draw strange looks from the checkers at my local supermarket. The only thing that concerned me more than getting the right balance of protein, carbs, and fats in my diet was staying hydrated, because my doctor said these things were all-important for preventing organ damage as my body endured the stresses associated with dramatic, prolonged weight loss. To avoid stretch marks and loose skin, I started ingesting at least 20 grams of collagen peptides each day and using a body lotion expectant mothers rub on their swelling bellies.
For the first time in my life I began tracking my calories to make sure I wasn’t eating too little. When I forgot to eat much at all one particularly busy day, the consequences only became obvious when my body experienced an overwhelming sense of total physical depletion. At no point in the hours before this did I feel hunger pangs or even emptiness.
Losing weight on GLP-1 drugs is different in almost every respect from doing it the old-fashioned way. One of the few ways it is not so different is that the experience becomes all-encompassing, like a career or a cherished hobby. This is never more clear than at the start and end of each day, when the bathroom scale tells me how things are going. In late June of last year, as I prepared to fly to New York for a former graduate school professor’s retirement party, things were going well. I’d lost 30 pounds in less than three months.
My relationship to clothes was only just starting to change. The first garments I got rid of were a half dozen pairs of Carhartt work pants that were snug in April but became baggy enough by late June that I was constantly pulling them up. The sunshine hitting the crack of my ass had illuminated a crossroads: I could either replace these pants or put workwear behind me and try something new. For most of my adult life I’d never owned more than one pair of Carhartt pants at any given time, starting with the ones I bought as an ironic teenage gesture in 1998. These pants were manufactured then in the US, and cost more than, say, a pair of Levi’s jeans, because they were meant to stand up to real abuse from the loggers and carpenters who wore them. The reason I started paying good money to wear the same pants as my grandpa was seeing how good they looked on my friend Kate, who was cool and iconoclastic enough to make her dad’s old work clothes look sexy. Decades later, Carhartt has ceased being a niche brand and workwear has ceased being a vehicle for irony or even a marker of working-class identity. To give myself more time to figure out what kind of guy I am now, pants-wise, I got myself a new belt.
Around the time my pants first needed belting, the shirt I’d bought at Neighborhood’s flagship Tokyo store had come to fit well enough that I decided to wear it to my professor’s retirement party. No one there mentioned or even seemed to notice my weight loss. This suggested one of three fascinating possibilities, the first and most cynical being that we regard fat people with ambivalence; that those who neither deride nor fetishize obesity nevertheless tend to place fat people in a single category to which no further adjectives must be applied. In this category there are no gradients or shades, and so there can be no discernment. By opting out of deciding how to feel about fat people, we free ourselves from the guilt of judging them too harshly, and from the fears they arouse over the unruliness of our own bodies.
The second possibility was that the difference between 290 and 260 pounds is simply not as obvious as I’d hoped. Staring at one’s body in the mirror every day, looking for signs of the quarter pound that vanished overnight, makes it harder, after all, to see the person in front of you as the rest of the world does. Then there was the third possibility, which is that we haven’t yet figured out how to talk about weight loss in the age of GLP-1 drugs. When it was a rarer accomplishment, the loss of a significant amount of weight had to be acknowledged. Now that it is all around us—and because of why it is all around us—commenting on someone’s weight loss requires navigating a minefield of assumptions: Is the person proud of having lost weight or ashamed that they didn’t do it sooner? Do they feel good about their body or is their shame deeper than that? And, above all, are they interested in discussing, or even acknowledging how they lost the weight?
When we are ready to discuss the issue without embarrassment, there will be plenty to talk about. With the recent arrival of GLP-1 drugs that can be taken in pill form, one imagines, the end of obesity for all who can afford such drugs seems assured. And just as assuredly there will come a further marginalization of obesity, which is already associated with lower socioeconomic status in America. What will widespread GLP-1 use do to fashion? Presumably, those too poor to buy the drugs necessary for losing weight will have even less access than obese people now have to clothes that might make them look good and feel stylish.
While in New York, I went shopping. My obsessive focus on clothes I barely fit into led me to forget the one garment I actually needed for the next leg of my trip: a rain jacket. Having to buy one put me in an unexpected bind. Something cheap wouldn’t cut it for my visit with family in Southeast Alaska, which is situated in the world’s largest temperate rainforest. Something expensive, on the other hand, would be a waste of money, given the pace of my weight loss. The irony was not lost on me as I worried for the first time in at least a decade about buying a garment that might be too big rather than too small. A solution occurred to me when I remembered writing about Arc’teryx for GQ, and learning about the brand’s resale program for pre-owned and refurbished outerwear.
When I arrived at the Arc’teryx store in SoHo I felt a spontaneous urge to disclose my Ozempic use to the sales assistant who greeted me. Were all those conversations I’d hoped to have with friends struggling to get out after no one brought up my weight loss? I’m not sure. But when I explained that I was on Ozempic, and wanted to look at rain jackets that would fit snugly, but not too snugly, her reaction suggested I wasn’t the first person to come to her with such a request. It felt good, not only because it made the transaction smoother but also because I’d grown so used to shopping experiences tinged with shame and embarrassment. Instead of lying to get through it, or avoiding sales staff altogether, I spoke plainly about my body and the clothes I wanted to put on it. Months later, I realized this was not the only milestone I’d crossed that day—instead of buying any of the subdued black, gray, or navy rain jackets in stock, I chose a bright orange anorak, size large, that looked positively nuclear.
One thing I hadn’t forgotten to pack was the first new pair of running shoes I’d bought in years. Since picking them up at an Asics store in Ginza, near my apartment in central Tokyo, they’d sat untouched in my closet. My concern had been that I was still too heavy to run without knee pain, and that taking it up before my body was ready might cause damage that couldn’t be undone without surgery. But the prospect of running on Alaskan roads I knew so well was irresistible. On my first day back I went straight from the airport to my hotel for a nap, then woke around 10 p.m. and laced up my shoes for a run along a lonely stretch of highway with mountains on one side and a glacier on the other. That far north, the midsummer sun sets late enough that it was still twilight when I set out for my first run in five years. It lasted just 10 minutes before turning into a walk and, physically, it felt awful. But emotionally, even spiritually, it felt like being reborn into my own body.
I ran again the next night, for 15 minutes, and for another 15 minutes two nights after that, still without knee pain. In July, when I got home, I started taking 20-minute runs every other day. Then 30 minutes six days a week. It was an especially hot, humid summer in Tokyo, so I woke each day before dawn to run along the banks of the Sumida River. Being able to run again changed everything, starting with my relationship to food. I’d never felt that taking GLP-1 drugs amounted to cheating, but there was something uncanny about the experience of losing weight without any exercise besides long walks with my dog. Stranger still was the sense that food amounted to nothing more than calories, numbers to be balanced against the abacus of my metabolism. Running restored the sense of some connection between the food I ate and the life I was living; it gave me back my hunger, not as I’d experienced it before Ozempic, but as an embodied feeling of depletion that returned some semblance of satisfaction to the act of eating. The best part of being able to run again, though, was out on the road, where putting one foot in front of the other for as long as I could manage made me feel as if my life was entirely, if briefly, within my own control.
My goal for an October trip to London was not to fit into any particular garment but to look as good as I could manage for dinner with a friend from graduate school. She was someone I’d always had a crush on, and though I had no intention of telling her this, it felt important to make an effort. Somewhere along the way I’d lost the confidence to reach out and pull people into my orbit. To get it back I would need to feel desirable once more, and while that wasn’t yet the case I wanted to at least remind myself how good it feels to desire someone; to sit across from the person you want to be with and let the light of their presence fill you with iridescent need.
Along with my charisma, I’d lost some of my ambition. Today’s media landscape privileges big personalities, relentless branding, and the kind of self-promotion I couldn’t stand once I got heavy enough to hate looking at myself in the mirror. The work of a magazine writer is already a kind of vanishing act in that it often requires fading far enough into the background for subjects to act as if you aren’t there at all. But in my case the act went on even after the stories I’d worked on got published. Time and again I turned down opportunities to appear on television programs and in documentaries promoting my work. This self-consciousness almost certainly kept me from advancing to whatever I imagined the next stage of my writing career might look like. At a certain point I just stopped caring.
By the time I flew to London I’d lost nearly 60 pounds—enough weight that the contours of my body started looking more like a grown man’s than an enormous baby’s. But each milestone brought a deepening obsession with tracking my progress toward some amorphous goal; I’d bought enough Ozempic to last through the end of the year, by which time I’d have lost nearly 80 pounds. This would bring me within a few pounds of leaving the “obese” range of the BMI scale to the realm of the merely “overweight.” Losing another 30 pounds will bring me within the “normal” weight range, at which point I will figure out how to manage my weight without Ozempic. And to manage the appetites, urges, and neuroses which may well intensify once I am no longer taking the drug. Like, for example, my obsessive fixation on constant downward progress.
The prospect of not weighing myself for the duration of my two-week trip to London was daunting enough that I nearly packed my bathroom scale. This was, I think, a form of post-traumatic stress from a decade of failed attempts at dieting. What made Ozempic so profoundly effective, for me, was that its results were immediate, leaving no room for the backsliding that can occur when progress is slow and any minor setback stirs up the sort of emotions one has grown used to burying beneath layers of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust. In the end, it was not the insanity of packing an odd-looking Japanese bathroom scale that prompted me to leave it at home, but rather the prospect of having to pull it out of my luggage and set it in a bin with my laptop and phone while going through airport security.
In London I found temporary relief from the hyper-self-awareness that had defined six months of weight loss. Each day, I woke up early and ran for just over an hour through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. I ate voraciously, walked aimlessly for hours on end, and perused every secondhand clothing store I happened upon.
A shrinking waistline meant I needed to buy smaller clothes every few months, and even without a goal weight in mind I knew I hadn’t yet gotten there. So spending money on a whole new wardrobe would have to wait. This is what my slimmer self has in common with my fatter self: an acute sense of my own body’s impermanence, once self-delusional, now aspirational, but in both cases fully in thrall to the tyranny of work-in-progress thinking. Overcoming this would take longer than any of the pants I’d packed could give me, and London’s secondhand clothing shops proved to be unexceptional. So, in lieu of deeper or more fashionable solutions, I turned to the Uniqlo store in London’s Mayfair district, where the Japanese fast-fashion juggernaut’s chinos suited me well enough. Later that night, over dinner with my beautiful friend from graduate school, I didn’t think about my past or future selves. I didn’t think about myself at all, in fact, but instead marveled at the mysteries of a body other than my own.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of GQ with the title “The Ozempic Diaries”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by John Clayton Lee
Grooming by Mari Kobayashi at Y’s C inc.
Styling assistant by Haru Shimizu