If the teen was taking Ozempic 'for her health,' shouldn't she have been unhealthy?

Hello—oh, man. I got my second bout of COVID this week and even though I have my booster, it’s somehow worse this time? Mask up if you are traveling. The flu-y symptoms are not even as bad as the way that I will look up and find myself standing in the living room holding a coffee filter, trying to remember what it is that I was trying to do. I have yet to do anything without a mistake in the last few days, swear I will rest after this, and have done my best here with this newsletter~

The Liftcord got a good discussion going about an article that published this week at The Cut, titled “An American Girlhood in the Ozempic Era.” After reading it, I felt that articles like this can confuse several issues, so I’m going to unpack a little here.

The article focuses on Maggie, a young girl who, despite the diet and exercise efforts of her mother, indexes extremely high for body weight. Maggie is fit, per a doctor, and has no significant health issues.

The article then goes on to list all of the health issues that a very small minority of children with high body weight do have (pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease, coronary artery problems, sleep apnea, too-early menstruation). For instance, between 2 and 5 percent of kids have hypertension (which means 95 to 98 percent of them don’t). Over and over again, individual Maggie is burdened with the problems of other people with different lives, including her father:

Brett had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and was prescribed Victoza back in 2015, and Erika is convinced that decades of irregular eating and night shifts on the railroad had made him sick. The Ervies didn’t want the same fate to befall Maggie.

If those health issues have become more prevalent and are such a concern for kids, it seems significant, then, that Maggie does not have any of those issues; she’s functional and fit. If being fat in and of itself is a health threat, period, as many, including the writer of this piece, still believe; if there are so many fat people with health issues who “prove” the danger of being fat; why focus on this girl, who is fat but otherwise active, healthy, and seemingly happy (save the unhappiness that comes from suffering the projections of her mother, peers, and various doctors)? It’s a strange choice, at minimum.