To have an Ozempic personality is essentially to have no personality at all. We all know dieters are never any fun but the ennui that envelops some people on GLP-1s is something more profound.
This is not depression — it’s not even as thrilling as that — but what a doctor might call a case of the “blah, blah, blahs”, where you just lose your enthusiasm for everything. Or, to use the technical term, anhedonia, which is a kind of emotional flattening.
It is not a listed adverse reaction of using GLP-1s but The New York Times is reporting anecdotal cases of people who have gone off exercise and sex, and have no motivation to do anything other than lie on the couch listlessly doomscrolling Instagram.
Having done my own stint on the diet wonder drugs, I know precisely what having Ozempic personality feels like. When I was taking it I was often struck by an odd feeling of nothingness and the things that usually made me excited started to have less of an impact.
The sunshine? Didn’t care. Sunsets become meh. Even admiring your newly skinny body in the mirror is just a bit dull. It robbed me of my usual Pollyannaishness (which in some ways probably made me less annoying).
At first I put the flatness I felt on Ozempic down to the fact that I had stepped off the sugar rollercoaster my body was usually on, but friends and studies report similar feelings of dullness. Some told me they weren’t just no longer hungry but found they couldn’t be bothered to leave the house.
It is Kate Moss’s infamous adage “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” come to life. Except in this case there is nothing to feel except skinniness.
One theory about this effect is that GLP-1s circumvent the part of the brain that rewards pleasure so users don’t get the same dopamine hit from doing the things that would usually light them up. As a result they learn that thrill-seeking is pointless. And so it also becomes pointless trying to do anything. (Although for some users this same effect has enabled them to cut out harmful drinking and drugs.)
Yes, I lost a couple of stone in a few months but I also lost my social life.
When you stop eating you quickly realise that 90 per cent of socialising is eating. All those long drunken lunches vanish from your diary and with them the romantic dinners, breakfasts in bed, going for a Sunday roast with your partner and cocktails with your friends. Instead you are left with long days of long hours to fill. What is the appeal of going out to watch other people graze over three courses when after a starter you’re full? In the end you start wondering if it’s even worth leaving the house.
The jabs put you off drinking too so the buzz of getting hammered has gone. One friend on Mounjaro told me she had noticed, having been a keen binge drinker, that when she went out with friends now she would still be sipping her first drink while they were on their third round, cackling about their next night out. And not just because she didn’t have room to drink much but because she had lost the lust for life that usually fuelled her to party on.
Even worse, some users say it puts you off sex. Although, thank God, I was saved from this side-effect.
Still, another friend blames her GLP-1 habit for killing her relationship. After she lost her motivation to do anything (because life just felt so bland, so what was the point of going out?) her boyfriend left her because she had become so dull.
He had supported the jabs enthusiastically and enjoyed how hot she became but he had not expected her to lose the gregarious qualities he liked about her in the first place. (I could have told you that’s the curse of going out with skinny women.)
On the flip side, doctors report some users find diet drugs have brilliant effects on their mental health — improving their self-esteem, reducing their shame around food and blessing them with the uplifting perkiness that any weight loss gives you — as they find their new body showered with compliments and get a kick out of buying new clothes.
Certainly the advantages of being slim in a world that rewards thinness are enough for some of my friends. One says the only thrill she needs these days anyway is fitting into her jeans.
