2.5 million Brits are on weight loss drugs and another 3.3 million are waiting to start. In America it is more than 30 million people, and children as young as 12 are being prescribed them.
Dr Courtney Raspin is an eating disorder specialist and psychologist, and co-author of The Weight Loss Prescription alongside Dr Max Pemberton. She has spent her career helping people understand their relationship with their bodies, weight and food, which makes her the person to ask what happens when a drug designed for one group of patients reaches everybody else.
In this conversation with Brogan Garritt-Smith she makes her case: that these drugs are a tool, powerful for the patient who genuinely needs them and dangerous for the one who does not; that most people come off them and put the weight back on four times faster than if they had lost it any other way; that what you lose along the way is muscle, which matters most for the people who can least afford to lose it; that the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry are paid twice over, once for making us unwell and once for the cure; that the drug dims hunger and dims everything else with it, the gym, alcohol, desire, the whole appetite for living; and that nobody is born hating their body, which means somebody taught us.
Brogan tells her own story in this one. She says that if these drugs had existed when she was younger she would have grabbed them with both hands, and what it took instead to get out.
We are being told that weight loss drugs are the safest and most effective way to lose weight.
Says Who?
She explains:
0:00 The cold open
1:30 Here's the question, Dr Raspin
2:38 You'll gain it back four times faster
4:17 Easier to sell a solution in a syringe
9:29 Nobody is born hating their body
11:29 The lesser of two evils, until it isn't
13:16 You upload a picture and the pen arrives
18:02 Children as young as twelve
21:09 The lights go dim on everything
24:18 The three phases, and the one nobody does
28:27 A real life experiment on the public, in real time
31:04 The pills are coming
33:34 Who benefits, and where there is no money
34:25 How you rebuild a relationship with food
36:39 My son made me heal my relationship with food
42:09 So let's settle it
44:08 After
Says Who? with Brogan Garritt-Smith. New episodes weekly.
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