By now, we’re all familiar with the newfound popularity of Ozempic, a drug created to help manage type 2 diabetes, being used as the new miracle weight loss drug. Recent studies have shown that the active ingredient in Ozempic, semaglutide, can cause weight loss and in 2021, the FDA approved a drug with a higher dose of semaglutide to treat “obesity.” However, the popularity of this new drug is increasing the weight of the pressure to pursue thinness. The return of low-rise jeans and Kim Kardashian shrinking her BBL were some of the first harbingers of the reversion back to a time when only our phones were allowed to be “thick.” It’s clear that the unlearning and undoing of a century’s worth of harm by the rise of the “body positivity movement” is regarded as just another trend.

I was born on the heels of Generation Y, so my mind and body developed during the ‘Got Milk?’ propaganda of the early 2000s. Truth be told, if Ozempic was introduced when I was growing up, I probably would’ve been eager to get my hands on some myself. I was raised—even in an African immigrant household—to believe that the worst thing you could possibly be is fat. I grew up wondering if the taste of Slim Fast would make me diminish and dance like the women in the commercials. I lusted after those dry, unappetizing Weight Watchers pastries because I craved the feeling of eating chocolate without immediately feeling guilty afterward. I felt the disappointment in my mother’s gaze whenever she bought me clothes where the tag had double digits. I longed for a weight loss version of a get-rich-quick scheme to make the numbers go back down. Just 15 years ago, you’d be hard-pressed to find any dissenting voices concerned about these weight loss fads to make the impressionable masses shrink instantly.

So what’s changed?

In the past 10 years, there has been more mainstream recognition of many social justice issues, likely aided by the egalitarianism of social media. One of many issues brought to the forefront is the widely-accepted marginalization of fat people. For the first time, fat people had the power and the platform to be visible on our own terms, tell our own stories, and call for the advancement of body positivity.

The body-positive movement’s origins have always been political. The movement was started by fat Black women in the ‘60s and largely addressed the fact that fatphobia is rooted in anti-Black racism. However, despite Black women being targets of medical fatphobia as well as their looks being used to undermine their leadership in the women’s rights and civil rights movements, the fat acceptance groups that followed also chose to center whiteness and undermine Black women’s contributions. And the reason why it’s so easy for people to hop on the Ozempic train is that the mainstream commodification of the body-positive movement is as flavorless and diluted as the low-fat diet regimens of yesteryear.