The Other Ozempic Revolution
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On Labor Day weekend, 35 excited guests arrived at a campground in Newark, Ohio, for a retreat dedicated to “fat joy”—a place where people could swim, dance, do yoga, roast marshmallows, and sleep in cabins with others who had been made to feel guilty about their weight. The point of Camp RoundUp was “really diving into the joy of being at summer camp, the joy of being a fat little kid again,” Alison Rampa, one of the organizers, told me.
She and a friend, Erica Chiseck, had created Camp RoundUp to counter the shame and stigma that fat Americans report experiencing because of their size. They wanted to establish somewhere that “ladies and theydies” could feel comfortable in shorts or a swimsuit, with no awkwardness in the lunch line over portion sizes or second helpings.
But even somewhere as body-positive as Camp RoundUp couldn’t avoid a subject that has captivated the American media and divided couples, communities, and friendship groups. At a session called “Compassionate Conversations,” someone eventually said the word: Ozempic—the best-known name in a class of new weight-loss drugs.
At Camp RoundUp, the discussion began with bariatric surgery, a more established medical intervention. But the conversation quickly drifted toward Ozempic. “A couple of the girls were talking about how either they had been on it or they had been offered it by their doctor,” Chiseck told me. “They were just all sharing horror stories, basically,” Rampa told me. Known generically as semaglutide, the drug causes nausea and other side effects in some patients, a fact that Rampa found “triggering.” It meant that people “are voluntarily making themselves ill—to not look like us.”
