It Was Great to Lose Weight on the New Drugs. I Also Experienced a Bizarre Downside.
I have a complicated relationship with my ass. When I was a Black girl growing up in a majority-white, middle-class milieu in Northern California in the 1970s and 1980s, there were standards of beauty that did not include a butt that rode high on the legs and protruded outward. I was so self-conscious about my ass that in the 105-degree Central Valley summers, I’d skulk around the community pool in my bathing suit with my hips tucked forward, tilted up and under to diminish my butt’s obvious ampleness to everyone around me.
As I got older and “big” butts—read: “ethnic”—became not just more acceptable but downright desirable, my consternation about the size and shape of my rear abated somewhat, though not entirely. That milieu I grew up in was replicated in college circles and then in professional ones, which is to say that for most of my adult life, I was surrounded by white guys whose ideas of what constitutes female beauty involved women who were a lot whiter and skinnier than I am. I quit tucking my butt; I didn’t try to make myself physically smaller, but I was still embarrassed by it, and by my plus-size physique. Most of the time I refused to wear clothes that might draw attention to my curves in any way, shape, or form.
And now? Most of those curves are gone. This past January I decided to go on one of the new, much-discussed “miracle” weight loss drugs—the one called Mounjaro—and, over the course of four months, lost a staggering amount of weight: about 40 pounds. (My doctor said I was a “model” patient, a compliment that I am not exactly sure is the sort I was looking for.) But with the extra weight, most of which was concentrated in the middle part of my body, muscle mass was also quick to go, despite my daily hiking regimen. Which meant: bye-bye butt. What’s left is what some call a back with a crack. It’s what I call a goddamn shame.
I thought I was alone in my frustration until, halfway through writing this piece, I got the (obvious) idea to type the phrases “Mounjaro butt” and “Ozempic butt” into Google. (Ozempic is the name for the most widely-used of the medications in this class of drugs.) Lo and behold: There were results! A lot of them! A June 2023 article in the New York Post called “Ozempic butt” a “bizarre side effect” of the weight loss drug, likening the appearance of some users’ asses to that of a pancake. (This is an apt description.) Prevention and Women’s Health magazines also published stories in the summer mentioning that complaints about the ass-effects of these weight loss drugs have skyrocketed, and have even gone viral on TikTok.
And it doesn’t help that I’m now at the half-century mark. As one doctor interviewed by Prevention put it, “Older patients have less capacity for producing new collagen and elastic fibers, so they are at a higher risk” of sagging skin. This is relevant to my butt. It would also explain what’s going on with my underarms.
I didn’t sign up for this. When I began Mounjaro I was well aware of “Ozempic face,” a term coined to describe, as the New York Times calls it, the “facial aging” that can occur alongside the weight loss that accompanies use of these popular drugs. And as my so-called weight loss journey commenced, I began to see evidence of it happening to me, the hollowing out of the areas around my eye sockets and cheeks. Depending on the day, this looked either good—hello, cheekbones!—or ghastly. Some mornings I am positively taken aback by the dark circles I find under my eyes when I look in the mirror for the first time.
I was also horrified to see that the skin below my face had begun to sag: The speed at which the Mounjaro-assisted weight loss occurred loosened up the skin underneath my chin—giving me a dreaded chicken-neck look about 10 years too soon. (If I had more money I’d probably resort to plastic surgery to fix it.) I didn’t realize how bad it was until a few weeks ago when I appeared on a video chat for a popular digital show. I didn’t place my laptop high enough to make sure that the camera would be angled down, not up, at my face; the result was a wince-inducing shot of my neck. It’s the sort of thing that a single woman like me hopes no prospective suitor ever sees.
Most days, the pluses outweigh the minuses: The way I feel in my body, and in my clothes, has made me much more confident, and I’ve reached a weight that makes sense for me. I’ve also cut back on my dosage, and the dosing itself: I now take Mounjaro at a lower milligram amount, and I take it less often—once every two weeks instead of once every week—to keep my weight stable. (I’ve heard horror stories about how easily some people gain the weight back.)
Even so, I feel bad about my butt. That ample—I’d actually say “big”—ass of mine has withered away to virtually nothing, and I’m not sure what to do about it other than embark on a vigorous regimen of squats and weights in the hopes that some semblance of shape will return. Sometimes I reach back to grab my ass to imagine what it would feel like in the hands of a man and I wince: Whereas it was once soft but firm, it’s now just … soft. Diminished. Droopy. Deflated. Unalluring and not sexy at all. Ironically, even though it, and my thighs, are much smaller, and I can ostensibly fit into outfits I’ve kept from my skinnier days—like that sexy silk Daryl K jumpsuit with the zipper running up the front—I’m still wearing loose, baggy clothes in order to hide my body; in this case, my square, flat, SpongeBob-like butt.
As for my face, well, as Catherine Deneuve reportedly once said, “At a certain age, you have to choose between your face and your ass.” Until recently, I was lucky, even at that “certain age,” and despite being overweight, to have both a youthful visage and a curvy butt. But it turns out that for me, at least with regard to my decision to take a powerful weight loss drug, I didn’t really have a Deneuvian choice at all. And that sucks ass.
