GLP-1s can be life-changing for women

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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Women in our society are judged on appearance. Overweight and obese women are downgraded in many ways, especially in relationships and jobs. These are essential areas in womens’ lives.

A recent study shows a stunning impact of GLP-1s in womens’ lives.

GLP-1–Induced Weight Loss and the Female Obesity Penalty

Rebecca Diamond, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2026

Working Paper 35387
DOI 10.3386/w35387
Issue Date June 2026

GLP-1 medications generate large weight loss and may also alter social and economic outcomes. Using the Understanding America Study, I compare women starting GLP-1s for weight loss with matched women who would like to start a GLP-1 but have not.

Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline non-employed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters.

Existing partnerships do not dissolve, and already-employed women show no upward job mobility. The pattern suggests that part of the female obesity penalty operates at new-match formation rather than only through health or incumbent productivity. [end quote]

“You only get one chance to make a first impression.”

When a man won’t ask a fat woman out for that first date, or when an employer won’t interview a fat woman, that woman loses the potential for her life improving.

This is a truly stunningly huge effect.

Approximately 69.4% of American adult women have overweight or obesity, according to data from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. When broken down specifically, roughly 27.5% of women are classified as overweight, and an additional 41.3% to 41.9% are classified in the obesity category.

GLP-1 drugs act on the brain’s reward center. They are psychoactive and affect the dopamine receptors.

Many users find that medication-induced regulation of the brain’s reward system can quiet obsessive thoughts about food, relieve addiction-related behaviors, and reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Some patients report a general dulling of emotions or difficulty feeling joy (anhedonia). Experts suggest this might happen because the medication dampens the brain’s reward response to both food and other previously enjoyed activities.

The market for GLP-1 drugs is immense. Since their use has expanded from diabetes treatment relatively recently it’s likely that off-label uses will expand. If I was a doctor treating addiction I would try GLP-1s even in patients who aren’t overweight.

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are the largest manufacturers. These are blockbuster drugs.

Wendy

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Definitely my daughter’s experience was a reduction in food noise. Whether that was a “habitual” thing she had (she certainly never had issues prior to the last couple of years or so before the ultimate breakup with her marriage) or chemically induced from her migraine meds (her neurologist had confirmed similar stories to hers) within a couple of days of her first shot, she reported that she was back to her normal self. Weightloss began almost immediately too as she immediately reverted to her former, disciplined eating habits.

No longer using the meds and no return of the FEED ME feeling. A worthwhile investment for her.

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What is food noise?

DB2

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Being unable to overcome the FEED ME triggers even when you know you’ve just eaten a decent meal (decent for energy content and macronutrient profile) and even when you can stand in front of the mirror and see the consequences.

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“Food noise” happens in the brain, not in the stomach.

Food noise is thinking about food constantly and obsessively. It’s like an addiction. It leads to addictive behavior - buying foods that we know are unhealthy and eating when we aren’t hungry. (The definition of “addiction” is uncontrollably doing harmful things.)

This doesn’t make sense to a normal, healthy person – because it’s NOT normal or healthy.

But we are surrounded by foods that are delicious, cheap and designed to be addictive, packaged in bright, alluring packaging and advertised everywhere. This stimulates dopamine in the brain which is addictive. Women have to think about food in order to plan family meals, shop and cook so there really isn’t a way to stop thinking about food.

That’s why millions of people have food noise.

The authorities say that food noise can be decreased by eating healthy meals with plenty of protein and making sure we don’t have any vitamin deficiencies. That makes sense. I’m sure it helps.

But the key to food noise is that it isn’t the same as hunger. People who eat due to the cravings caused by food noise often aren’t hungry and often are already overweight.

Giving GLP-1s to an obese person is analogous to giving buproprion to a person who is trying to quit smoking. It acts on the dopamine receptors in the brain to shut down the craving.

Wendy

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One of the things that I’ve started to wonder about in this context is, what comes first…food noise (the cause of the overeating) or excess adiposity (food noise as a result of). I haven’t had multiple discussions with multiple folk about eating habits for about 20 years now but prior to that, I had about 30 years of such conversations every workday. A good many such conversations concerned weight management. Not necessarily part of my remit but rather something inevitable, as so many of my colleagues and/or employees were themselves on diets of some sort.

Back then relatively few of my patients were truly obese but I’ll wager a good many were on the way there. I cannot recall anyone referring to food noise as an uncontrollable driver of their weight gain… but a good many certainly demonstrated weird ideas and unshakablebeliefs regarding energy balance etc. as it applied to themselves, and presumably acted on those beliefs. It’s quite incongruous to be in the same room as women almost half my age confident in the knowledge that weight gain is inevitable as you get older/hit menopause etc.

One of the reasons I couldn’t decide if the daughter’s experience with food noise was a consequence of getting “habituated” to overeating, or if her migraine meds had truly had an effect on her satiety centers in a way that lasted even after her migraines lessened in intensity and she was able to drop the offending meds.

So, not so much rambling thought processes as stumbling on the idea that earlier intervention … at those first 20lbs or so of pre pathology pounds (or vanity pounds for the denialists) … might well be an even more valid use of these meds rather than wait until demonstrable and possibly irreversible pathology has taken hold.

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This is a paradigm shift. But well worth exploring.

If a person has enough self-awareness to say, “I have food noise in my mind and that’s why I am gaining weight from overeating/ inappropriate foods/ eating emotionally” maybe that should be an indication that the doctor should prescribe a drug to prevent relentless weight gain.

The Weight Watchers organization is set up similar to Alcoholics Anonymous for the same reason. These are both addictions. But if there is a drug that can be taken to get the addiction under control without years of meetings and self-discipline (which many people eventually fail) wouldn’t that be preferable?

Wendy

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Of course. It may make it easier to find a man.

intercst

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This is causing a secondary problem though. Because men are judged by appearance, mostly on height, and on paycheck, there has become a severe shortage of “eligible men” for all the new thinner women! This is a real thing and has rapidly become a problem. And because there’s no drug to increase height or paycheck, it’s not an easily solved problem.

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…or, apparently, misogyny (don’t forget that important factor)

I’m sure that, if it were a worthwhile exercise, this alleged problem might be more than compensated for by smart, successful women who found the confidence to leave an abusive relationship when they reignited the spark they thought they’d lost under the layer of fat and abuse.

This “side effect” of GLP-1 receptor agonists has to be just about one of the daftest I’ve come across :roll_eyes:

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How does misogyny fit in? I would marry/cohabit with Sidney Greenstreet either.

DB2

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The real problem is that women are graduating from high school, college and graduate school in higher numbers than men. The severe problem is finding a similarly educated husband in our era of assortive mating (where people marry others of a similar education).

Wendy

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I’m finding these conversations around GLP-1s fascinating on multiple levels.

One is in regards to my late wife. She was overweight to obese for her entire life. She had an unhealthy relationship with food in a way that those who haven’t lived with it can’t seem to understand. But folks like Wendy and VeeEnn are touching all the bases that I witnessed during our decades together.

Another is how this empowerment of people - and especially women - brings out the worst in some people. The wild claims and excuses that folks make who haven’t experienced or witnessed up close the issues around obesity are amazing to me.

It seems that in addition to an epidemic of food related issues, there is also an epidemic of a lack of empathy for our fellow humans.

GLP-1s are making lives better for an awful lot of people. Yet rather than celebrate this, people seem to be threatened by it. It’s fascinating to witness.

—Peter

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@VeeEnn Carrying your paradigm shift to its logical conclusion…

  1. GLP-1s are psychotropic drugs. They treat addictive eating which can be life-threatening. Negative health effects (such as ASCVD and insulin resistance) can start to build up even when the patient is overweight (not necessarily obese) and pre-diabetic. (To make this personal, I have a 40% blockage of my left anterior descending coronary artery (the “widowmaker”) which my cardiologist shrugged off as inconsequential. BMI 28. Fasting blood glucose 95 but it has gone over 100 in the past so pre-diabetic if I don’t control my carbs. Insulin 11. Lp(a) 9.)

  2. Doctors prescribe antidepressants for depression (which usually isn’t life-threatening). Doctors usually don’t wait until the depression is so deep that the patient’s life is threatened. They prescribe earlier in the process to improve quality of life.

  3. If prevention is far preferable than trying to cure an advanced condition (and I agree with you that it is!) then doctors should prescribe GLP-1s to patients who are overweight if they report food noise/ addiction. This is similar to reporting depression since there is no direct test for what’s going on in a person’s head.

Given this logical sequence I should start a GLP-1.

This would dramatically expand the market potential for GLP-1s. An astonishing number of American women already take antidepressants and/ or anti-anxiety drugs. They could add a GLP-1. Maybe if they lost weight they wouldn’t be so depressed.

Wendy

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THIS!! Times 10.

When I was at dental school (early 1970s) my class had 12 women out of 42 students…a sharpish uptick from prior years. Corresponding medical students had similar ratio. Fast forward to daughter’s vet school class (class of 2007) there were about half a dozen blokes out of a class of 60 odd.

This dearth of similarly educated men is how come daughter ended up with the Lump of Foul Deformity…although it didn’t start out like that. Kindness and consideration to someone who seemed to have suffered mightily from an abusive childhood, lack of opportunities, bad luck etc etc. Nothing at all that he could be held accountable for (see a pattern here?) He was a foreman on a building site with no college degree, a failed marriage and a slew of debt (allegedly run up by his wife). I saw a dreary, uneducated blob and likely freeloader…she saw the forlorn puppy no one wants to adopt. HE saw a gravy train there in the station and hitched his dusty old caboose to the high performance engine and the rest is history.

Of my daughter’s undergraduate, high achieving female cronies, all but one have settled for a suboptimal partner. Divorce/child custody law is the winner here and in the future.

Hint: for anyone with young women set to go places in the family, get the background check done early at the first sign of some low rent individual sniffing around

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You get a rec just for the Richard III quote!

Pete

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Full confession … I cheated​:face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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LOL. I gots to get me one of them mugs!

Pete

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Wait, what? I hadn’t heard this. How common is this problem?

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High quality cursing and insult is an endangered high art — I need to get back in practice.

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