Mostly I have been just sprawling, its fleeting and beautiful. But I would like to turn around and see the path I pave. Because of that and me wanting to improve my writing i'm going to start posting write-ups and discussions from my anthropology units I have made.

The unit we got at the moment is called medical anthropology, so I have talked about a couple things like biohacking western biomedicine and pharma.

Ozempic and the Body Politic

The way I was imagining this discussion post was going to be analysing Ozempic's place in the Obesity Epidemic through a lens of transhumanism/biohacking I.e.The use of technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints. -(https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/transhumanism))
I decided that, that take was a stretch, yet the topic still perplexed me. 

The weird thing about Ozempic isn't the drug. It's that we view it being used as cheating. 

The study guide notes that in the age of Ozempic we live in, there is a pressure to lose weight "the right way" without medication. 
Nobody tells a diabetic to beat it with willpower. Nobody insists on getting over an infection without antibiotics.
So this stance is bizarre if obesity really is a disease or just another social construct (I think its a social construct and I'll get into why) 

This suggests the demand was never about health. It was about labour and what the makeup of a good worker would be. 
So the thin body only counts if it was earned through hunger, discipline, visible suffering.
If fatness reads as laziness (as the guide says), thinness has to read as effort. Ozempic delivers the result and skips the work to get there. The rationalisation that follows tells us what the body politic was actually trying to get at (not fat, but the performance of self-discipline.)
This is conveniently something you can blame on the individual, when they "fail at self-discipline". 

Semaglutide (the chemical in Ozempic) was built as a diabetes drug. The weight loss was an accident and it doesn't work on the stomach, it works in the brain. (I'm not going to pretend I know how glucose and insulin work, but as I understand it was developed to make the half-life of a hormone needed for Type 2 diabetics extend from a couple minutes to a week per injection.)

Interestingly the trials reported reduced cravings and changed food preferences. It doesn't make you eat less, you just want less. 
(Pharmaceutical company be like "yo we could make money off this") 
The consequence being, to the body politic, willpower just got relocated from the moral domain into a receptor.

However Ozempic isn't given out to anyone. It's reserved for diagnosed diabetics. Or people with the money and means to do an expensive round of Telehealth consultations. Gatekept behind a paywall. 
The elite body always signals what the masses can't have. When calories were scarce, the elite were fat. Now calories are cheap and time is scarce. So the elite body signals gym memberships, personal trainers, whole foods, leisure.
Thinness is now the visible consumption of time and self-discipline.

P.S. - Got a friend to proof read and apparently Indian Pharmaceuticals have already have cloned ozempic replacement meds for cheap. 
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-03-20/ozempic-copies-at-14-in-india-as-generic-glp-1-era-starts