Nobody’s really talking about the cruel downside of losing weight in your 40s.
Or maybe they are, but they’re talking about it by a different name: Ozempic face. According to Northwell Health, “Ozempic face… describes the facial changes that can accompany rapid weight loss when using medications like Ozempic… for weight-loss treatment.” Northwell’s own bariatric surgeon, Dr Andrea Bedrosian, goes on to explain that “Ozempic will help you lose a lot of weight in a relatively short period of time [and] a lot of people will see that initial weight loss in their face first."
We’ve seen it in a lot of celebrities whose pictures we’re bombarded with online, whether we seek them out or not; suddenly, having lost “the weight” (that’s a gross term, isn’t it? “the weight”, like it’s this enormous burden we’re carrying around with us), they look older and more wrinkled than we’re used to seeing them.
But maybe it’s not just the fact that their faces have less fat on them – fat on the face, FYI, is a great substitute for Botox and filler – but that those “extra” few pounds (I hope you know that, when I say “extra’, here, I’m not implying that the weight they’ve lost was bad, but it’s hard to talk about this without kind of writing in a way that feels and seems fatphobic, which I would never intend or believe) were concealing the fact that celebrities are just like us and, just like us, they tend to get older as time goes on.
I’m not someone who has ever been especially concerned with aging or, at the very least, the effects of aging on my face or body. I’ve always had pretty clear, smooth skin, thanks to genetics and nothing else, honestly.
Right now I’m quite committed to a fairly elaborate skincare regimen thanks to a Caroline Hirons skin kit I treated myself to before Christmas, and while I can say my skin feels lovely and soft and moisturised, I could not say, in all honesty, that it looks any different than it did before I started this twice-a-day, six-step routine.
I got Botox once, for the single deep horizontal wrinkle between my eyes that’s also genetic (thanks, Mum!) and I think makes me look a bit cross, sometimes (even on the rare occasion when I’m not actually cross), but aside from that, I’ve never even been tempted to investigate anti-aging interventions for myself.
Until now.
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In the last few weeks – and this might also be because I’ve started filming a lot of reels for Instagram, the editing of which requires me to stare at myself for longer than I’d like – I’ve started to feel a lot of stupid, negative feelings about my face and the obvious signs of aging that have emerged, as I continue to lose weight.
Is this Ozempic face?! I’ve wondered to myself, more than once. (While also adding to cart ridiculous things I truly don’t believe work, like LED light masks and eye masks and extra-strength retinol I’m sure I would sincerely regret using.)
And, I mean, it is, right, because I’m losing weight not necessarily quicker than ever before – as previously flagged, I once lost 17lbs in a week; on another occasion, I got “slimmer of the week” in my local Slimming World group, as I’d lost 9lbs – but definitely more consistently. Previously, I’d lose large amounts, week to week, but then put on a few pounds the following week (and probably the week after that, too).
While there are definitely days, since starting Mounjaro, where I’ve put on a pound, only to go down on the scale the following day (I don’t generally weigh myself every day, as that way madness lies, but sometimes I do two days in a row for whatever reason), week to week, I’ve continued to lose weight. So that could be it, right?
But also – and this feels really important – the last time I was this weight was a decade ago. If ever I weighed less than this, it was in my teens, maybe going into my early twenties (I turned 41 last Friday). It stands to reason that my actual face, emerging from beneath the very youth-giving layers of fat I’m losing, is now the face of a middle-aged woman, when it was once the face of a child.
Like I said, I’ve never thought much about my face or body aging, because the signs of it have never been as obvious as they are now that I’ve lost “the weight”, or some of it.
And look: I truly believe aging is a gift. I’m not ashamed of being 41; I had a lot of questions, especially coming up to 40, about how I’d feel about the age itself, and my being it. I thought, many times, about writing a piece about it – and I might still – but I couldn’t quite grasp the contours of how I felt, not really. I was glad to have reached 40, honestly (like many emo teens who view themselves as artists of some sort, I truly believed I would die in my twenties), but I had a lot of feelings of shame and regret about the things I had once thought I would have achieved by the age of 40 and which, obviously, I hadn’t.
But I also have long placed so much value – I mean, did you read my book?! (you can still buy copies from Gutter Bookshop in Dublin at that link) – in how attractive I am to the opposite sex (ugh, I mean I KNOW). So looking at my face, which is suddenly starting to look its age, throws up a lot of insecurities for me that I could, quite honestly, do without.
There’s such a frustration to all of this, which largely boils down to how s**t and complex and difficult it is to be a woman. I’ve been trying, for pretty much my entire adult life (I first joined Weight Watchers at the age of 14), to lose weight – and now that science has finally found a way for me to do that (because, reminder, diets don’t work), I’m finding yet another thing to beat myself up about.
At moments like this, I think it might be time for me to do a deep dive into Jessica DeFino’s work “reporting on the absurd world of beauty culture”, and maybe have a re-read of Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, for solidarity purposes.
It all makes me think of the many, many people who’ve asked if I feel taking a GLP-1 is “worth” it. Is it “worth” it, to spend $210 a month to (eventually, hopefully) be thin? Is it “worth” it to take a weight loss medication, if you’ll have to take it for the rest of your life? Is it “worth” it to lose weight, if you’re then going to be worried about looking old and haggard as a result?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. What I will say is that, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to ask them. Fat people could just be fat, and be happy with their fat bodies and their fat faces, and thin people could just be thin, and be happy with their thin bodies and their thin faces, and none of us would be wondering whether we’re too fat or too thin or too old-looking or too young-looking, and all of the truly smart people who dedicate their lives to anti-aging and weight loss would, instead, be busy finding the cure for colorectal cancer (and more!), because what millennial isn’t absolutely bereft at the news that James van der Beek has died?!?
It’s a cruel world, and I mean that sincerely. (Thank you so much for taking time out of your day in this cruel, cruel world to follow and read my work. I appreciate it more than you could know.)
