The Decibel - Skinny, Inc. Part 3: Body image in the age of Ozempic

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

The first episode of Skinny Inc. was all about the science behind GLP-1s, and the second episode was about the business, from the pharmaceutical companies who make GLP-1s to the insurance plans that may or may not cover it. Today, we’re exploring how the so-called “Ozempic era,” affects people’s mental health. First, business owner Maiyhet Burton tells us how using a GLP-1 has helped her body image. Globe health reporter Kelly Grant details how experts are split on the effect of GLP-1s on weight stigma, and psychotherapist Zoë Bisbing explains how the body positive movement helps her clients. Plus, Tigress Osborn, executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance on why the popularity of GLP-1s shows how far we have to go with anti-fat discrimination, and Ary Mahraj and Emily Donahue from the National Eating Disorder Information Centre tell us how people with eating disorders may be impacted by the constant discussions about weight loss. Finally, Dr. Stephen Glazer, Medical Director for the Bariatric Surgical Program at Humber River Hospital in Toronto on how weight stigma can be internalized. You can contact the National Eating Disorders Information Centre at their toll-free helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or visit their website. Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, it's Cheryl. Today we're bringing you the final part of Skinny Inc, a three-part series on the rise of drugs like Ozempic and Wagovi, and how they're reshaping the health, business, and cultural landscape. This week's episode deals with the cultural impact of these drugs. If you'd like to hear part one and two, click the link in the show notes. My name is Maiet Bertin. I am a clothing designer and manufacturer and artist. Myette is 55 years old and she has two kids. We met up at her store in Toronto's West End one cold winter day and sat down between her sewing machines to talk about her quest to lose weight. You know, I got pregnant again, had the second kid, and then that was it. Like, I don't know, my metabolism broke. For years, doctors were like, just lose weight.

They would tell you to lose weight. Lose weight. And I'd be like, yeah, that's why I'm here. I'm trying to lose weight, but you're telling me to just go lose weight to lose weight? Like, what am I supposed to do? I've done everything. I think my aunt's experience is a lot like many people's, especially many women's, and she speaks about it very honestly.

Women talk amongst ourselves, and I have women in my shop every day, and we're like, what the hell, man? Like, why try, like, what is, why? Why is this happening? Why? How can I can't stop it? like, you know, and I would look at skinny people and be like, oh, yeah, must be nice. I want to share Maiet's story because up until now, I think we haven't heard enough from someone actually using a GLP1 for weight loss.

In this final episode of Skinny Inc., we're looking into how the culture we live in plays into how we think about weight gain, weight loss, eating disorders, and body image, and how we talk about GLP1s. I'm Kashima-Hilovich, and I'm Kashimahe, and I'm. And this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. I am in the fashion world. I wanted to be the size that I was before. As Maiet steadily gained weight over the years,

she tried a lot of things to feel better in her body, including accepting it as it was. I accepted my plus size status, and I catered to that environment and to those people. I was very understanding of that size and selling that size to people who needed a beautiful clothing. so you don't have to feel like you're struggling. But that didn't really work for her.

Myatt had known for years that she has sleep apnea and PCOS, or polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder which can cause weight gain. About a year ago, she decided to go to a bariatric doctor who ran some tests. So now we have PCOS, sleep apnea, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance. And I was like, actually, thank God there's something that points to something. The doctor put her on a strict no-carb diet that was similar to the very popular keto diet you might have heard of. So that worked. I did that very strictly and I was hungry.

Like, hungry. Were geopians on your radar at this point? They were. And I was like, hell no, I'm doing it the hard way. I'm doing it my way. I'm going to do it the natural, healthy way. I'm not going to do that. Why was that important to you?

Oh, just I grew up that way. I wanted to eat healthy food. I didn't ever want to take a drug. I just didn't want to be on a prescription drug. I didn't want to be beholden. You know, I had hippie parents. I know I'm beholden to the man. I don't want to have the drug companies controlling me.

Still, Maiet wasn't losing the weight she wanted to. So she switched doctors and was put on a basically liquid diet, made up of smoothies that were nutritionally balanced. I still had what I would consider at that point, quite a bit of extra cortisol belly and like a double-teacherous. chin and I was like, this is bullshit. Like, I've worked so hard for these 30 pounds and this is it. Like, this is where I plateau. This is it. And I'd stayed that way for months. I thought, like, I don't know how, like, people were wondering, how much longer can you do this for? Like, are you,

you know, do you have a mental issue here? Like, just accept yourself. And I was like, no, no. I'm just wondering, why is my body not doing this thing that's supposed to be able to do? At this point, Maiet said her blood work was coming back normal. No insolence resistance, no pre-diabetes. But she was still on a liquid diet. So despite all of her trepidation about taking a prescription medication, she considered a GLP1. I just missed chewing.

And still I was having like hunger and cravings. But I've been on the manjarro now for two months, maybe three. I've lost 20 pounds in three months. But I'm doubling down on all the things I've learned are like in my tool belt and I'm on this drug. So it's really working for me. Now, my aunt is back eating three solid meals a day, though she's still counting calories, still on Monjaro, and still resistance training. She gets a lot of information and tips about GLP1s and weight loss online. And unlike a lot of people, she actually finds it quite empowering.

At this point, a lot of people are shy to talk about it. That's never done well for humanity. And some people are like, it's kind of uncouth to talk about these health things and it's boring and whatever. But actually, like, really, I think health is so important. I think it's one of the most important things. So sharing information is the only way we're going to figure out what's happening. And the GLP1 has other benefits. like I never knew what people talked about food noise.

Like I didn't know what that was necessarily until I didn't have it. And then I was like, holy crap. That's how I felt like in most of my life after I got pregnant, I'm hungry. I'm hungry. There's a little voice, but because of my extreme, like, what do you call that? Strength of purpose. Discipline. Yeah, that's the word.

That's a word I would use to describe you. I have a very strong discipline. I would just ignore it. You know, and that's stressful too. Maiette told me that she feels being on a GLP1 has also improved her mental health. Yeah, and what does it feel like now being very at least close to your, the weight you want to be? It's the best feeling, honestly. Like, I look in the mirror and I'm like, oh yeah, yeah.

It was just something that I had just like accepted but was like not happy with. and I also didn't like going up the stairs and being out of breath. It also gives her more peace of mind about her health in the future. It's like I'm fighting for my life, basically, and my quality of life. My idea is I'm young enough now and healthy enough to like fix this problem so that I can like Kime Mount Kilimanjaro or go camping up north with my grandkids. What do you think you would be doing now if you hadn't had access to a GLP1? I would have probably given up trying to lose weight.

I would have just tried to maintain and felt shitty. I mean, I heard Serena Williams talk about this too. She's like an athlete who has like personal chefs and like doctors and athletic trainers in her world to help her do everything she needs to do. And she couldn't lose it either after having two kids. And now, are we supposed to lose it? I don't know. This is another question. Like, if it's going to cause long-term effects of health problems, then yeah, we've got to be able to be healthy.

And really, like, I don't foresee being able to quit working at any time. Like, Freedom 65, that's a dream for the last generation. I'm looking after elderly parents and kids. Like, the rich are getting richer, the poorer are getting poorer. I'm, like, trying to stay in the middle, but it's. like a struggle. So it's kind of like I better be healthy for as long as I goddamn can so that I can keep you a functioning person. I cannot express to you enough how hard it is for people who badly want to lose weight and can't. This is Kelly Grant, our health reporter. And some of the

people I spoke with just described like what it was like to feel like every room you walked into, everybody's looking at you. I'm sure everybody isn't looking at you, but that might be how you feel if you're a person who's obese moving through the world. Now, certainly injected medications are not the only way to solve that problem. We could start by, as a society, treating people who are overweight and obese far better than we treat them today. And that is something that we should do regardless of what happens with OZEMPIC or any other medication. I asked Kelly a that I kept thinking about again and again. How does the availability and the popularity of GLP-1s affect weight stigma? The weight stigma that's such a big part of our society.

It depends on the experts you talk to, but there's kind of two interesting threads that I felt myself pulling while I was having these interviews. On the one hand, it had seemed to lessen the stigma a little bit because watching somebody you know who's been overweight and has worked hard and tried and tried and just couldn't get there, watching them then take a medication and then lose weight, in some ways made the thin people around them go, oh, wait a minute. Like, if this is something that you can turn on and off with a medication, then like, this is more than willpower and it's certainly more than fault. On the other hand, there are people who I spoke with experts, sociologists, researchers who fear that ozemping a drugs like it will make it socially unacceptable to be anything other than thin.

Now it's like, well, actually, you do have a choice. You do have a solution. Take this injection, right? And your problem can be solved for you. As we talked about earlier, it absolutely cannot be solved for everybody. And there are some people who don't want to solve it. But the point is that you've probably noticed that there's a lot fewer overweight celebrities out there, right? People who have the money and means to get their hands on these medications and who are themselves constantly, you know, in the eye of a camera and being judged on how they look have gone out and gotten their hands on GLP1 drugs and lost weight. And as we see fewer and fewer depictions of different body sizes in public. spaces, it makes thinness seem like it is the only acceptable posture for people. So that is where the kind of downside of GLP-1s and stigma may come around.

It just might make it less okay to be anything other than thin. After the break, we'll explore what the body positivity movement has to say about the rising popularity of GLP-1s. A lot of people hear body positivity and they think feeling positivity, about your body. Like, right? It's writing the title. But that's really not what it is.

This is Zoe Bisbing. She's a psychotherapist who specializes in disordered eating. She also runs a platform for parents and teachers called body positive home. And she lives in New York City. It's really a radical belief that emerges that no matter what you look like, no matter your size, shape, level of ability, no matter what body you live in, you deserve a positive relationship with it. But the key word here is,

It doesn't mean you can access. And I think that's the piece that people don't understand. Zoe spoke with our online culture reporter Samantha Edwards about what this moment has been like for those who believe in body positivity. It's very hard to have a positive relationship with your body if you live in a marginalized body, right? If you live in a body that's been harmed or bullied or is chronically being told there's something wrong with you. So I could have body positive values and that I believe that this is just true for human beings, but I might struggle with my own body image, right? In your own practice, how have you heard clients talk about body positivity?

What are the kind of the key differences or changes that you've noticed? I think the biggest change is in the context of GLP-1s. I think that there was clear before time now. Everyone on TikTok is showing there before and after, having lost 160 pounds. And a lot of my clients have been really helped by seeing whether they're influencers or actors or whoever in their social media feed showing evidence of living in all sorts of shapes and sizes, particularly larger bodies, right? So maybe those influencers who were really powerfully influencing that person to say,

accept yourself as you are. Look at me. I'm fat and living my life is now transformed. all of a sudden that support and that sort of feeling of I thought I belonged is eroding. And so I think that there's a understandable like lack of trust. Like can I still work on body acceptance? Should I? You know, there's a lot of betrayal.

There's a lot of grief. And, you know, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect these influencers that I don't think they owe us anything, actually. I have a deep belief in body autonomy and like, there's still a human being living with their own lived experience and trauma and health issues and who knows, right? And I think the other thing is, I do think it invites people to be like, okay, you have to stand in your own decision. That's one of the things about therapy. It's like the grownups aren't coming. Our parents were imperfect.

Like we have to stand in our own lives and surround ourselves with trustworthy people who support us unconditionally, et cetera. But we have to make these decisions. One thing that I have heard and read and other reporting and I've seen as well is just the way that GLP1 marketing is really seeping into all parts of social media. And just I'm on the subway in Toronto and I'm seeing so many telehealth companies explaining how easy it is to get prescription for this specific GLP1. How do you talk to your clients about just being ambushed with the. kind of marketing. It's everywhere, you know, like even as I just heard you describing it, I'm like, wow, it's really everywhere, you know. And especially for folks who have really felt like their mental health has improved as a result of connecting with things like body

positivity and fat liberation, I find that there's this dual conflict, right? So on one hand, there's, I'm, I feel awful seeing this. it's making me feel like my body, for example, should be eliminated, or I'm seeing betrayal, right? Other people who were in my camp are no longer. But then there's this dual piece where then they start to think, if I, I'm curious about this, if I were to pursue this, am I abandoning body positivity? Bless you if you feel great about your body. And when you are living in a body that is facing marginalization, oppression, you know, discrimination, it can be really hard to feel great about your body. You still deserve your rights. You still deserve access. And an equity,

even on a day when you go, girl, ain't going to cut it. Tigris Osborne is the executive director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which is a fat rights organization that's been around in the U.S. since 1969. Spocker spoke to us about her work with NAFA. So fat rights work for NAFA looks like pursuing public policy change, pursuing narrative change in the media. Like part of our mission is to change perceptions of fat. And doing any kind of advocacy work with the government, business, individuals

around how to make their spaces and their cultures accommodating and welcoming and accessible for people in larger bodies. Can you give an example or a couple of examples of where anti-fat discrimination shows up in our world? So size discrimination really shows up in every possible aspect of life and that can look like employment discrimination, housing discrimination, lack of access to public spaces, things like seating in schools or libraries. And so it can really be those systemic things, especially in our employment systems, our medical system, our court systems. but it can also show up in day-to-day interactions as weight stigma between individual people. You wrote that, quote, the conversation we could be having is about how OZEBIC proves fat activism right.

Can you explain to me what you mean by that? Yeah, so as OZMPIC started trending, we started seeing more and more media coverage of this question of like, is OZMPIC killing body positivity? Do we even need body positivity anymore? And was body positivity ever real anyway, or were they all just faking it until there was a chance to lose weight? And now that the miracle drug has arrived, nobody has to fake it anymore, right? So we don't even need that. There was like, there started to be this like proliferation of news pieces about that. Side note, that's not all organic and accidental. That is also partly the pharmaceutical companies, marketing teams working behind the scenes to help develop some of those stories. But I digress.

And so like at NAFEL we started to get all this outreach from, from journalists. like, you know, do you want to make a comment on how OZEMPIC is killing body positivity? And no, I don't want to make a comment on that. I want to make a comment on how the portrayals of OZemPEC are deeply tied to, and in some ways dependent on us pretending that there is not systemic discrimination against fat people, that fat people just need to change their bodies and everything will be magical. And even if the misperceptions of how much. these drugs are changing people's bodies are true. You know, if you lose a percentage of your body

weight and you started as a very large person, what you're going to be is still a very large person, right? And so still dealing with all of the systemic discrimination and all of the interpersonal weight stigma that's governing your life every single day. But the fact that people are so desperate to access these drugs when they are unavailable, to afford these drugs when they are unaffordable and to believe that these drugs work in a much more dramatically different way than they are proven by their own research to work. All of that is a testimony to just how hard it is to live in the world as a fat person and to just how much people who are not fat people can see how hard it is to live in the world as a fat person and are trying to escape that at any

cost. And so the idea that if something has come along that can change people, then we should all change is worth questioning in the first place. But also, if something has come along to change people and we're all desperate for it, should be an indicator to us that there are some other things that we could be changing. And then that desperation would not exist in the first place. How do you explain the difference between, like, health concerns and someone just being biased against fatness? If we actually cared about fat people's health, we would be talking about weight stigma regardless of whether or not it led to people taking these drugs. You know, so we have this major system, the medical industrial complex, where that's the only time weight stigma gets talked about. We don't talk about the effects of weight stigma itself, you know, on physical and mental.

health. We don't talk about looking for ways to eliminate it other than by helping people, quote unquote, control their obesity. I don't think the only way to reduce weight stigma is to get people to invest more deeply in the idea that weight is a disease. And that's the approach that mainstream media and mainstream medical treatment is taking. And, you know, if you only listen to people who've never been exposed to the idea that you can improve your health without weight loss, that you deserve respect regardless of what your health profile is, that it's problematic and ablest to assume that everyone in one kind of body is better than everyone in another kind of body. If you've never been exposed to those messages, you've only been exposed to the very pervasive, culturally embraced ideas. that pursuing weight loss is to be rewarded at all costs. If you've only been exposed to that,

then when you hear something like obesity is a complicated and chronic illness and it's not your fault, you feel a sense of relief. And I think that there are folks in the medical field who want to give people that relief and who genuinely believe that they are saving lives by trying to eliminate higher weight people. Can people still want to lose weight but be part of fighting anti-fat discrimination? Are these two things completely at odds?

You know, fat liberationists believe in body autonomy, believe deeply in body autonomy. The whole thing we're arguing for is to be able to be in our bodies as we think is best. And so fat liberationists are not inherently anti-weight loss. We are inherently anti-weight loss culture. And so weight loss is a part of natural human diversity just like weight gain is, right? It can be anyway. But we want people to be able to make autonomous choices based on informed consent, not based on cultural pressure, not based on affirmation that their way is better. better than somebody else's way of being in a body, not based on misinformation about the

treatments, in quotation marks, that are available to them. I wish I could just say a yes or no to, like, is, you know, can you want to lose weight and still be body positive or still be a fat activist? It's impossible to expect people not to want that in the culture that we live in. Those of us who have adopted a stance of weight loss is not going to be my focus. weight loss is not going to be my solution to things. That is, we're going against the grain of everything in the culture. And not everybody is ready to do that.

And I've been doing it for 15 years and it's still hard for me sometimes. Right? And I learned about NAFA when I was 18 years old. I'm 51 now. And it's still hard for me sometimes. And so I don't expect people to just easily turn away from the fantasy of weight loss. But I do expect professionals who know better to be providing more guidance so that people can actually make informed choices. And, you know, there are people who change and still do the work of trying to make it better for the next generation.

Marilyn Juan is a longtime fat activist who I will paraphrase what she's always said, I do not care how much you weigh. I care how you talk about weight. And that's kind of what guides me and thinking about how I orient to folks who are on. Like, if you're using all the language of diet culture, weight loss journey and before and after pictures and you're like, you're using the toolbox of diet culture, then I don't want to be around that. Since the larger discourse around GLP1 medications for weight loss is sort of ramped up that rise in popularity and accessibility, I think we do hear more and more from people reaching out to our helpline. Feeling like that noise around weight loss is a little bit inescapable for them, more so than it

was before. Emily Donahue works for the National Eating Disorder Information Center, or NEDIC. She's a community engagement officer, and one of her jobs there is overseeing their helpline for people with eating disorders. And by the way, you can find the helpline number in the show notes. You can call if you have an eating disorder, you're worried you might have one, or if you feel the same way that Emily is describing right now. We have people reaching out with some sort of concern, whether they're, you know, exhausted from hearing about OZempic or weight loss conversations in the office at work or parents or friends or loved ones are recommending taking OZempic or even in conversations with their doctors. it feels a little bit inescapable more so than it ever was before.

And I would say to the people that we speak to who have experienced disorder eating currently or in the past, it can either sort of cause that disorder eating thoughts, behaviors to reemerge or can sort of worsen or strengthen it altogether. We've also gotten to hear about people who are frustrated about the weight fluctuating after they discontinued the GLP1, which can then lead. to the disordered eating behavior potentially coming back in full force. Ari Maharaj is the team lead for outreach and education at NEDIC and a registered psychotherapist. He teaches eating disorder prevention at schools and educates healthcare providers about

eating disorders across Canada. I think when someone chooses to potentially be on a gLP one or chooses to go on a diet, there can be plenty of reasons for why that might be. maybe it's because they're concerned for their health or people have told them that. Maybe it's because they are experiencing appearance-related pressures in society or are body-related pressures in society and they feel like they need to change their body to cope. Maybe they're experiencing low self-worth and that's manifested into poor body image. To me, these are the core tenets of what might actually be behind a behavior that a GLP1 might offer some temporary relief to some of that noise,

but I don't think the underlying, like, psychological conversation that that person is thinking about their state of health has changed ultimately. I think it speaks to us as a larger question of if we're going to increase popularity and accessibility of a GLP1, without also increasing the accessibility of mental health services at the same time, are patients really having a lot? choice. I would have liked to see as many alternatives funded as possible so that we can actually, I think, do the real world randomized control trial research and really get to see what's

changed for somebody if they have a GLP1 versus potentially other things. What do you hear from the medical community about GLP1s when you come in to give your talk specifically about eating disorders? I think it's common for us that a lot of the medical community has heard all of the correlation research between weight and health, which means that people are coming in thinking that weight loss is potentially a good thing and making sure that I think assessing for their own weight stigma ends up being a lot of our initial conversation and making sure medical community from both an obesity prevention lens and an eating disorder prevention lens, both communities have really talked about how weight bias and weight stigma underlie the patient experiences of both

of those illnesses. And then I think it's been able to have like open and real honest conversations about if we are coming in to problematize something like a GOP one, what are we wanting them to do instead? And often we're wanting them to ask eating and body related questions thoughtfully to encourage some open dialogue about potential pros and cons, to really acknowledge weight and body-based discrimination as a medical provider in an appointment to allow a patient to be able to maybe open up and say that that's something they've experienced. Like, we know that our society treats people differently based on their body size. Like, wanting to escape from that kind of judgment makes sense.

Is this part of the reason why you're thinking about accessing a GOP one? You know, and having a conversation start there is, I think, really different than a, great, sounds like, you know, losing 10 to 10, 20% of your weight might be a good thing to get in check. Let's go ahead and do that. And I think it's just making sure that we're being thoughtful in assessing. for all potential factors so that way we can actually have full informed consent. I think there are, there's some percentage of people who are interested in taking a GLP1 just so that people stop discriminating against them for their body size.

What's a problem with that wanting to try to look a certain way so that society accepts you and doesn't discriminate against you? The problem there lies in. experiences of weight stigma, exacerbate disordered eating. You know, the external pressure from society to appear a certain way, I think that becomes individually or personally problematic when a person starts to internalize it, hearing all those messages constantly that they need to look a certain way to be healthy or to be worthy of medical care or worthy of care and compassion in their day-to-day life.

when they start to internalize that, that then in turn is going to lead to more appearance monitoring, body checking, body shame, guilt around eating, ultimately then leading to a decrease in physical and mental well-being, and we're stuck in disordered eating there. And the risk of an eating disorder is very real. The numbers are almost a decade old, but Ari said that in 2012, the Canadian Community Health survey found around 3% of Canadians met the diagnostic criteria for having an eating disorder. That's more than a million Canadians, or the population of Saskatchewan. And eating disorders come second only to drug poisoning as a cause of death from mental illness.

Yeah, and while I think I'll always have empathy for someone, especially someone in a larger body who's coming in and saying, I think this will be really helpful. like I just want to cut out the noise. I would want the time in a funded capacity where the patient doesn't have to pay for psychotherapy, which is often the case right now that has to happen out of pocket, to be able to ask them the question,

like, is that love you really want? I would argue that often it's probably going to be more sustainable for their well-being to be able to have a conception of self and have a conception of worth that is nothing to do with whatever they weigh, even though it's reality that folks in larger bodies face more discrimination, are paid less, potentially feel like they can't be teachers or healthcare providers or take airplanes like everybody else does because of their body size.

Navigating all of this can feel really complicated. So I asked Emily what she sees in her work that makes a difference. When I talk to people on our helpline who are navigating this sort of ocean of diet culture and weight stigma. I think we're all swimming through in this rise of accessibility and popularity of GLP1 medications. I hear how much of a world of a different it makes when they feel like they have one person in their corner who is treating them as a whole individual and not just a body or not just

a number on a scale. Because I think we speak to folks all the time that say, you know, I have no one that I can turn to. It feels like my family. is a source of shame. I can't speak to my doctor. I don't have access to mental health care. It is a wildly different interaction when a person can identify that I have one person, my, my doctor, my best friend, my colleague, my partner that I can turn to and have a candid conversation about this. And so I think it really for me makes this upstream work so important

that, you know, we're helping scale up knowledge for health care providers to be able to be that one person in a patient's life. It's funny that sometimes patients will come to my office and I say, how can I help you? And they say, I'm here because I'm fat. I said, no, we don't use that word in my office. You're not fat. You're perfect. That's Dr. Stephen Glazer, and he's the medical director for the bariatric surgical program

at Humber River Hospital in Toronto. He's also Mayette's doctor, the woman who we heard from at the beginning of this episode. She told me that Dr. Glazer, quote, gets it. He took her concerns seriously. And he agrees that weight stigma hurts his patients. So you see that stigma and bias is not only external. It's internalized bias. So patients have their own stigma and bias about themselves.

I'm not strong. You know, I have no willpower. You know, I brought this upon myself. I'm not worthy. These are very real and very sad things that people feel. So we have to be mindful of that. These patients have suffered. They really have, and it's very real, you know.

Perhaps as a cultural aspect, it's very, especially right now, it's very in to be thin. I think it's in to be healthy. Well, that's the way you want it to. Right, exactly. And that's why I'm correcting. It's right. It's not the thin because you can be unhealthy and thin. It's so interesting.

I will repeatedly have the question, what should my weight be? And I never, ever answer that question. I always tell them, we don't treat numbers on a scale. Our objective is to improve your quality of health. And so I tell them, we'll let your body and your genetics determine. what your weight should be. We'll do all the interventions and we'll give you all the building blocks to achieve that, but your body ultimately will determine what your weight will be and that's genetically determined. And I love the reactions I get. You hear, you know, the sigh that the pressure is

taken off them. They don't feel so responsible for, you know, their outcomes. And we're not just giving them a buy. It's true, right? It's true. Thank you to everyone who spoke to me and other Globe reporters for this series. You can listen to all three episodes using the link in the episode's show notes, and you can read more reporting from my colleagues at the globe and mail.com. I'm Kasha Mihailovich.

Skinny Ink was produced by me and Ali Graham. Sound design and mixing by Ali Graham. The Deciples Senior Producer is Adrian Chung, and our executive editor is Angela Pichenza. Thank you for listening.