Christians debate drugs vs. discipline in the age of Ozempic
Jenny Espino had bariatric surgery in 2006, when she was 20 years old and weighed 271 pounds. After the surgery, she lost over 100 pounds and maintained that weight loss until 2020, through the ups and downs of having children.
Then, said the mom of four in southern California, “I got a back injury from working out. I couldn’t even walk from room to room. I started gaining weight,” Espino told me, “and entered this really hard season where I was cut off from my community. By 2024, I had gained everything back.”
At the suggestion of a woman from her church who had recently lost weight on a GLP-1—the category of pharmaceuticals, including Ozempic and Wegovy, that mimic a naturally occurring hormone in the body that regulates blood sugar and appetite—Espino decided to call her doctor and ask about a prescription. Over the past year and a half, she’s lost more than 100 pounds for the second time.
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Espino says she’s always experienced her weight as a difficult-to-manage chronic disease, and she sees GLP-1 as a pragmatic approach to a long-standing problem. “When you have a disease, you attack it with medication,” she explained. “I believe in supernatural healing, but Jesus created the hands that created this medication.”
As GLP-1s becomes more widespread—more than1 in 8 American adultsare currently taking them—not all Christians share Espino’s matter-of-fact mindset about their use.
“No one talks about how hard it is to lose weight God’s way when everyone around you is taking the devil shortcut” reads the text on arecent Instagram videofrom a fitness influencer, Jaclyn Renee, who offers her followers a way to “heal your relationship with food and your body through the truth of God’s Word.” The clip shows Renee running on a treadmill; the post’s caption argues that there’s “a difference between quick relief!Image 1: 💉[syringe emoji] and true transformation.”
The wellness industry and influencer world are shifting emphases and tactics in response to theGLP-1 boom, and Christian wellness influencers are no exception. Their reactions vary widely: Some caution against the use of drugs to lose weight, urging followers to build discipline and self-control. Others have embraced the potential of GLP-1 to help people (especially women) achieve the body size and shape they desire.
TheFederal Drug Administration (FDA) approvedthe first GLP-1 for diabetes treatment in 2005, but the drugs have only been broadly prescribed for weight loss for five years. In 2025, theestimated global market sizefor this category of pharmaceuticals was $66 billion. It’s projected to reach $185 billion by 2033.
As documented weight loss by patients taking GLP-1s has increased, so has the off-label market for these drugs. A flourishing gray market of telemedicine andcompounding pharmaciessells variations of name-brand drugs inlcuding Wegovy to patients who might not qualify for prescriptions from their doctors (for example, patients who have not been diagnosed as obese). Compounded GLP-1 drugs are not FDA approved but are manufactured in FDA-registered facilities.
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One such telehealth platform for women, Kiaora, sells compounded GLP-1s as well as hormone replacement therapy. It markets “physician-guided microdose GLP-1 therapy” to “ignite your body’s trimming hormone” and hormone therapy products for female sexual health, including “Foxy Mama Cream.” The founders of the platform, sisters Serene Allison and Pearl Barrett, are also the founders of the Christian diet brand “Trim Healthy Mama.”
Barrett and Allison aren’t newcomers to the Christian wellness sphere. Their book _Trim Healthy Mama_ was published in 2012, and they’ve since cowritten several follow-ups _._ The two slender, long-haired women appear on the covers of most of their books, and they’ve built a business on the unapologetic belief that women feel better when they feel good about how they look.
Kiaorapromotescompounded GLP-1s with messaging that rejects the assumptions of influencers like Jaclyn Renee. Though Kiaora’s language shares the skepticism of the “quick fix,” it also insists that “weight management isn’t about willpower” or “discipline. When biology gets in the way, a different kind of support can make all the difference.”
The American Medical Association (AMA)classifiedobesity as a disease in 2013. The decision was controversial, sparkingdebateswithin the medical community about definitional metrics and the relationship between body weight and other chronic health conditions. The classification of obesity undeniably made it easier for pharmaceutical companies and influencers to sell weight loss products; as a matter of marketing andperhaps insurance coding, they can now use medical rather than aesthetic language to describe the value of slimming down.
Renee isn’t alone among Christian influencers in her wariness of the medicalization of weight loss. “If you’re a Christian on a GLP-1 … this may offend you—but it’s not coming from a place of condemnation,”said a postfrom fitness consultant named Kara Williams. The medications might help in the short term, she argued, but they wouldn’t address the root causes of weight gain.
“Your body was designed by God with its own natural hunger and fullness signals. Ozempic shuts those down,” said Kristy McCammon, a Christian health coach, in anInstagram post. She warns followers that GLP-1s can cause “long-term damage to the systems that God gave you to steward your body well.”
Leslie Schilling, a Christian dietitian and author of the book _Feed Yourself,_ told me she’s worried about the social conditions pushing people to pursue weight loss via medication, as well as the medications themselves.
It’s hard to make informed choices about medication when, in her view,side effects—including nausea, digestive problems, and potentially long-term issues like muscle and bone density loss—are downplayed. And “the marketing of these drugs has been very unethical. They’ve weaponized compassion,” Schilling said. “I understand why people in larger bodies want relief from the horrible way they are treated in our society and in our medical system,” Schilling said. “Does it break my heart? Yes. But we have an obsession with thinness. It’s social currency, and it shouldn’t be.”
She discusses this pressure with her clients, Schilling told me, and while she worries that GLP-1s may be functioning as “injectable eating disorders” for those who are taking them exclusively for weight loss, she doesn’t judge anyone who wants to lose weight.
Yet she does invite readers of _Feed Yourself_ to reflect on Romans 12:2 as a counterweight to the constant pressure to lose weight and change our bodies. “The world says, ‘If you change your body, you will be happy and loved,’” she writes.
One way to “conform to the pattern of this world,” as the verse says, is to adopt wholesale the belief system that makes GLP-1s so incredibly profitable, to run toward extreme thinness or toward nihilistic neglect. And the self-control of the Holy Spirit isn’t the biohacking and body optimization of the wellness world. It’s a form of temperance that comes from sanctification, from the renewal of the mind.
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For Jenny Espino, GLP-1s have been life-changing, but she also remarked that she wished her bigger body hadn’t caused her so much emotional turmoil. She acknowledges that her desire to lose weight has always been connected to the pressure to be thin and the stigma associated with being a woman with a bigger body.
Research suggests that people classified as obese or overweight face discrimination in theworkplaceand inmedical settings. Even for Christians who believe our worth is in Christ alone and not in body shape or size, it’s hard to avoid the impact of weight stigma in a fallen world.
“I didn’t feel comfortable or confident,” Espino said. “I loved singing, but I didn’t want to be on our church’s worship team because I was afraid of what people would think of me.”
Finding relief through GLP-1s is enough for now. “Ideally, I would be able to choose not to care,” Espino mused. “But I couldn’t, and that’s really hard.”
Looking back, Espino thinks her shame over body size was a spiritual attack. “The Enemy was using it to trap me and create this anxiety and depression. It’s like he was saying,_No, you’re going to sit here and stay quiet, you’re not going to use your voice or your presence_.”
After her weight loss, “I have so much more confidence to walk in my calling,” Espino said. She even sings on the worship team now.