Is it my manifest destiny to lose 40 pounds in 3 weeks?

I started keeping track. And on average, I get 5 GLP-1 ads DAILY. When I started really paying attention to them, I noticed that what they were selling me wasn’t just the normal skinny = health = beauty formula. A formula Sabrina Strings’ research shows has been used to racialize Black bodies for centuries. Instead, its promise to me was: You’ll finally be who you’ve always been meant to be. And that is where my scholar of religion brain starts kicking in. Because whenever you start talking about destiny and who someone has always been meant to be, you’re talking about religion, especially American religion.

This week, I’m thinking through three things that being inundated with GLP-1 advertising has taught me: what these ads reveal about our ideas of becoming and the self and why Serena William’s as the face of Ro is diabolically genius, why its feels spiritually unsettling to my own sense of self + embodied knowledge when the same platforms used to learn+connect are constantly telling me not to trust my body, and how GLP-1 marketing has hard launched an entire genre of social media content organized around being your final form (5 Things I Did To Be XYZ), rather than life as a continual process of becoming. AND IT’S SO BORING.

Chapters

00:00 — Teaser: What Are GLP-1 Ads Actually Selling?

00:31 — Welcome to Grounded

01:28 — Finding Grounding: Learning How to Be Unstressed

03:36 — What I Learned From Seeing 5 GLP-1 Ads a Day

07:45 — Why GLP-1 Marketing Feels Different From Earlier Weight-Loss Marketing

17:50— You Go Looking For Info, And Are Told Not To Trust Your Body

22:24 — GLP-1 Marketing Has Become Its Own Content Genre & ITS BORING

References

Strings, Sabrina. "How the use of BMI fetishizes white embodiment and racializes fat phobia." AMA Journal of Ethics 25, no. 7 (2023): 535-539.

Strings, Sabrina. Fearing The Black Body. New York University Press, 2020.

About Grounded

Grounded with Dr. Iman is a podcast for people who like their big questions grounded in research. Each week, Dr. Iman AbdoulKarim, professor and scholar of religion and spirituality, takes on a question about this human experience we’re all having, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual.

Expect religion, spirituality, Black thought, culture, history, and whatever else the question requires.

New episodes every Monday.