It Took One Weight Loss Medication Ad to Pull Me Back Into Eating Disorder Thinking
- Index:MH
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Trigger warning: The following is a first-person account submitted anonymously, and contains discussion of eating disorders, relapse thinking, body image, dieting, and weight loss medication. Please prioritise your wellbeing and read only if you feel able to.
If you or someone you know is affected by eating disorders, support is available through Beat.
I opened Instagram to check one message. That's it. Quick task; in and out. The second I opened the app, the first thing on my feed, before a single post from a single person I actually follow, was an ad for weight loss medication. Now in pill form!
I don't know why I clicked it. I've spent a decade curating that app within an inch of its life. I unfollow anything that flickers close to diet talk. I hide, I block, I mute, I do the whole ritual. Most days I just don't open the app at all, because I know exactly what it's capable of doing to my head. And still, one ad, zero effort on my part, and off I went.
The ad took me straight to an online “weight management” supplier. Glossy homepage, soft lighting, a parade of people talking about how much happier they are now that the weight's off and how easy it all was. There was a quick eligibility check: height & weight. At that stage you can type in whatever you like, so I did. That got me wondering how difficult it really was to get hold of the meds.
Until that moment weight loss medication didn’t really cross my mind. Of course I’ve heard about it; a few people I know achieved their goal weight with the help of injections. But I don't need to lose weight; I’m on the slimmer side and comfortably within the “healthy” BMI range.
Yet, forty minutes later I was deep in a Reddit thread about GLP-1s, and it wasn't some shady corner of the internet. It was a well-moderated forum, mostly people who actually met the eligibility criteria, swapping honest advice about the process. Which providers asked for a photo and which only checked once. How discreet the packaging was. Whether pharmacies actually contacted their GP. Which ones let you upload an old photo instead of taking one in the app. Nobody in that thread was trying to cheat the system. But I didn't need them to be, because everything I needed to know was right there anyway, offered up in good faith to people who had every right to ask.
None of this may sound like a big deal but here’s what one weight loss ad actually did in under an hour: I went from having vague awareness of weight loss medication to understanding, in practical terms, how to get it without anyone ever even laying eyes on me.
Now here’s the kicker: I used to have anorexia. Then bulimia. Then years of the quieter stuff that falls under the category of ‘other specified feeding or eating disorder’ (OSFED). I'd describe myself as recovered. For a long time now I've lived without the constant weight loss hum in the background. I trained myself to keep thoughts about my body at bay, because I know what my brain is capable of. I eat what I want. I don't count calories. I don't weigh myself. I'm not interested in dieting. But none of that mattered, because recovery isn't a vaccine. It isn't some magical point where your brain forgets everything. It's more like a room I don't go into anymore, except the ad for weight loss pills didn't ask permission to let itself in.
I didn't go looking for any of this, but within an hour I had a working knowledge of how to bypass medical oversight for a medication I have no business taking.
I didn't rationally decide to research weight loss medication. There was no thought process that started with "should I lose weight" and ended with "let me look into it." It went the other way round: the click came first, almost on autopilot, before I'd consciously registered what I was looking at. The wanting arrived afterwards. My brain had done an hour of homework on a subject it had no interest in sixty minutes earlier. Somewhere along the way I'd gotten so preoccupied asking whether I could get those weight loss pills, that I stopped thinking about whether I should. Nothing about my body had changed during that hour. Yet by the end of it I was thinking: do I actually need to lose weight?
What eventually snapped me out of it was luck. While researching, I stumbled across an article, completely by accident, about how dangerous exactly this kind of advertising is for people with a history of eating disorders, and something in it just went: that's you. That's what you're doing right now. Close the tab.
Until that moment, everything I'd been doing had felt perfectly rational. I wasn't sitting there thinking, "I'm relapsing." I was just... researching. That article pulled me out of it. I closed the tabs.
But here's the scary part: this happened days ago. And even now, that little thought is still sitting somewhere in the background. I probably could get those pills. I know the process. I have a mental list of pharmacies that are known to be more lenient than others. I know there are workarounds for the photo check.
One advert; that's all it took. And I never even ended up responding to that DM I opened Instagram to read.
Shouldn't Weight Loss Medication Come With a Safeguard?
I know there’s going to be a Karen somewhere going, "Well, JuSt sTaY oFf SoCiaL mEdiA." I already do. I avoid social media as much as I can. How much smaller does my world have to become? How many more parts of everyday life am I supposed to avoid because an algorithm might decide I'm the perfect person to advertise weight loss medication to? I was doing everything right. I'd built every safeguard I know how to build. The ad went round all of them, because it wasn't trying to only reach people actively searching for diet content. It was trying to reach everyone.
I'm not going to say the ad never should have existed. Weight loss medication has an important place in healthcare and I'm not arguing against it. But shouldn’t providers keep in mind that people like me exist too? People who have fought incredibly hard to recover from eating disorders. People who aren't searching for weight loss. People who have deliberately built lives that don't revolve around shrinking themselves anymore. And yet a single advert was enough to wake up a part of my brain I hadn't visited in years.
I don’t think any of this needed a locked door. It needed a single moment of friction, placed somewhere within the first few minutes, that would make me stop and check myself instead of the eligibility form. Maybe a prompt before the height-and-weight box, asking if I'd ever struggled with an eating disorder, and where to go if the answer was yes. Something that treated "person browsing weight loss medication" as a category that might include people it shouldn't. Right now that entire pathway, from ad to purchase, is built for speed and conversion, and nothing in it is built for someone like me pausing to ask whether I should be there at all.
I didn't go looking for any of this, but within an hour I had a working knowledge of how to bypass medical oversight for a medication I have no business taking. The thing that finally stopped me was recognising what was happening inside my own head. But it makes me wonder how many other people never get that moment. How many keep clicking. How many keep researching. How many eventually convince themselves they needed the medication all along. Advertising doesn't just reach the people it's intended for. Sometimes it finds the people trying their hardest not to be found- and that needs to stop.
If you or someone you know is affected by eating disorders, support is available through Beat, the UK’s eating disorder charity.
Editor's note: In the UK, prescription-only medicines (POMs), including prescription-only weight loss medicines, cannot be advertised to the public. This article focuses on the psychological impact of online weight loss marketing rather than the compliance of any individual advert. For more information, visit the Advertising Standards Authority
