What a Year on Ozempic Taught Johann Hari
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
In the fall of 2005, Johann Hari, then a young columnist for The Independent who was struggling with his weight, described a trip he said he’d taken to a wellness spa in the foothills of the Carinthian Alps. After spending just four days there on a cleansing diet that consisted almost entirely of drinking tea—Hari could not bear to stay a moment longer—he’d lost seven pounds. “The cravings for lard had leeched [sic] out of my system,” he marveled in his write-up, noting that he hadn’t yet regained the weight.
Hari tells this Alpine-detox story once again in Magic Pill, his fourth and latest book, released last month—but the anecdote now appears to hold a different lesson. Instead of maintaining his new diet, he seems to relapse: “When I got home, I felt like a failure,” he now says of the very same experience. “Where, I wondered, was my willpower?”
The new book’s title is a slanted reference to Ozempic (which doesn’t come in pill form), and to the new class of anti-obesity medications that is already reshaping health care for tens of millions of Americans. Many of Magic Pill’s 250 pages describe these drugs’ amazing benefits and potential harms; most of the rest are devoted to a workmanlike review of certain social causes of obesity, and how they might one day be reversed. Some portions of this story have been told in other places—Hari makes ample references to other well-known books. But his account brings an element of human drama that few could match, even when it’s just rehashing others’ work. That drama is the author’s own: Above all else, Magic Pill describes Hari’s everlasting struggle to control himself. Whether purposefully or not, he has produced a revealing record of his shame.
Why does Hari feel ashamed? For one thing, he’s on Ozempic. Hari doesn’t really to take Ozempic, but he’s on it nonetheless: That’s the premise of the book, as laid
