‘Miracle' weight-loss drugs shut down desire, but where's the fun in that?

The Age

25-04-2025

This story is part of the April 26 edition of Good Weekend. See all 10 stories.
I was about halfway through writing my new novel, Lonely Mouth, when first reports of the new drugs began trickling out – the magic new drugs that stopped hunger. As it happens, my book is about hunger, and eating, and food; about the inconvenient inability of human beings to switch off their desires. It is not every day the real world echoes you like this; responds to whatever it is you have been ruminating on for a while and throws up an answer to it. I had to pay attention, right? It was research.
How else to explain the fact that, despite not being overweight, I read every single article I could find on this new generation of miracle weight-loss drugs? I now knew my Mounjaros from my Ozempics and my Wegovys from my Zepbounds. I loved the names of these new drugs – they sounded Olympian and titanic, able to leap buildings in a single bound. It seemed there was nothing they couldn't do. They turbocharged the entire economy of Denmark, where Novo Nordisk, the company that manufactures Ozempic, is based.
Here was a drug that seemingly solved the problem of human desire.
I ignored reports of side effects. I didn't want to know about gastro symptoms or depression. I just wanted to read about how these drugs transformed the lives of countless people who took them. Slimmed-down wives left husbands! Slimmed-down husbands left wives! People began to climb actual mountains and run actual marathons, after barely being able to lumber to the corner store in their pre-Ozempic bodies. Perhaps these drugs could solve the entire social and economic problem of obesity? They might put soft-drink companies and fast-food outlets out of business!
Soon, there was news they might be helpful for people suffering from other compulsions – towards tobacco or alcohol, or other drugs of addiction. The drugs became so popular they were prescribed off-label; there were reports of shortages. Hardly surprising – here was a drug that seemingly solved the problem of human desire. Surely this was civilisation at its peak; scientific discovery meeting one of the most fundamental problems of the human condition.
I became fascinated by first-person stories about the way these drugs were able to shut down desire within the brain, as though it is a tap that can be turned off. People reported that thoughts of food (or cigarettes or alcohol) just evaporated, almost overnight. They became indifferent to the thing they once craved. We think of desire as being something intrinsic to the human condition. But these drugs seemed to indicate that it was just a matter of brain chemistry.
As I worked on my novel, which is the story of two half-sisters, 10 years apart in age and oceans apart in experience, I was thinking a lot about the nature of human hunger – for all things, not just food.
I was in the mind of my main character, Matilda, who works in a smart restaurant in inner-city Sydney. I read everything I could on the running of kitchens. I spent hours mooning over cookbooks of all kinds. I interviewed chefs and I even did a few shifts waitressing to learn how service worked – the simple, noble act of putting meals in front of hungry people, every night. I marvelled at the organism of the kitchen, populated by humans, who are so prone to mistakes and emotions, and yet are so proficient in cooperation they can manage the nightly feat of cooking for and serving so many mouths all at once.
I also ate out a lot, with great relish, in contrast to my main character. Matilda is dismayed by her own hungers but, not being able to deny them completely, instead seeks to control them and cordon them off. And Matilda is right to be dismayed by her own wants – they have caused her nothing but trouble.
Matilda's younger sister, Lara, is very different. Lara feeds herself easily, literally and in other ways. She eats with the shamelessness and gusto of a healthy labrador. She lives her life in a similar way – guilelessly and artlessly, taking what she wants when she wants it.
People without desires probably make good Buddhist monks, but they make dull companions.
Despite making her living in the food industry, Matilda is covert and self-conscious with her hungers. Like many women, she vigilantly polices her own body, trying to keep it within acceptable bounds. Our bodies are the engines of our desires, but so many women view theirs with suspicion, disappointment or distaste. And in a world where many men continue to feel entitled to women's bodies, it is not surprising we try to govern them ourselves. Matilda doesn't like eating in front of others, and when she takes small personal pleasures for herself, like smoking weed or bingeing food, she does so in solitude.
It's as though she lacks the sense of entitlement required to satiate herself in public, to take up space and resources for herself without apologising for it. Matilda would like to switch off her desires, à la Ozempic, but she finds herself incapable of that (which is to say, she is human). She is attracted to the Buddhist concept that suffering comes from attachment, from wanting things. I, too, like this idea and have read a bit about it. You are never so vulnerable as when you want something badly. Detachment is powerful.
But here's the rub, the thing that the novelist in me knew: people without desires probably make good Buddhist monks, but they make dull companions and even worse characters. The best people are the ones with gusto, the ones with appetite, energy and vim. They don't ask for just a sliver of cake, or say they're watching their figure. They're the ones dragging their finger through the last puddle of sauce on the plate.
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When we are reading fiction, what interests us are characters who wrestle with their desires. It is a custom of traditional fiction that every character must want something, and must be thwarted from getting it, at least for a while. It is the struggle we want to read about. We don't want to read about people who are content, for heaven's sake. Desire propels us forwards, towards the wanted thing. It keeps us going somewhere. And somewhere is better than nowhere, right?
Of course, desire can also take us backwards – Marcel Proust wrote a notable book on this theme. In my case, writing my (far, far less notable) book sent me into a Proustian reverie about the meals I have had, and how I feel cross when I have a bad one because, just like days, we have a finite number of meals in our lives, and you can never get one back. I meditated on my grandmother's caramel sauce and the salmon blinis she served as the adults drank gin and tonic. I thought of my grandfather peeling the lemon, the fizz of the tonic water as he dropped it into the tumbler. I thought of the care and polish my grandmother put into everything she served us, high or low, be it frankfurts (proper ones from the deli, never supermarket hotdogs) in crusty French bread spread with good quality butter, or the summer pudding she made from scratch each Christmas. I thought of the apricot chicken and mashed potato under cling film that my mother left in the fridge for me, on one of the first nights I ever went out to the pub, aged 18.
And I thought, and I still think, without all that, where is life's pleasure? And don't tell me that pleasure comes from not acquiring something or tasting it, but rather, that true happiness comes from appreciating things as they pass you by. Don't tell me that pleasure is in sunsets or your baby's smile. Because you might need to hike to watch your sunset, and for that, you will require a hearty sandwich and maybe a chocolate bar. And to feed that baby, you will need to feed yourself.