Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison · Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS

From Taking Ozempic for Weight Loss to Practicing Weight-Inclusive Medicine with Dr. Mara Gordon

·35 min·2 clips

A bariatric surgery patient tells her surgeon, "I want to be able to cross my legs like you."

Christy Harrison frames the conversation around diet and wellness culture inside medicine. Mara Gordon joins to talk through the path from taking Ozempic for weight loss to stopping it. She also describes how she came to practice weight-inclusive care. Harrison keeps the focus on how personal experience turns into a larger critique. The tone stays warm, but the tension is still there. Gordon talks about medical school as a pressure cooker. She remembers heavy weekend drinking and a culture of performance that sat close to the surface. She also recalls hearing rumors that some students bought Adderall to focus. She says she never saw that firsthand and did not do it herself. Even so, the larger environment clearly shaped how people behaved. Harrison draws the line from that setting to anxiety, body image strain, and other forms of stress. Gordon says exercise often fit into the same system of pressure. In that world, even healthy habits could start to look like status signals. The episode then widens to medicine's changing relationship with mental health. Gordon says it is now more normal to talk openly about those struggles than it was ten years ago. That shift matters to her as an educator working with students. The conversation keeps coming back to stigma and the ways medicine teaches people to read bodies. It also stays interested in how lived experience and professional training can support or undercut each other. The paid portion goes further into her current perspective on GLP-1s and whether she prescribes them, along with her upcoming book.

As heard by us

A candid conversation about Ozempic, weight stigma, and the medical culture shaping both.

Physician and writer Mara Gordon joins Christy Harrison for a conversation that moves from diet and wellness culture among doctors to Gordon's decision to take Ozempic for weight loss, then to the reasons she quit and the path toward weight inclusive care.

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Why you'd press play

You want an Ozempic conversation that stays rooted in anti-diet care and medical culture.

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