With April showers clearing up to make way for the summer, more than flowers seem to be sprouting. Conversations about the “perfect summer body” have been routine for decades, but it seems as though a certain weed has invaded the Internet’s garden with an unavoidable popularity: glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists, or GLP-1 agonist medications.
GLP-1 agonists are a class of medications originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes. Through mimicking the GLP-1 hormone in charge of triggering insulin, slowing digestion and appetite, these medications extend the hormone’s effects to induce notable fullness long after eating.
Drugs such as tirzepatide and semaglutide (commonly known as Ozempic) have long been used for type 2 diabetes treatment, but their popularity exploded far beyond their target population after talk of weight loss from GLP-1 agonist use gained traction—most notably, on social media platforms such as TikTok.
TikTok’s advertisement policy on weight management and body image explicitly states that sponsored products cannot tout themselves as the sole solution for weight loss, and that any weight loss claims “must be restricted to audiences aged 18 years or older, and must do so via the promotion of a healthy lifestyle.”
Listed among examples of what is not allowed are “weight loss injections” and “fat-burning pills,” as well as “suggestions that losing or gaining weight is easy or guaranteed.”
When scrolling on TikTok, however, it seems that every other post is sponsored by a GLP-1 agonist product, most often a patch made of “natural” ingredients. Most videos include some version of the same caption about using “patches to get slim instead of going to the gym” when these sentiments are against TikTok policies.
So how do these videos stay up?
By rebranding these products as “natural” wellness remedies, influencers do not face the same restrictions that they would advertising a medication explicitly for weight loss. In fact, many of these patches do not even contain the actual GLP-1 agonists they claim to have the effect of.
“The marketing seems to suggest that you could get with these natural products, these natural ingredients, the same effect that you can get with GLP-1 agonists, which is simply not the case. And in that way, they are being misleading to people,” said C. Michael White, a professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, in an article with PBS.
“Some of them don’t even tell you what ingredients are in it at all. And in those products, somebody may actually believe that they are going to get semaglutide or they are going to get tirzepatide.”
Whether or not a viewer is looking for the quickest way to get “snatched” before the end of May, it appears as though TikTok is manufacturing the conversation regarding the “ideal” summer body one misguided advertisement at a time.
“It’s really enforcing stereotypes and not providing actual beneficial, healthy ways of how to get more lean during the summer through clean eating—it’s just putting [a patch] on and, boom, you’re skinny,” said an anonymous secondary education senior at Nicholls. “It’s kind of capitalizing on someone’s insecurity to sell this.”
But is “the perfect summer body” something that we should be worrying about to begin with?
At the end of the day, what does it matter if our bodies don’t meet the TikTok’s manufactured standards for one fleeting summer? Should we decimate our collective sanity in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Will buying an off-brand, $10 pill off of TikTok Shop really have been worth it in ten years’ time?
“The ‘perfect summer body’ isn’t something people should strive for, but a good, healthy mind and body definitely is,” said an anonymous Nicholls marine biology sophomore. “It’s one thing to want to be healthy, but it’s another to only do stuff just to look good for Instagram photos that mean nothing.”
“I still don’t really know what hip dips are and I don’t want to, because then I’d be looking at myself and feeling some type of way. We have bigger fish to fry.”
