Can GLP-1 Medications Cause Eating Disorders? Understanding the Risks
GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have become cultural phenomena. Often dominating social media feeds and dinner table conversations alike. Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, these drugs have gained widespread popularity for their dramatic weight loss effects. Celebrities and influencers showcase their transformations, and prescriptions have skyrocketed as millions seek the promise of effortless weight reduction.
But beneath the headlines celebrating rapid weight loss lies a troubling question that deserves more attention: what are the mental health consequences of these medications, particularly for people vulnerable to or recovering from eating disorders?
As GLP-1 medications become increasingly accessible and normalized, mental health professionals are raising concerns about their potential to trigger or worsen disordered eating patterns. The intersection of these powerful drugs with our culture's obsession with thinness creates a perfect storm that may be putting countless individuals at risk.
What Are the Benefits of GLP-1?
GLP-1 receptor agonists work by mimicking a hormone that regulates appetite and blood sugar. These medications slow gastric emptying, increase feelings of fullness, and reduce hunger signals to the brain. For people with type 2 diabetes, it can improve blood sugar control and reduce cardiovascular risk. For people seeking weight loss, they can lead to significant results for some.
The benefits for appropriate medical candidates can be substantial. Research shows these medications can improve markers of metabolic health, reduce the risk of heart disease. And for some people with diabetes, provides meaningful quality of life improvements. When prescribed and monitored appropriately by healthcare providers for legitimate medical indications, GLP-1 medications can be a valuable tool in comprehensive treatment plans.
What Are the Risks of GLP-1?
However, the risks are increasingly apparent and concerning. Physically, users commonly experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and abdominal pain. More serious potential complications include pancreatitis, gallbladder disease, and gastroparesis (stomach paralysis). There are also concerns about muscle loss accompanying the fat loss, and the long-term effects of these medications remain unknown since they haven't been widely used for extended periods.
The mental health risks are particularly alarming and often overlooked. Users frequently report a complete loss of interest in food, an inability to eat normal portions, and feelings of disgust or aversion toward eating. While pharmaceutical companies may frame this as a positive effect, mental health professionals recognize these as hallmark symptoms of eating disorders. The medications can create a disconnection from natural hunger and fullness cues, making it extremely difficult for users to establish or maintain a healthy relationship with food.
Additionally, many people experience significant psychological distress when they stop taking these medications and weight returns, which studies suggest happens to most users. This can trigger a cycle of dependence on the medication, yo-yo dieting, and increased preoccupation with weight and body size. For individuals with a history of eating disorders or those predisposed to them, these effects can be devastating.
How Does Diet Culture Fuel GLP-1 Use and Why Can It Impact Eating Disorders?
Diet culture is the pervasive belief system that equates thinness with health, moral virtue, and success while demonizing larger bodies and promoting weight loss at nearly any cost. It thrives on making people feel inadequate about their bodies and selling them solutions, whether those are diets, fitness programs, or now, injectable medications.
GLP-1 medications have become diet culture's latest tool. Lately repackaged as a medical solution to what diet culture has convinced us is a crisis: existing in a larger body. The marketing and social discourse around these drugs often emphasizes aesthetic goals rather than health outcomes, with before-and-after photos replacing meaningful discussions about metabolic health or quality of life.
This cultural context matters enormously. When weight loss medications are positioned as a shortcut to an idealized body rather than a medical treatment for specific conditions, they become attractive to people who don't have medical indications for their use but have internalized diet culture's messages about the superiority of thinness. This includes many people with active or subclinical eating disorders, as well as those in recovery.
Diet culture creates the perfect conditions for GLP-1 misuse by normalizing extreme measures for weight loss. This includes celebrating food avoidance and appetite suppression, and treating dramatic weight loss as an unqualified achievement regardless of the method or consequences. In this environment, the serious side effects of GLP-1 medications—nausea that prevents eating, food aversion, inability to finish meals—can be reframed as desirable outcomes rather than red flags.
For people with eating disorders or in recovery, this is particularly dangerous. Eating disorders are characterized by an unhealthy preoccupation with food, weight, and body shape, along with disturbed eating behaviors. GLP-1 medications can intensify these exact patterns. They medicalize and externalize the restriction that someone with anorexia might accomplish through willpower, or provide the appetite suppression that someone with binge eating disorder might desperately seek. The medication can become a socially acceptable way to engage in disordered behaviors while avoiding the stigma or concern that might arise from visible restriction.
Moreover, when celebrities and influencers openly use these medications for cosmetic weight loss, it sends a message that pharmaceutical appetite suppression is not only acceptable but aspirational. This normalization makes it harder for people to recognize when their use of these medications crosses from medical treatment into dangerous territory.
What Damage Can GLP-1 Cause?
The potential damage from GLP-1 medications extends across physical, psychological, and behavioral domains, with particularly serious implications for eating disorder development and recovery.
Physical
Physically, beyond the commonly discussed side effects, there are emerging concerns about the medications' impact on the gastrointestinal system. Some users develop severe gastroparesis that persists even after discontinuing the medication, leaving them unable to digest food normally. This can create a medical situation that mirrors the physical complications of severe eating disorders like anorexia nervosa. The rapid weight loss can also lead to significant muscle loss, nutritional deficiencies, and metabolic adaptations that make weight maintenance increasingly difficult.
Psychological
Psychologically, GLP-1 medications can fundamentally alter someone's relationship with food and eating. Users often describe feeling no pleasure from food, experiencing intense nausea at the thought of eating, or being unable to recognize hunger signals. While actively using the medication, people may not perceive this as problematic, but these changes represent a profound disconnection from the intuitive eating processes that are essential for long-term health and recovery from disordered eating.
This disconnection can prevent or undermine the development of skills that are crucial for eating disorder recovery, such as learning to honor hunger cues, distinguish between physical and emotional hunger, and experience food as nourishment and pleasure rather than as something to be controlled or feared. When appetite suppression is chemically induced, individuals lose the opportunity to build these competencies.
Behavior
Behaviorally, GLP-1 medications can establish or reinforce patterns that are virtually indistinguishable from eating disorder symptoms. Users may eat increasingly small portions, skip meals due to lack of appetite, experience anxiety about eating, avoid social situations involving food, and become preoccupied with maintaining their weight loss. The medication can make these behaviors feel easy and natural rather than effortful and distressing, which may make it harder for individuals to recognize them as problematic.
Perhaps most concerning is the potential for GLP-1 medications to trigger eating disorders in people who were previously not symptomatic. The experience of rapid weight loss, the positive social reinforcement that often accompanies becoming thinner, and the development of rigid eating patterns can activate eating disorder pathology in vulnerable individuals. Young people may be especially at risk, as their identities and relationships with their bodies are still forming.
The damage can also extend to treatment and recovery efforts. For people already in eating disorder treatment, starting a GLP-1 medication can completely derail progress. The appetite suppression works directly against the goals of normalized eating and weight restoration. For people in recovery, the medication can trigger relapse by reactivating the rewarding aspects of restriction and weight loss that the eating disorder provided.
The rise of GLP-1 medications has created new challenges in the landscape of eating disorders and body image. Understanding these risks is the first step in making informed decisions that prioritize mental health and support genuine, lasting wellbeing.
Check out our other blogs about GLP-1 medications. We'll explore how these medications specifically impact eating disorder recovery and provide practical guidance for those who need to establish safety plans or exit strategies.
Final Thoughts as an Eating Disorder Therapist in Raleigh, NC
If you’re wondering whether GLP-1 use is supporting your wellbeing, or quietly undermining it, eating disorder therapy can offer a safe, non-judgmental space to talk honestly about what’s going on. You deserve care that looks beyond weight loss and centers long-term healing, body trust, and sustainability.
At Swell Mental Health, I support women in Raleigh, NC, who appear “high-functioning” on the outside but feel stuck in diet culture, body dissatisfaction, or food control on the inside. Together, we can explore how GLP-1 medications may be impacting your relationship with food, reconnect you with your body’s cues, and create a path forward that prioritizes both physical and mental health.
I’m Here to Walk Alongside You in Eating Disorder Recovery
If questions about GLP-1 medications, food, or your body are starting to feel heavy or confusing, you don’t have to sort through them on your own. Working with an eating disorder therapist in Raleigh, NC can help you make sense of what’s coming up and reconnect with your body.
I offer in-person therapy in Raleigh and virtual sessions across North Carolina for women navigating eating disorders, chronic dieting, body image distress, and the mental health impact of GLP-1 medications. If you’re ready to take the get started, follow the steps below:
Explore my blog posts for more information on GLP-1s, recovery, and more.
Support is available, and you’re allowed to ask for it.
Other Ways I Support Clients in North Carolina
In addition to eating disorder treatment, I offer therapy that supports healing on a deeper, more holistic level. Through trauma-informed and somatic therapy, I help clients gently reconnect with their bodies and work through experiences that may still be held physically and emotionally. For clients who are not seeking therapy or who want more action-oriented support, I also offer body-image-focused coaching.
About the Author: Eating Disorder Therapist in Raleigh, NC
Kate is a licensed therapist based in Raleigh, North Carolina, who works with women navigating eating disorders, body image struggles, anxiety, trauma, and burnout. She’s a type-A, recovering perfectionist, dog mom, and avid reader who can absolutely hyperfocus on a new hobby or a good romance novel. SWELL is her love letter to being a new surfer, a wannabe mermaid, and a full-time mental health nerd.
Kate identifies as a highly sensitive person and believes sensitivity is a superpower, though it didn’t always feel that way. Growing up anxious, feeling big emotions, and later working through childhood trauma and eating disorder recovery deeply shaped how she shows up as a therapist. Her lived experience doesn’t define her clients’ journeys, but it does allow her to sit with complexity, intensity, and vulnerability without flinching.
She often works with people who look like they “have it together” on the outside, but internally feel overwhelmed by anxiety, self-criticism, body hatred, obsessive thoughts, or the weight of past experiences. Kate gets how hard it is to ask for help, because she’s been there herself, searching for a therapist and hoping life could feel different.
In therapy, Kate sees the work as a partnership. You bring your lived experience and self-knowledge. She brings clinical expertise, practical tools, and the ability to gently (and sometimes directly) call out the patterns that keep you stuck. Together, you navigate the mess, challenge the inner critic, and work toward a life that feels more grounded, connected, and, yes, SWELL.
