Weight loss medications like Ozempic have aided people who struggle with health issues. However, the widespread usage of the drugs has also reintroduced unrealistic body standards. 

Women have been and still are victims of the expectations of society when it comes to their bodies. Men and women both contribute to the issue, since both perpetuate the idea that there is only one acceptable body type for women. 

For so long, a woman’s only purpose was to please a man. Now, women have the opportunity to look at themselves and decide how they want to treat themselves. But weight loss drugs, originally for people with type two diabetes, have become popular since they regulate hunger, and they seem to have contributed to a reemergence in society of the idea that only conventional thinness is acceptable. 

Recently, many female celebrities have been seen looking extremely frail, with their upper-body bones easily detectable. They look unhealthy, as if they are experiencing a famine and are not millionaires with access to lots of food. 

The acceptance of celebrities losing weight may be quieter than the en masse weight-loss trends of the ’90s and 2000s, but the overall rise in the need to be thin mirrors those standards. 

To go unnoticed, under this harmful way of thinking, is to be beautiful. When women make themselves physically smaller, it is easier for them to go unnoticed and therefore be seen as gorgeous by society. 

In truth, no matter how many critical articles are written on the way women’s bodies are portrayed and treated in society, no cultural change will likely come anytime soon. 

These ideas are so ingrained in most of Western culture that the best thing that women can do for themselves is to recognize that the beauty standard changes extremely quickly, and the only way to uphold it is through thousands of dollars or by starving themselves. 

Hopefully, women will start seeing the underlying reasons why their bodies are subjected to scrutiny and begin to unlearn the ideals that plague society.