Ozempic Is Wreaking Havoc on Mother-Daughter Relationships

Natalie* grew up out west in a steak-house family. Her dad owned a restaurant that’s been around for almost 70 years, the kind of place where you can get a filet with a lobster tail on the side. As an adult, she started out working in technology and consulting, but seven years ago she got the call: Her dad wanted her to take over.

At first, she regretted saying yes: “I was kind of like, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t know anything about this.’ ” But she grew into it through Covid, and “now I absolutely love it.” A year ago, at 33, she moved to New York City to open a second branch. That year, she also gave birth to a baby girl and invited her mother to visit. That’s when the trouble started.

While Natalie had been getting a crash course in big steaks and big-time hospitality, her mother, who’d struggled with her weight for decades, had been on a GLP-1, dropping several dress sizes. Suddenly, she had a new body—and opinions about everyone else’s.

To Natalie, then three months postpartum and in the midst of construction on the new place, she said: “Maybe you should consider taking a GLP so that you’re skinny by the time the restaurant opens.”

Natalie pushed back. “I was like, ‘Or I could just wait and let my body do its thing,’ ” she recalls. But her mother kept pushing. “She’s like, ‘Yeah … or you could just take a GLP.’ ”

Even Natalie’s infant daughter inspired comments: “My mom was like, ‘I think you should pull back on the milk. I think she’s overeating.’ I didn’t realize how toxic some of the thinking around GLPs was until I had my child,” Natalie says now.

Today, GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs are everywhere, of course. According to a recent Gallup poll, 15 percent of Americans report having used one of these medications (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, Mounjaro, or Saxenda) for weight loss at some point. Physician-scientist Jennifer Manne-Goehler, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who helped develop the World Health Organization guideline on GLPs for treating adults with obesity, says that in her own clinical experience, as well as in studies, many users lose 5 percent or more of their total body weight within three to six months. In clinical trials, people have lost an average of 15 to 22 percent of their weight over 12 to 16 months.

For many people, this has been nothing short of a miracle. At the same time, the GLP revolution has tapped into some of our deepest cultural anxieties around weight and body image, shaking up friendships and transforming marriages. Perhaps nowhere has it caused more friction than between mothers and daughters. After all, many of us got our most deeply ingrained ideas about beauty, but also self-control and appetite, from our mothers, who got them from their mothers, and so on. Now that a simple injection may be able to control what a lifelong struggle could not, mothers and daughters alike are wrestling with the implications—and a wealth of emotion is rising to the surface.

Zoë Bisbing, a therapist in New York City who focuses on body image, sees the same scenarios over and over in her practice. There are the women in midlife whose 70- or 80-year-old mothers are on a GLP-1 and have made it the center of family discussions. “I hear a lot from women who are like, ‘Yep, the grandmas are on it and can’t stop talking about it,’ ” Bisbing says. There are the young adults whose parents are pressuring them to take one of the drugs—sometimes even offering to pay for them—in a way that recalls a childhood spent being dragged to Weight Watchers. Some women don’t even want their mothers to know they’re on the meds. “It feels like something that will please their moms,” Bisbing says, “and they don’t want to please their moms.”

When one member of a family suddenly, dramatically loses weight, the sense of betrayal can be intense. Novelist Rainbow Rowell’s latest book, Cherry Baby, which came out in April, follows a protagonist with four sisters. All five siblings are plus-size and bonded by a loose family-centric sense of body positivity. So when the eldest suddenly starts mysteriously dropping dress sizes—she’s on a GLP-1 but doesn’t say so—the others are rocked. Rowell, who isn’t on a GLP-1 (but doesn’t rule it out for the future), now sees similar storylines playing out among friends and family, some of whom are taking them. “GLP-1s are an element of control that just wasn’t there before,” she says. “So it becomes more of a choice to be fat, or at least it’s perceived as a choice. Before, there was more of a feeling that we’re all in this together. I think GLP-1s have put us all on different pages.”

Rowell says the rise of GLP-1s can present a tectonic identity shift. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to be okay with being fat. To like who I am and be grateful for my body,” she says. “So it’s world-shaking to have what feels like an exit. If you take the exit, what does that say about all the work that you’ve done? Were you lying to everybody? Were you lying to yourself?”

Rowell has seen what happens in families when someone goes on a GLP-1 and tries to keep it secret: “When you say, ‘I’ve just gotten more disciplined about exercise’ or ‘I’ve finally been treating food in a healthy way,’ everybody around you is like, ‘Bullshit. On top of everything else, you’re lying to us,’ ” she says.

When you’re used to watching loved ones navigate the world in a body shaped like your own, it can be destabilizing to witness them suddenly change. “You’re constantly navigating your feelings about it, and they’re bumping up against other people’s feelings,” says Rowell. “It feels like judgment, and it feels lonely, and it feels like competition.”

It’s easy to complain about almond moms—the social-media term for mothers who project their own unhealthy body image onto their children. (“Hungry? Just have a few unsalted almonds!”) But Bisbing says the impulse, however misguided, can come from a well-intentioned place. “Parents have a primal need to support and protect their kids. And everybody knows we live in a deeply fat-phobic culture where body privilege is a thing and body hierarchy is a thing,” she says.

“Mothers don’t want to see their daughters in pain, ashamed about their bodies,” says Geneen Roth, who has written 11 books about emotional eating and breaking free of diet culture, including this year’s Love, Finally: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food. “The problem is, a daughter picks up what the mother feels—not just what she says. There’s a transmission of what the mother feels about her body and food.”

Baltimore therapist Lucy Anson, who specializes in body-image issues and disordered eating, says her clients can tell when their mothers are secretly on a GLP-1. “Suddenly my mom doesn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner with me,” she says, parroting what she’s heard. “She doesn’t make the desserts she made anymore.”

For every woman who feels judged by her mother about weight-loss meds, there’s another who frets about revealing her own GLP-1 use to her kids, for fear they’ll internalize a damaging message. “Even with adult children, you don’t want them to think they need to change their body,” says Bisbing. “At the same time, you might want to be honest about what you’re doing and why.”

How can a mother talk about losing weight without planting the wrong ideas in her children’s heads? Anna, 48, is from a Jewish family in New England “where there’s this grand irony: Food is forced upon you, but God forbid you should gain weight,” she says. Her mother often criticized her own body and was critical of other people too—noting, for example, when a cousin “got heavy.”

As an adult, Anna carried on the family tradition, cycling through restriction and backsliding, shame and frustration, to manage her own weight. Nothing worked until she got on a GLP. Not only did she lose the weight, but her joint pain and inflammation cleared up. Without the constant buzz of “food noise,” she felt more mental clarity. “Even weeks before a vacation, I’d start to get anxious: Am I going to overeat?” Now that anxiety is gone.

Still, she needed to figure out how to discuss the medication with her preteen daughter and teenage son. Both have noted that their grandmother is “always talking about how much she hates her body.” Anna has asked her to stop doing this in front of the children. “That was not the way that I wanted to show what I valued in other people,” Anna says.

Bisbing validates Anna’s approach. “What we pay attention to, what we talk about—it communicates what’s important. And, oh my gosh, the most protective thing we can do for our own body image and other people’s body image, whether it’s friends, colleagues, or kids, is to talk about what we want them to value about themselves.”

Ultimately, Anna decided to treat her GLP-1 like she would an antidepressant: as a medical intervention, not a sign of weakness. Her kids see her taking her shot and hear her discussing her health plan. So far, she says, it doesn’t appear to have made much of an impression on them—unlike the time she was dieting and refused cake, even on her birthday. “That stands out much more for them than what I’m doing now, which is eating the same food as everybody again.” Anna doesn’t make herself separate meals anymore, and she maintains a family culture of not talking about other people’s shapes. “I’m really happy to say that my daughter has not once said anything about not liking her body,” she says.

For her part, Natalie, the restaurateur, is trying to wrap her head around raising a daughter in a world in which our body ideals sometimes seem to have shifted radically and sometimes seem frozen in amber. Her mom’s post-GLP weight fixation, she says, has “dramatically” affected the way she thinks about her own parenting.

“I was so fixated on ‘How do we teach her to have a kind heart and be smart and work hard?’ and all of these things. Now I’m [also] like, ‘How do I make sure she’s not obsessed with being skinny?’ ”

She bristles at comments about her daughter’s body, even when they’re framed positively. “I even catch myself with my husband and in-laws, where they make a comment like ‘Oh my God, she’s so fat. It’s adorable.’ Maybe we stop doing that. Maybe instead we just say, ‘She’s so happy.’ ”

This story originally appeared in the October 2026 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.