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Thanksgiving this year will look very different for Julissa Alcantar-Martinez and her family. The Houston-area realtor has been taking the appetite suppressing medication Mounjaro for one-and-a-half years following fifteen months on Ozempic. She has lost 115 pounds after years of struggles with dieting and diet-related disease. Her son, 17, has lost 65 pounds on Ozempic, and her 21-year-old daughter has lost 50 on it. (Shanker, 11/19)

For most of her life, Claudia Stearns dreaded Thanksgiving. As a person who struggled with obesity since childhood, Stearns hated the annual turmoil of obsessing about what she ate — and the guilt of overindulging on a holiday built around food. Now, after losing nearly 100 pounds using medications including Wegovy, a powerful new anti-obesity drug, Stearns says the “food noise” in her head has gone very, very quiet. (Aleccia, 11/20)

Whether you’re a fan of the drug name Zepbound or, like one X user, think it sounds like “an off brand bus line,” you’re likely to have some opinion about the new moniker for Eli Lilly’s blockbuster diabetes drug Mounjaro. The company announced the new name on Nov. 8 following the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug for weight loss as well. (Merelli, 11/20)

Booming demand for newer weight-loss and diabetes drugs is expected to accelerate the rise in medical expenses for employers in the United States next year, staff health benefits consultant Mercer said on Friday. GLP-1 medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could contribute between 50 and 100 basis points to the trend, Mercer's Chief Health Actuary, Sunit Patel, told Reuters in an interview. (Leo and Mandowara, 11/17)

The fact that diet culture all over social media targets grown women is bad enough, but such messaging also trickles down to tweens and teens. (And let’s be honest, a lot is aimed directly at young people too.) It couldn’t happen at a worse time: There’s been a noticeable spike in eating disorders, particularly among adolescent girls, since the beginning of the pandemic. (Hurley, 11/18)