Weight Loss Drugs in Teens: What’s the Real Cost? 

Wegovy, Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications are more than just a fad diet for many. These drugs can be life-changing, even for those less than two decades into their own. 

By Tess Patton

I cried at my gynecologist’s office. I am sure I wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. She started to ask about my birth control prescription and tears welled up in my eyes. She tossed over the tissues. 

Snot dripping down my face – a certified ugly crier – I started to tell her that I just didn’t love my body at that moment and that I didn’t know what the root of my problem was. She interrupted my rambling: “Well, is it the weight you’re worried about?” she asked. ”Because we could fix that.” 

Fix that?

I didn’t think that was for people like me, a mid-sized girl who was upset she gained the freshman 15, okay maybe 20, and it wasn’t coming off. The sobbing continued and the splotches on my face got splotchier. 

Is Ozempic made for me? I didn’t think I was some fitness queen or supermodel, but I never thought I was fat. And just because she thought my parents could afford it meant that I deserved it more than someone with clinical obesity or type 2 diabetes? I didn’t understand.

She had provided me with a clear, simple solution for my crippling body image issues and unrelenting negative self-talk, but at what cost?

Well, at the very least a $1,375 monthly check to my parents and a knock at my ego.

“I didn’t change anything. I’m still eating the same healthy foods and working out and doing sports, and all I added was the medicine, and I finally lost the weight.”

Demi buckley

Eating isn’t easy

For as long as she can remember, Demi’s life revolved around food. Where it would come from next. What snack was going to accompany any activity. Always fueled by the constant need for fullness.

“It was a constant battle because I didn’t like always eating, but I always felt like I had to, especially when I was bored and not doing anything,” she said. 

When she was 15 years old, she was almost 200 pounds, entering a zone that doctors deemed “morbidly obese” for her age group, according to her body mass index (BMI). 

“The BMI scale is so messed up,” she said jokingly.

This wasn’t for lack of trying. Demi and her mother Deana Buckley both struggled with being overweight, a trait they attribute to genetics. They went on this journey together – everything from keto diets and calorie deficits to motivating each other in the gym. Nothing seemed to work. Demi’s full plate of after school activities, including volleyball, cheer and school band, still didn’t quiet the food noise in her head. 

In October of 2022 Deana started the GLP-1 medication Mounjaro weighing in at 366 pounds. The following December the FDA approved Wegovy as a weight loss medication for children ages 12 and up. The weight started to come off quickly for Deana – she lost 100 pounds in the first year. Deana was eager at the opportunity to give her daughter this “miracle drug,” but Demi had her doubts. 

“I didn’t think it was gonna work,” she said. “I wasn’t really interested in giving myself shots if it wasn’t going to work.” 

Demi would be the first teen patient her family doctor had ever put on the medication, and she had her reservations. The doctor gave Demi the same disheartening eat healthy and work out speech she had heard countless times before. Advice that simply wasn’t making any great changes in Demi’s body.

Demi had reservations of her own. Her eating disorder. 

Demi has battled her eating disorder since late elementary school. In sixth grade she had a friend that struggled with her own disordered eating and projected those feelings onto a young Demi. 

“She would make me weigh myself when I went to her house, and she would compare jean sizes. I remember one time we went up north to a cabin, and she put on my jeans, but she put both her legs into one [of mine] and was like making jokes about that,” Demi said.

This same friend would tell Demi she couldn’t eat at her house and that she should go on a diet at 12 years old. That’s when she stopped eating. Or tried to. 

She would think about food and binge to the point where she needed to purge, leaving her still unhappy with her body and feeling more guilt than before. 

“Even with an eating disorder, I still didn’t lose weight. And that’s when I realized that there was an issue with why I couldn’t lose weight, and it was more than just eating,” she said.

She was nervous that starting the drug would perpetuate these thoughts, but with the encouragement from her mom and doctors she took the risk.

Now almost a year since starting the medication in March of 2023, Demi has lost about 60 pounds. The medication has silenced the food noise and shame that she once had around food. Demi did say that the medication has quieted her hunger cues to such an extent that sometimes she doesn’t think about food at all. She credits her mom for supporting her and making sure she gets the nutrients she needs.

“My grades have gotten better, like my mental health is like so much better now that I’m on this medicine,” she said. “I’m confident in my body, which helps me be confident in my mind.”

The kind of progress that both Demi and Deana had was not simply because of the medication. Many doctors have found that access to these semaglutide drugs or GLP-1 receptor agonists combined with nutritional, behavioral therapy helped their patients better manage their hunger and satiety levels. 

Demi and Deana pictured on the left pre-Wegovy and on the right one year in for Demi and two years in for Deana (Photos courtesy of Deana Buckley).

Both Demi and her mother have found that people look down upon their use of the drug as an easy way out. She said the most common misconception of people using this medication for weight loss is that they’re just lazy and eating junk food at home. Demi noted that in order for her to see serious changes she prioritized protein intake, behavioral changes and water intake.

“If I really was like eating like crap, like I would have a lot of stomach issues, because this medicine doesn’t mix well with greasy foods and that, and if I wasn’t drinking water working out, then I wouldn’t be losing the weight like I am.”

However, not all patients take to these lifestyle changes easily. Dr. Karla Lester, a self-proclaimed “TikTokdoc” and weight loss specialist, has noticed in her work with children and adolescents that parents’ often well-intended nutritional intervention can give their teens heightened levels of anxiety and body shaming. 

Some patients felt like an outcast at their own dinner table, receiving smaller portions than their siblings. Others felt the pressures of diet culture placed on them by their parents.

The TikTok “almond mom” trope came up often in meetings with Dr. Lester and her teens. She said there is a discrepancy between parents wanting to support their kid and how that love and intervention is received. The root of it, she says, comes from self-hatred, body judging and food shaming. Many of her clients are stuck in their own heads so much that the nagging from a parent can be frustrating.

“The parents think they’re helping, but they get in their teen’s lane when they’re eating. They’ll say ‘Are you sure you wanna have seconds? You just ate,’” she said. “It’s just these huge shame triggers.”  

Almost all of Dr. Lester’s patients struggle with body image issues before coming into her Zoom room, she said. Her approach to managing her patients’ weight and health is about meeting them where they are and finding a manageable dietary and lifestyle plan.

Not everyone is on board with teenagers using this kind of medication. Deana has been open about her and her daughter’s story on TikTok, opening the two of themselves up to the public. While many express support for the open dialogue, the internet has no lack of haters coming their way – some even threatening to send Deana to Child Protective Services for “killing her daughter”.

“Some of these teens have tried everything. And it hasn’t worked for them. They’ve been so bullied that some of them would rather commit suicide than continuing to try to live their life like this. So you would rather than be dead from suicide than taking a medication that has helped them gain control of their life?” Deana responded.

“Some of them would rather commit suicide than continuing to try to live their life like this. So you would rather than be dead from suicide than taking a medication that has helped them gain control of their life?”

Deana buckley

As Demi enters her junior year of high school, she looks forward to staying involved in cheer volleyball and basketball at school. She also plans to go to community college and get a degree in early education. She credits her newfound confidence and stable mental health to her experience on Wegovy. 

“When I was heavier people said something. Now that I’ve lost weight people say something, but I’ve just realized people are gonna say stuff, no matter what I look like. I just have to deal with it,” Demi said. “So I’m happy with where I’m at. I don’t care what they have to say.”

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