Stephen Colbert Talks About How Ozempic May Affect Thanksgiving Dinner

Stephen Colbert injected a new timely topic into his monologue on The Late Show last night. He discussed how Ozempic and similar infectible weight loss medications may affect the Thanksgiving Holiday. Colbert began the segment by saying, “This year people’s relationship to food at Thanksgiving may be a little bit different, thanks to new weight loss drugs like Ozempic, which cause you to lose your appetite.” Yeah, when you’ve spent the past, oh, every Thanksgiving trying to stuff yourself to the point where you can’t move, being a less hungry this time around could significantly change the dynamics around the annual feast.

If you haven’t been on social media where some influencers and celebrities have been making Ozempic out to be the best thing since giving up sliced bread, you may not realize how popular Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy and other glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists have become. Such semaglutide-containing medications when injected on a weekly basis can significantly suppress one’s appetite, which can lead to weight loss. Such medications have their drawbacks—as will be mentioned later—but their popularity means that quite a few people may be approaching this year’s Thanksgiving Dinner a bit differently.

Colbert continued his monologue by saying, “Some Ozempic users are wondering whether they should tell family members that they’re on the medication to avoid hurting feelings with their smaller appetites,” as you can see in the following video from the late night talk show on CBS:

When you don’t automatically wolf down Grandma’s or Grandpa’s 10,000-calorie sausage-cornbread-sage-mushroom-butter-more sausage-more butter dressing as you usually do, others may wonder what’s happening. Feelings may indeed get hurt. That’s why Colbert suggested the following: “Absolutely tell them because, in America, it is rude to leave the Thanksgiving table alive. Plus, plus, under your own power, at least.” Colbert added, “If you tell your family that you’re on Ozempic they’ll know you were lying when you said you lost the weight the old-fashioned way- cocaine.”

Clearly, cocaine is not a great option for weight loss. It has a number of potential side effects such as addiction, three-to-five years in prison, psychoses, and death. Naturally, Ozempic isn’t the same thing as cocaine in any way. But GLP-1 receptor agonists are not without their potential side effects. And if you were to stop Ozempic or other semaglutide injections for a week so that you can fully gorge during Thanksgiving and then re-start the medications afterwards, such side effects could result in an even more intense manner. As Colbert went on to say in is monologue, “Doctors warn that when people restart their doses they can experience more intense side effects such as nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, that undermine the pleasure of any food.” So quietly stopping the medication so that you partake in the Thankgiving feast and then resuming the medication may not go so smoothly.

This is yet another reason why ultimately it helps to be upfront with others about your use of such medications. In other words, it’s probably better to talk turkey when it comes to Thanksgiving.