The Billboards Are Selling You a New Diet Culture (It's Just in a Syringe Now)
TL;DR: Tampa is absolutely saturated with GLP-1 and medspa marketing right now - billboards on I-275, ads on your feed, a medspa in every strip mall. This post breaks down why that's not actually a new problem, just diet culture wearing a different outfit, and what it's doing to the folks who are already exhausted from spending years fighting the old version of the same message. Spoiler: this isn't about whether you personally take a GLP-1. It's about naming what's actually being sold to you underneath it.
Drive down Dale Mabry or hop on I-275 anywhere in Tampa right now and count how many ads you see for weight loss shots before you hit your exit. I'll wait. It's… a lot, right? Between the billboards, the medspa that opened up in the strip mall next to the nail salon, and the sponsored posts in your feed, you cannot get through a normal Tuesday in this city without someone trying to sell you a syringe that promises to finally fix the thing you've been told your whole life needs fixing.
I want to be really clear about something before I go any further, because I know how this topic gets twisted: this is not a post about whether you personally should or shouldn't take a GLP-1. That's your body, your medical history, your relationship with your doctor, your decision. Nobody (including me) gets to tell you what to do with your life if you're not hurting anyone else. Full stop.
What this is about is the culture that's exploded around these drugs. Because I promise you, the culture is not neutral, and it is not new. It's diet culture. It just changed clothes.
Same Diet Culture, New Delivery System
For twenty years I dieted. I know what it feels like to believe, all the way down in your bones, that the next thing - the next plan, the next program, the next "this time it's different" - is finally going to be the thing that fixes you. I grew up in communities where that belief was basically wallpaper. And then I spent my twenties and thirties chasing it myself, before I found my way to intuitive eating and started doing the actual work of unlearning (and then relearning) all of it.
So when I look at what's happening with GLP-1s right now, I don't see something new. I see the exact same promise diet culture has always made. That your body is a problem, and here is the solution. Except this time it comes with a prescription pad instead of a meal plan, and it's being marketed with the same intensity a wellness brand used to reserve for green juice.
The billboards aren't selling a medication. They're selling the same old lie: that you are one intervention away from being acceptable.
The New Rules Are Just the Old Rules With Extra Steps
Here's where it gets even more absurd. Researchers have actually started studying how people judge folks who lose weight on GLP-1s compared to folks who lose weight through "traditional" diet and exercise — and the GLP-1 folks get judged more harshly. People are more likely to say they "took the easy way out." They're less willing to associate with them socially. Even people in larger bodies who are using these medications report feeling like they have to hide it, downplay it, or perform extra effort somewhere else to compensate. We all see this in real time - in the groups on social media and in our day to day lives.
Think about what that actually reveals. It was never really about health. It was never really about "hard work." If it were, someone “successfully” losing weight through medical intervention would be celebrated the same way someone finishing a marathon is celebrated. Instead, we've gotten so obsessed with looking like we're suffering for it that even real medical treatment still gets judged as “cheating.” You can't win. You were never supposed to be able to win. That's the whole design.
And now there's a new goalpost on top of the old one - "Ozempic face," the term for the gaunt, hollowed-out look that can come with rapid weight loss. So now the conversation isn't just "did you lose enough weight," it's "did you lose it the right way, at the right speed, without looking like you lost it." The bar didn't get more achievable. It just moved again. That's what diet culture does. It never runs out of new places to move the goalpost, because the goalpost was never the actual point - the constant self-surveillance was.
What This Feels Like If You Live Here
If you're one of my clients, or you could be, you already know this feeling: you finally get some distance from the "should" voice about your body - through therapy, through intuitive eating, through years of hard, unglamorous internal work - and then you go to your kid's back-to-school night, or a work happy hour, or your family's group chat, and someone brings up who's "on it" now, and who's lost how much, and suddenly you're back in the exact conversation you thought you'd finally stepped out of.
That's not a personal failure. That's diet culture doing what diet culture does, and doing it in a city that is currently blanketed in ads for it. Tampa didn't invent this moment, but between the sheer number of medspas here and how much of daily life happens in a car staring at billboards, this city is giving that message a lot of surface area to land on.
I see this in session constantly right now - folks who are doing genuinely good, values-aligned work around food and body image, who then feel totally thrown off by a conversation at a birthday party or a targeted ad that shows up mid-scroll. Not because they're doing anything wrong. Because the noise got louder, not because their progress got smaller.
If any of this is landing - if you're noticing how much louder the noise has gotten lately, or you're realizing you've been white-knuckling your way through conversations you used to be able to breeze through - you don't have to keep doing that alone. If you are in Florida, North Carolina, or Vermont - reach out and let's talk about what's actually going on underneath it.
So What Do You Actually Do With All of This?
I'm not going to hand you a five-step plan to "opt out" of diet culture, because that's its own kind of trap - turning body image recovery into one more thing to perform perfectly. But here's what I can offer:
Notice who's driving the bus
When you feel that pull - the "maybe I should look into it too" thought - get curious about which part of you is talking. Is it the part of you that's genuinely curious about your health, on your own terms? Or is it the exhausted, scared part that just wants the world to finally stop commenting on your body, by any means necessary? Both of those parts deserve compassion. But they're not the same voice, and it matters which one you're listening to.
Separate the medication from the marketing
GLP-1s are a real medical tool for real medical reasons for a lot of people. The billboard on I-275 is not a medical conversation. It's an ad. You're allowed to opt out of the ad campaign without it being a statement about anyone's personal medical choices, including your own.
Give yourself permission to be tired of this
You are allowed to be exhausted that the version of this conversation changed shape but never actually stopped. That exhaustion isn't a sign you're not doing the work. It's a sign you actually might be paying attention.
Remember: recovery isn't a finish line
I've been doing this work - both personally and professionally - for years, and I still have hard body image days. I still swim in the same water everyone else does. The difference isn't that I've become immune to the noise. It's that I know what to do when it shows up. That's what we build together in this work - not a permanent, unshakeable sense of body peace, but a set of tools for the days the noise gets loud again. And in a city where the noise is currently everywhere you drive, that skill matters more than ever.
You don't have to keep shrinking yourself (physically or otherwise) to earn a full, meaningful life. That was true before this drug existed, and it's still true now, no matter how many billboards (or social media groups) say otherwise.
If you're reading this and something in it landed - if you're tired of fighting the same fight in a new outfit, or you just don't want to do this next part alone - that's exactly the kind of thing I help folks work through. I offer a free consult call to talk through what's actually going on and see if we're a good fit. You've already done a lot of the hard work just by noticing the noise for what it is. You don't have to figure out the rest by yourself. I see folks in my Carrollwood, Tampa office, or virtually throughout Florida, North Carolina, and Vermont.
Keri Baker, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker and the owner of a therapy practice in the Carrollwood area of North Tampa, working with highly sensitive adults - especially folks in larger bodies - around food, body image, and the exhausting work of unlearning diet culture. She's a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, trained in IFS and Brainspotting, and has spent twenty years dieting so you don't have to take her word for it secondhand. She sees clients in person in Tampa and virtually throughout Florida, North Carolina and Vermont.
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