This Woman Cut Off Her Friend For Using A Weight-Loss Drug, And Then It Got Weirder

 This week, writer Sophia Ortega published an essay in The Cut about ending a friendship. You’re probably asking, “Hmmm, is it over a betrayal? A falling out? Maybe her bestie is a bad person?” Those are all reasonable questions, because you usually don’t just cut someone off for no reason. But according to Ortega, she had to part ways with her best friend because she had been quietly taking a weight-loss drug called Wegovy. Ortega called it an act of self-protection. Meanwhile, the internet is calling entitlement.

In case you don’t wanna read it (I totally understand), I’ll summarize it for you: Ortega noticed the drug in her friend’s fridge. She describes finding the Wegovy as feeling like "being cheated on, a confounding betrayal.” Then she compares it to seeing "a picture of my ex with someone prettier than me." The weight-loss drug is already pulling double duty as both romantic rival and mortal enemy. Mind you, we’re literally two paragraphs in. She then notices the dog has climbed onto the kitchen counter while she was processing her discovery and writes: "Nothing was as it should've been." 

She texts her friend, "wegovy… You're not in trouble but what is going on?” as if she’s a disappointed parent who found cigarettes in a teenager's backpack. When the friend came home, she told Ortega, "I can explain," as if she is in trouble. They sat in silence for a moment after they talked, but Ortega couldn’t hear anything because her blood was boiling. Then Ortega told her she loved her and left. On her walk home after their conversation, she reports having "a brief but violent fantasy about breaking and entering her doctor's office." 

Oh, and they had multiple pairs of the same clogs. When leaving each other's apartments, one of them would ask, "Are these yours or mine?" and the other would shrug and say "Who cares!" This is the friendship that ended over Wegovy. Let that breathe for a moment.

It’s safe to say that people on social media are not holding back. User @JeremiahDJohns put it bluntly on X, "The Cut seems to specialize in essays that essentially say 'I am profoundly mentally ill and would like society to bend itself around my disorders so that I never have to change.'" 

@senderowiczj added, "I think the Cut may have found its most demented personal-narrative author yet, and polyamory isn't even involved." 

To be clear, none of this is meant to minimize what Ortega has been through. She spent over a decade in the grip of anorexia and bulimia, came out the other side only after years of grueling recovery work, and the discovery of that Wegovy genuinely rattled something real in her. At the same time, her friend didn't get Wegovy off the street. She got it from a doctor, who assessed her, wrote the prescription, and determined she was a candidate for it. I’m happy for Ortega's recovery. But as legitimate and hard-won as it is, I see why the internet feels that it is being utilized as some kind of verdict on what her friend is allowed to do with her own body.  

Here’s where it gets crazier, though. X users found another piece by Ortega. @benryanwriter, who apparently went full investigative journalist on her back catalog, reported back to his followers that Ortega’s “ex had a feeding fetish and was a cinephile snob. He added that Ortega “sublet her place to a British man who made passionate love to her in her apartment and then took her to England and turned cold.”

Before Wegovy, before The Cut, before any of this, Sophia Ortega wrote a first-person essay for HuffPost in 2020 titled "I Couldn't Fulfill My Boyfriend's Fetish, So We Opened Our Relationship." It is exactly what it sounds like. The boyfriend, Drew, is a self-described feeder and fat admirer. A feeder is someone sexually attracted to larger partners and helps them gain weight by making them eat a lot. Ortega, who was at the time newly in eating disorder recovery and had stopped weighing herself entirely, found his fetish disorienting in the best possible way. "My obsession with food was the least attractive thing about me," she wrote, "so when Drew finally disclosed his proclivities, it turned my reality upside down." They tried feeding together, but it didn't work. So they opened the relationship.

The essay follows her through downloading Tinder, deleting Tinder, joining OkCupid, eventually texting a man named James from a single good date years prior, and finally meeting him at a hotel bar in New York on Christmas Day while Drew was simultaneously spending time with Jessica. Jessica is a 44-year-old, 600-plus-pound matriarch of the feederism community who ran one of the first softcore websites of its kind. Ortega describes flying home to Los Angeles the next morning, feeling like "sexual royalty," wondering whether her seatmates on the plane knew who they were sitting next to.

So let's get this straight. Ortega was fully on board with a relationship that literally centered on the glorification of extreme eating and weight gain, dissolved the boundaries of monogamy without a second thought, and wrote about all of it with breezy, cosmopolitan flair. But her best friend — her closest friend — quietly takes a doctor-prescribed weight loss medication, tells nobody, and that is the unforgivable offense. The dissolution of an entire friendship. The line that cannot be crossed. Extreme eating and degrading kinks? Totally fine. Open relationship? Absolutely! A Wegovy prescription obtained from an actual physician? How dare she. 

At the end of her Wegovy essay, Ortega writes: "Hunger is the body's announcement that it is alive and wants to stay that way." It's actually a beautiful line, and she's right. The body wants to stay alive — which is precisely what her friend was trying to do when she walked into her doctor's office and walked out with a prescription. The irony is that Ortega understands bodily autonomy better than most people. She fought for her own for over a decade. She just seems to have a harder time extending that same grace to someone who made a different choice than she would have. For a woman who once shrugged "Who cares!" over a pair of shared clogs, the answer, it turns out, was her. She cared very much.