What a Year on Ozempic Taught Johann Hari
15 min read
In the fall of 2005, Johann Hari, then a young columnist for The Independent who was struggling with his weight, described a trip he said he’d taken to a wellness spa in the foothills of the Carinthian Alps. After spending just four days there on a cleansing diet that consisted almost entirely of drinking tea—Hari could not bear to stay a moment longer—he’d lost seven pounds. “The cravings for lard had leeched out of my system,” he marveled in his write-up, noting that he hadn’t yet regained the weight.
Hari tells this Alpine-detox story once again in Magic Pill, his fourth and latest book, released last month—but the anecdote now appears to hold a different lesson. Instead of maintaining his new diet, he seems to relapse: “When I got home, I felt like a failure,” he now says of the very same experience. “Where, I wondered, was my willpower?”
The new book’s title is a slanted reference to Ozempic (which doesn’t come in pill form), and to the new class of anti-obesity medications that is already reshaping health care for tens of millions of Americans. Many of Magic Pill’s 250 pages describe these drugs’ amazing benefits and potential harms; most of the rest are devoted to a workmanlike review of certain social causes of obesity, and how they might one day be reversed. Some portions of this story have been told in other places—Hari makes ample references to other well-known books. But his account brings an element of human drama that few could match, even when it’s just rehashing others’ work. That drama is the author’s own: Above all else, Magic Pill describes Hari’s everlasting struggle to control himself. Whether purposefully or not, he has produced a revealing record of his shame.
Why does Hari feel ashamed? For one thing, he’s on Ozempic. Hari doesn’t really need to take Ozempic, but he’s on it nonetheless: That’s the premise of the book, as laid out from the start. He decided, “quite abruptly” as he puts it in the introduction, to begin injections. It was 2022, and his pandemic BMI had risen to a hair over 30, just high enough to qualify for a prescription. Going on it “was a snap decision,” he explains, “and later I realized I was driven by impulses I didn’t fully understand at the time.” A methodical examination of those impulses unspools from there: Across the book’s 12 chapters, Hari will ask himself why he can’t just stop eating. Why should he need the help of a powerful drug to lose weight? Where, he’ll wonder again and again, is his willpower?
There are scientific answers to those questions, and also there are moral ones. “Taking Ozempic was a betrayal of my values. Every time I injected myself, I felt fraudulent,” he writes. A few pages later, he elaborates: “If I am totally honest, at some level, I believed that by taking these drugs, I was cheating.” This inner sense of crookedness is meant to stand in for a more expansive one. If he’s a victim of his impulses, then we all are as well. Why can’t any of us stop eating? Whatever happened to our willpower? And if Hari feels uneasy injecting himself with artificial self-restraint, then society should feel the same. We’ve made a religion, more or less, out of limitless consumption; we’ve allowed our diets to be overrun with processed, packaged foods. Now we’re rolling back the ill effects of too much eating with yet another branded product. Doesn’t this approach to public health feel a little bit like cheating? Isn’t it a form of fraud?
This line of thinking holds a special resonance for Hari, who has in other contexts shown a catastrophic lack of self-control. In fact, his history as a journalist would seem to offer special insight into the battle between the id and the superego. As a columnist for magazines and newspapers—and as the guy who wrote about the Alpine weight-loss trip almost 20 years ago—he was once a lauded journalist. Hari’s work “combines courageous reporting and forceful writing with honest analysis,” announced a judge who awarded him the Orwell Prize in 2008. But Hari’s career appeared to reach an early end a few years later, when some of his work was found to be conspicuously dishonest. In 2011, he was outed as a plagiarist, and then for making vicious accusations about his rivals through a sock-puppet account on Wikipedia. “I did two wrong and stupid things,” Hari wrote in his final column for the Independent, under the headline “A personal apology.” He promised to step away from writing for a while so that he could study journalism, and that when he finished he’d be more scrupulous than he’d ever been before, footnoting all his work and posting audio of all his interviews. “I hope after a period of retraining, you will give me the chance,” he said.
That chance arrived a few years later, when Hari reappeared with a best seller, Chasing the Scream, on the social causes of addiction, and a viral TED Talk—which has now been viewed 21 million times—on the same topic. He’s since written three more pop-science books, all of which are variations on this theme. In 2018, he published Lost Connections, another best seller, about depression, anxiety, and, to some extent, the nature of addiction. Hillary Clinton blurbed that one, and Ezra Klein had Hari on his podcast. After that was Stolen Focus, in 2022, about technology, distraction, and the limits of the will. Hari got another blurb from Clinton (among other celebrities), and spent another hour as a guest on Klein’s show. And now this year we have Magic Pill, Hari’s book about obesity, overeating, and, once again, the limits of the will.
Which is to say, all of Hari’s writing since his comeback has been concerned—one might even say obsessed—with self-control and self-destruction; and with the interplay of forces, from without and from within, that may lead us into ruin. They present as social commentary, and also as self-help, and further as a meditation on the links between the social and the self. As Klein put it on his podcast, the books compose “a little subgenre taking conditions and afflictions that we individualize and arguing for their social roots.”
Hari tends to use himself to illustrate those conditions and afflictions, however they arise. According to his books, he’s been hooked on stimulants; he’s also been strung out on antidepressants, dependent on his phone, and addicted to fried foods. He says he has a family history of drug dependence, and of mental illness, and also of obesity. In other words, Hari lives in just the way we all do: caught between desire and self-blame. His books describe dysregulation. They’re also a product of it.
Back in 2015, when Hari gave his first post-scandal interview, he described himself, in a joke, as a “recovering former columnist.” His work since then does read like one extended chronicle of a struggle for sobriety—particularly when it comes to sticking to the facts. Hari’s books remind you in a hundred different ways that he’s on the wagon as a journalist. He posts the audio from many of his interviews, just as he promised he would, and he piles on the endnotes. “I went on a journey of over forty thousand miles. I conducted more than two hundred interviews across the world,” he boasts in the introduction to Lost Connections. “I went on a 30,000-mile journey … In the end, I interviewed over 250 experts,” he says in Stolen Focus. And now, apparently having rushed a bit for Magic Pill: “I went on a journey around the world, where I interviewed over a hundred experts.”
But showing off is not the same as showing discipline. In spite of Magic Pill’s 394 endnotes (including those published on the website for the book) and 318 posted clips from interviews, and notwithstanding the pair of fact-checkers whom Hari thanks in his acknowledgments, the book is strewn with sloppy errors. Some of these have already been made public. When a British restaurant critic named Jay Rayner, described by Hari as having lost his love for food after going on Ozempic, pointed out on X last month that this was “complete and utter bollocks,” Hari admitted his mistake: “I apologise to Jay for getting this wrong, & am gutted I & my fact-checkers missed it,” he wrote. Then his proffered explanation—that he’d meant to cite the experience of the film critic Leila Latif when she was on Ozempic—ran aground as well. “I’m not, nor have I ever been, on semaglutide,” Latif chimed in just hours later.
A few weeks ago he posted fixes for another seven errors from the book on his website, in response to an email from a journalist. (A detailed roundup of those mistakes has since been published in The Telegraph.) I came across a bunch of other glitches in my reading of the book. In one instance, Hari writes about an evening long ago when he heard about a restaurant in Las Vegas where the servers doled out spankings to anyone who didn’t clean their plate. According to the book, that conversation happened in the late 1990s or early aughts, but the restaurant in question—called the Heart Attack Grill—didn’t open in Las Vegas until 2011. This tiny error makes no difference to the story Hari tells, but lots of tiny errors, set against the backdrop of the author’s ostentatious rigor, tell a story of their own. In a chapter on the scourge of ultra-processed foods, Hari talks about the slurry of defatted beef that is sometimes called “pink slime,” suggesting that it got this name from a food executive. This is precisely not the case. (Food executives sued the guy who coined that phrase, along with the news outlet that reported it, for defamation.) When Hari writes about the big reveal of findings from a major trial of Ozempic’s use for losing weight, he sets the scene on “one day in 2022.” The reveal occurred in 2021. And when he describes a study of mothers who have been taught “responsive parenting” techniques, he says their children ended up half as likely to become obese or overweight as those of other parents. (Hari puts the word half in italics, to emphasize the size of the effect.) But this finding was not statistically significant, according to the published work to which he is referring. “Differences between study groups were modest,” it says.
When reached by email, Hari acknowledged two of these mistakes and insisted that the other two were spurious. Some food executives did end up uttering the words pink slime, he said. (This was only in the course of responding to the PR crisis that the coinage had produced.) He also said that he’d drawn the stat about responsive parenting from a different paper that came out of the same research project, which was published two years earlier than the one cited in the endnotes of his book. (The text in Magic Pill clearly refers to the findings of the more recent paper.)
I’m worried by this indolence with details, from a (once again) successful writer whose commitment to the truth was formerly in question. But I was disconcerted, too, by Hari’s careless use of language. He’s a lovely writer when he wants to be: As a columnist, his early work—filled with fizzy, funny formulations—was a pleasure to consume. Now he sometimes writes as though he’s dishing day-old cream of wheat. “Then a breakthrough came from totally out of left field,” reads one characteristic section opener. The scientists in Magic Pill are said to have “aha moments,” “light-bulb moments,” and moments as “in a game show, where you realize you’ve won the jackpot”; and many of their reported quotes—which Hari tends to give at snippet-length—are comically banal. “That was unbelievably exciting,” an endocrinologist tells him, in reference to the FDA’s approval of a diabetes drug. “When you have obesity as a child, it’s very difficult to become un-obese,” another source explains.
He’s also shameless about recycling his work. “I’d like to briefly restate a little of what I wrote,” he offers at one point, as the setup for a two-page run-through of a scene from Lost Connections. In other places, second-hand material gets passed off as something new. “If I was a sandwich, you wouldn’t want to eat me,” he says he told his trainer in Magic Pill, after learning that his body-fat percentage was up to 32. He made the same incomprehensible joke about his body-fat percentage, using almost the same words, in the story about his visit to the Austrian health spa from 2005: “If I were a sandwich, nobody would eat me. Except me.” He also used it in a column from 2010: “If I were a sandwich, nobody would eat me except me.”
Some stretches of Magic Pill are so caked over with cliché that you can’t help but wonder if Hari might be doing it on purpose. He writes about a time when “something unexpected happened,” and then another time when someone “stumbled on an unexpected fact,” and a third when a lot of people started to “notice something unexpected.” This formulation—someone noticed something—keeps coming back: We hear from people who have variously “noticed something weird,” “noticed something odd,” “notice[d] something disconcerting,” “noticed something striking,” “noticed something peculiar,” or simply “noticed something” (which occurs multiple times on its own).
Some people are so rich they’re said to have fuck-you money. As I read through Magic Pill, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is this Hari’s fuck-you prose? But then something else occurred to me: Ironically, and despite its tendency toward sloppiness, this is Hari’s writing on a diet. Sure, he used to tell his stories with panache, but that was the old Johann Hari—the fried-chicken-eating Johann Hari, the pill-popping Johann Hari, the plagiarizing Johann Hari. Now he’s on a strict regimen of bullet points. He’s skimmed the oil from his writing and doubled down on adding fiber.
Why else would he insist on keeping track of all the miles that he’s traveled for each book? Why else would he be calculating (and reporting!) the numbers of his interviews? And why else would Hari feel the need to enumerate his every thought and argument as if it were a meal to be recorded in a food-tracking app? Magic Pill, like all his other books, is preoccupied with numbered lists. He can’t seem to stop himself from tallying: the five reasons we eat; the seven ways that processed foods will undermine your health; the 12 potential risks of taking drugs like Ozempic; and the five long-term scenarios that these drugs may yet produce. Was this just another form of laziness? He’s counting calories, of course; he’s showing you his work is made from whole ingredients. This is journalism on a detox cleanse. This is how you write for sustenance instead of pleasure. And this may be what you do when you’re a recovering former columnist.
“I work hard to make my books both factually accurate and transparent,” Hari told me in his emailed response. “Because of some things I did that were unambiguously wrong 14 years ago, I am held to a high standard, and I embrace that high standard.” But few efforts at self-discipline can last for long, as Magic Pill itself explains.
The book describes a long history of research showing that losing weight by eating less is often ineffective. “When I injected myself with Ozempic for the fifth month in a row, I thought of all the diets I had tried over the years, all the times I had tried to cut out carbs or sugar,” Hari writes. “I wondered if all those diets had been a sad joke all along, and this was my only option now.” As a journalist, he also ends up straying from his regimen: From time to time, and in place of conversations with his expert sources, Hari slips into a looser and more entertaining style. He talks about his friends, for instance, and describes the conversations they’ve had about Ozempic. Hari’s pals, unlike his sources, tend to speak in long and lively monologues that just happen to encapsulate the themes of Magic Pill. “How much is this really about improving your health?” asks a friend whom he decides to call Lara. “I don’t think, for you, it is. Not really. Not primarily. I want you to stop, and really think about it.” She goes on:
I’ve known you for twenty-five years, and you’ve never been happy about how you look. You look good. I’ve always thought you looked good. But you don’t think you do. So you’re taking this drug—and all these huge risks—to conform to a particular look, an approved look, the most socially approved look. That’s why you’re doing it. You want to be thin. Those people at that Hollywood party you went to, where you learned about this drug for the first time, and you texted me all excited—they weren’t doing this to boost their health. They were already healthy. They had private chefs to cook them the healthiest possible food. They see a personal trainer every day. They were doing it to be unnaturally thin. You aren’t taking these risks to have a healthy heart. You’re taking them to have cheekbones.
Lara continues in this vein, with very minor interjections from the author, across five pages of the book. This reads like Hari’s writing on a binge, unchecked by endnotes or the need for posting audio from interviews. (The bits about his friends come with no citations.) And he’s in binge mode, too, when he’s telling stories from his past, like the one about the wellness trip to Austria. Certain rigors now appear to be suspended, and the facts get kind of doughy.
For instance, when Hari first wrote about his visit to the Alpine clinic, for TheIndependent in 2005, he said that he was met at the entrance by a man. In Magic Pill, it’s “a woman dressed in an elaborate nineteenth-century Austrian peasant costume.” (When reached by email, Hari blamed this gender inconsistency on a typo in the first version, which turned she into he.) The same woman comes back later in the retold version of the story, still in her elaborate peasant costume, where the original version refers only to a “nurse.” Hari says in Magic Pill that multiple staffers at the clinic were in these silly peasant outfits. The version from The Independent—from which entire paragraphs have otherwise been borrowed word for word—mentions none of them. (“It’s normal, when writing an article, to leave out some minor descriptive details, and to include them when you have more space later,” Hari told me in the email.)
Similar adjustments can be found in Hari’s other reheated anecdotes. He starts the book with one about a trip he took to KFC on Christmas Eve in 2009, where all the members of the restaurant’s staff surprised him with a giant Christmas card addressed “to our best customer,” which included personal messages from each of them. He told the same story a few years ago in Lost Connections, and before that in an Independent column in 2010. But the original version takes place on December 23, not Christmas Eve; “You are our best customer” is a thing that’s said out loud, not written on a card, and there’s no mention of any personal messages from anyone at the restaurant. (Hari acknowledged that he’d made an error on the date, and told me that he’d be “happy to correct this.”) If these stories have been lightly edited, all the changes were of course unnecessary. Perhaps the clinic sounds a little sillier with the staff in dirndls, and the story of the card from KFC lands a little better when it plays out on Christmas Eve. But why would Hari bother to adjust these minor details when he’s taking such pains in other ways to demonstrate his scruples?
Hari’s subject matter and his execution seem to come together in these moments. He’s explained the social and environmental causes of compulsive overeating, and he’s appealed to all the ways in which behavior can be shaped by past experience. In recent years he’s done the same for drug abuse, depression, and distraction. After nearly losing his career for taking liberties with facts, Hari has gotten famous as a chronicler and social theorist of our lack of self-control. But however it’s presented, his struggle to constrain himself still appears to be ongoing. Johann Hari keeps wondering what happened to his willpower. Four books into his comeback, we all might wonder just the same.
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