She says she wants to reduce the stigma around taking GLP-1s, but is that really what she’s doing?

Tennis great Serena Williams has been both lauded and loathed for her muscular figure throughout her career. But over the last year or so, that famous silhouette has been shrinking.

When she opened up about her 14kg weight loss, I’m sure it was meant to come across some kind of brave confession: she has been using a GLP-1 medication. These weight loss injectables were originally made to help those with type 2 diabetes, but they have since seen worldwide shortages as everyone everywhere (or so it feels like) uses their appetite suppressant effect to lose weight.

Williams says that through being transparent she hopes to break down any stigma around taking GLP-1 medications. But as she becomes a celebrity ambassador for Ro, a telehealth company that makes these drugs (and one that her husband is, ahem, on the board of), this reads more like a commercial than a confessional.

And that is why I take issue with it. Williams is, of course, free to make her own medical decisions. And I greatly sympathize with the relentless attacks she has faced on her body over the decades. And why I imagine the birth of her children changing her body probably sparked a kind of panic for her. She’s talked about walking 30,000 steps a day and training for 4 hours in the summer heat and still plateauing at a weight she thought was too heavy…

And it’s here that I want to make two points: 1) that kind of intense training coupled with what I’m going to assume was a very strict diet is likely to send her body into panic-mode, where it will try to store fat to protect against the threat it’s facing. That ‘threat’ being overtraining with not enough to eat. The body adapts to the threat, slows metabolism, etc., making weight gain easier. If she truly was so overweight it was impacting her health, I would suggest ditching such an unsustainable routine and instead focusing on calming her nervous system and healing her relationship with food – so her body could settle at a sustainable weight for her. Because GLP-1s would just be treating the symptom, not the cause.

And 2) Was she even too heavy, though? Or was she just too heavy for society’s strict beauty standards? Williams has never had a super-slim physique, even at the height of her athletic career (where let’s assume she was healthy). So this desire to be slimmer than what she naturally is isn’t really about health at all, is it?

Williams even told Women’s Health that, ““I am a very good case of how you can do everything – eat healthy, work out to the point of even playing a professional sport and getting to the finals of Wimbledon and US Opens – and still not be able to lose weight.” And I feel that that statement exposed what this is really about: fitting society’s current idea of beauty, which is to be very thin.

It’s not about health at all.

William’s body naturally sits at a higher weight. But instead of celebrating her strength, her endurance, her sporting prowess, and the incredible feat of having children, she’s saying that her body is a failure because it’s not as slender as 2025 beauty standards demand.

Her endorsement of GLP-1s shows the cultural shift here: GLP-1s are no longer medicinal products, they’re beauty products.

In fact, her advertising of them came complete with glamorous magazine glossies of her injecting herself, like she was selling makeup and not a powerful drug that comes with the risk of side-effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, constipation, headaches, fatigue, pancreatitis, bowel obstruction… Not to mention the hallmarks of weight loss that has happened too rapidly, e.g. hollow face, sunken eyes, and not being emotionally ready for such a drastic change.

(And don’t even get me started on what happens when you can no longer afford or access GLP-1s… I’ve written about how these drugs can exacerbate binge eating here and how they reinforce disordered eating here).

With 8-10% of Americans now taking GLP-1s, it’s safe to say the cultural obsession with shrinking our bodies has well and truly taken hold again (it never really disappeared). But oddly enough, I feel a sense of relief that at least the veil is lifting on the true reason these drugs are so popular. Whether she meant to or not, Williams has told us all that in 2025 she believes appearance trumps health.

Do you?