‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ spotlights the dark side of GLP-1s and ‘Utah beauty’

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is known for its unvarnished look at the drama, aspirations and personal struggles of the women who pioneered #MomTok, and the fourth season, which premiered last week, is no different. The latest installment goes deep on an under-discussed issue that’s become all too common in recent years. Late in the season, cast member Layla Taylor reveals that she’s been abusing GLP-1s — a practice she says has become “a very negative part of the Utah culture.”

In Episode 10, Layla tells her friends that she’s struggled with body image, and with disordered eating, since she was a young girl. “I don’t think I’ll ever be small enough in my head,” she says, “and I know it’s affecting me.” In the past year, she reveals, she’s begun using GLP-1s despite having no medical need for them. She also believes she’s far from the only one in her community to do this. “I can’t even count on both hands how many people I know abuse GLP-1s, like myself,” she says, “and it’s a real problem.”

As GLP-1 drugs become easier to access in a culture once again obsessed with thinness, they are colliding with a long-standing public health crisis: eating disorders. For a subset of vulnerable users, these medications aren’t just a weight loss tool, but a powerful new way to reinforce disordered eating. Because this generation of GLP-1s is a relatively new innovation and many users access the drugs outside of medical supervision — from sources like online prescribing systems and compounding pharmacies — it’s difficult to measure just how widespread this problem has become.

That many people — particularly those who struggle with eating disorders — are abusing GLP-1s doesn’t surprise Amanda Banks, a practicing physician who advises multiple biotech and pharmaceutical companies (none involved in GLP-1 production). “There are pretty much no limitations on who can access these medicines, regardless of whether you’re overweight or have an indication for the medicines or not,” she said. The only requirement? “As long as you can pay.”

Real vulnerability, no guardrails

Nine percent of the U.S. population — that’s 30 million people — will at some point in their lives struggle with an eating disorder. For this population, the use of GLP-1s can trigger a whirlwind of difficult and dangerous experiences, both physical and emotional.

Rebecca Boswell, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the director of Penn Medicine’s Princeton Center for Eating Disorders, explains that GLP-1s compromise patients’ ability to eat intuitively by silencing hunger cues. This can be especially dangerous for those with eating disorders.

“Most people [on GLP-1s] don’t get adequate nutrients to support their body systems when they have such profound appetite loss,” Boswell says, “[and] we see those effects of malnutrition and eating disorders regularly.”

Too often, the rapid weight loss that GLP-1s trigger can become self-reinforcing for users with eating disorders. Author and fat activist Amanda Martinez Beck had been previously diagnosed with atypical anorexia nervosa but began using GLP-1s under a doctor’s supervision in 2021 after a COVID-19 infection spiked her blood sugar levels. At the time, GLP-1s were not as widely prescribed and Martinez Beck did not know about their weight loss effects. Had she known, she says, she probably would have decided against them. She noted that because our society prizes thinness, the desire to lose weight can feel logical regardless of how it actually impacts your health.

“You get treated better [when you’re thin],” Martinez Beck says. “You get better outcomes with medical providers because they pay more attention and spend more time with you. Your pain is taken seriously. You have greater opportunities for love because people are prejudiced against fat bodies.” The list goes on and on.

Beginning the medication was easy, but Martinez Beck struggled when she tried (again, under a physician’s supervision) to stop taking the drug for three months last year. “It screwed up my brain,” she says, “because I hadn’t had to deal with [hunger cues] in years.” Once again, she began experiencing the panic attacks, anxiety and fear of food that had historically accompanied her eating disorder.

The bodily price of ‘costly grace’

As relatable as Layla’s revelation likely feels to women across the country, it also highlights a specific cultural phenomenon. Fairly or not, “Utah beauty” has come to represent both homogeneity and artifice: long mermaid waves, Anglo faces and lots of pastels, an ideal that many associate with the state. A 2017 study from Utah State University said that the state employs more plastic surgeons per capita than Los Angeles, and that two-thirds of Utah Mormon women know someone who has undergone cosmetic surgery.

Sarah Coyne, professor of human development at Brigham Young University, has studied how those pressures play out within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2023, Coyne coauthored a study that found that religious affiliation can often protect people from negative body image, with one important exception. Cosmetic enhancements turned out to be more common among participants who bought into perfectionism and “costly grace,” referring to the idea that one must earn divine love through total obedience.

“In particular areas [of Utah], there tends to be a high level of homogeneity in terms of the way people think that women should be; in terms of dress or appearance; in terms of body shape or size; in terms of race or lack of diversity,” Coyne says. “I think that those things all come together to create this very competitive environment, where then, perhaps, we see feelings of perfectionism bloom even more than we would, say, in more diverse areas.”

You can see how that kind of environment can then trigger the onset of eating disorders, with the explosive rise of GLP-1s further complicating the picture.

Although she has not watched the most recent season of SLOMW, Coyne says she feels “a lot of empathy for Layla.” “She just must feel so much pressure around appearance, and that’s a hard place to be in.”

Healing from the inside

When battling an eating disorder, healing begins in the mind, and as Layla revealed onscreen, she has sought treatment. Speaking with Us Weekly, she said she is no longer taking GLP-1s and has continued outpatient therapy. Looking back, she said GLP-1s had become an “unhealthy crutch” that helped silence hunger cues and “make an eating disorder more easy.”

That description echoes Martinez Beck’s experience on the drug. Although she ultimately decided to continue taking it to manage her blood sugar, she also sought help from a therapist, dietitian and doctor to navigate the complicated emotional and physical terrain of having neglected her body and its needs for years while taking GLP-1s. This is important for anyone managing an eating disorder, and especially those whose bodies do not conform to the stereotypical notion that all eating disorder patients are thin.

Embracing and nourishing her hunger has been among the most difficult aspects of recovery for Martinez Beck, as someone who has been taught to suppress that feeling throughout her life.

“My hunger has been demonized my whole life,” Martinez Beck says, “and so there’s this lightness, pun intended, that comes with not feeling the burden of hunger. Identifying that lightness as part of disordered thinking about eating is the hard part.”

Banks and Boswell confirm that eating disorders often go under-detected in those who are not thin, and that the weight loss these patients experience while taking GLP-1s can lead to praise from those around them who equate weight loss with overall health — regardless of how one achieves it.

Banks, whose daughter was previously diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, emphasizes that eating disorders are an illness, not a lifestyle choice. “It is deep-seated central pathways that have been hardwired, [and] that cause real problems when the environment really tips some things against the person who’s vulnerable.”

Banks emphasizes that she is not against GLP-1s in general and believes they have delivered incredible benefits for patients who medically need them. At the same time, she says, “We should put guardrails around the people who are vulnerable.”