A Body She Mourned, Then a Face She Barely Recognized
At 25, after nearly two years on a GLP-1 medication, she has never felt better – and that sentence requires everything that follows to make sense of it. The writer and creator Alicia Lartey gained 30 kilos in the space of a single year at age 19, watching a body she had loved – one tied directly to her sense of freedom, fashion, and self-expression – disappear under weight she couldn’t explain and couldn’t shift. The grief that came with it was real, even if no one around her seemed to treat it that way.
What followed was a diagnosis that reframed everything.
Doctors confirmed she had polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS – formerly referred to as PCOS – a hormonal condition affecting the ovaries that produces symptoms including acne, excess facial hair growth, androgenic alopecia, and, in Lartey’s case, significant weight gain. The well-meaning advice from her circle landed flat. Eat less. Move more. What her support network didn’t account for, and what healthcare practitioner Dr. Michael Mrozinski explains, is that for people with PMOS, weight management is frequently a biological problem rather than a willpower one – rooted in a complex hormonal dysregulation that affects insulin, androgens, and the broader metabolic system. Telling someone in that position to simply try harder is the medical equivalent of telling someone with a broken leg to walk it off.
Why GLP-1s Entered the Picture – and What They Actually Did
The medical support Lartey received focused heavily on what PMOS might mean for her fertility down the line, with far less attention paid to how the condition was affecting her daily life right now. At 23, she started privately researching GLP-1 drugs – a category of medication that has since become impossible to ignore. According to available data, 12% of US adults have now tried some form of GLP-1 drug, even as the medications remain financially out of reach for a large portion of the population. The cultural footprint of these drugs has expanded dramatically, with celebrities, influencers, and everyday people all circling the same conversation.
For Lartey, the medication worked. Weight came off. The hormonal symptoms that had overtaken her life began to ease. She started to feel, by her own account, like herself again – the version of herself she had lost at 19. The relationship between PMOS and body image is layered in ways that don’t reduce to aesthetics alone; for her, regaining a body she recognized meant regaining access to the identity and self-expression that had been tied up in it. That matters, even when it’s uncomfortable to say out loud.
Then she looked in the mirror one morning and saw something she hadn’t prepared for.
GLP-1 Face Is Real, and the Reckoning Is Complicated
The face looking back at her was, in her own words, almost gaunt. GLP-1 medications don’t selectively remove the fat you’d prefer to lose – they reduce body fat broadly, and that includes the volume in the face that gives it structure, softness, and the particular quality that reads as healthy rather than depleted. Lartey had lost significant body fat, and with it, the facial fullness she hadn’t thought to factor into her decision. The term “GLP-1 face” has since entered mainstream conversation, describing exactly this phenomenon: the hollowed-out, aged appearance that can accompany rapid weight loss in people using these medications.
What makes her experience worth sitting with is the tension it holds without resolving it neatly. She doesn’t regret the medication. She still feels better at 25 than she did at 19. But she also wanted her old face back – the face that existed before the weight gain and, it turns out, before the weight loss too. That’s not a contradiction so much as it is an honest account of what it actually feels like to navigate a body that has been reshaped by a hormonal condition, a pharmaceutical intervention, and the very human desire to look in a mirror and feel at home. Androgenic alopecia, another PMOS symptom Lartey contended with, sits in the same difficult category – hair loss that connects directly to how a person sees themselves, not just how they’re seen.
The medication gave her back a body. It couldn’t give back everything.
GLP-1 drugs are still, for most people who need them, either unaffordable or inaccessible, even as 12% of US adults have now tried them and celebrity usage has driven the cultural conversation far beyond their original clinical purpose. Lartey’s story – the 30-kilo gain, the PMOS diagnosis at 19, the private prescription at 23, the gaunt reflection at 25 – doesn’t fit the before-and-after format that tends to dominate how weight loss is discussed online. There is no clean ending. There’s a woman who feels better than she has in years, who also misses a face she used to know, standing in front of a mirror trying to hold both things at once.
