A 12-year-old’s journey into the world of Ozempic

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Kait Handler spent much of her life in a battle with food noise. It started in childhood when she would “shame eat" packets of Devil’s Food cookies after school and hide the wrappers.

As an adult, she stewed over whether to order a salad or a cheeseburger for lunch. When her daughter, Birdie, started exhibiting similar behaviors around age 8, she recognized them right away. She noticed Birdie would fixate on the promise of particular foods, like ice cream, and get upset when she couldn’t eat them.

She watched her regularly eat adult-size portions at meals and ask for seconds. She heard her make negative comments about how she looked in her clothes. It felt familiar.

Handler started keeping a closer eye on what Birdie was eating, enrolled her in therapy, encouraged her to walk more in their New York neighborhood and eventually sent her to weight-loss camp. Even while she was encouraging her daughter to be healthier, she felt bad about the way she was doing it. “The real difficult part about being a woman is then having a child that’s also going to be a woman and realizing all of the messed-up internalizing that you’ve done," says Handler, 40.

“I started getting a lot of anxiety about her ending up like me." Handler was still dealing with her own weight struggles. After having ramped up her exercise routine and trying multiple diets, including ketogenic, WeightWatchers and Whole30, she felt she had exhausted her options. She went to her primary care doctor and asked about taking a GLP-1, the class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known for brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy.