Conquering Fat Logic: What I Think Now, After Ozempic
Updated September 2026: Years ago, I wrote a review of Conquering Fat Logic (AL) by Dr. Nadja Hermann, translated by David Shaw. The book challenged much of what I thought I knew about weight loss, and I loved it for that. I still do.
But I recently reread what I wrote about it, and there are things I would say very differently now.
One reason is Ozempic.
There is nothing quite like having your own body disprove one of your theories.
In my original review, I wrote that many of the explanations we reach for around weight — processed food, portion size, the stress of modern life — might be true but were still “excuses.” I ended by asking, “How much responsibility are you willing to take for your own health?”
Well.
I still believe strongly in taking responsibility for my health. But I no longer think I understood the relationship between responsibility, biology, and choice nearly as well as I thought I did.
Since writing that review, I started taking Ozempic, and it changed my experience of hunger and eating. Not my opinions about them. My actual experience of them — and that was much harder to argue with.
Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, is a GLP-1 receptor agonist. GLP-1 medications affect the biological systems involved in appetite, satiety, and food intake, among other things. I'm not going to turn this into an article about the science of GLP-1s; there are people much better qualified to write that article.
What interests me here is what happened when a medication altered something I had previously understood largely in terms of behavior and choice.
I had new information.
And unfortunately for those of us who enjoy being right, new information sometimes requires a new conclusion.
The simplicity should probably have made me suspicious
Looking back, I can see the appeal of my original argument. Personal responsibility provides a wonderfully clean explanation. Biology, environment, genetics, illness, stress, economics, appetite, behavior, and the peculiarities of an individual body make for a much messier one.
Bodies are messy, so are people, and a satisfying explanation is not necessarily a complete explanation.
This doesn't mean I have reversed my opinion of Conquering Fat Logic(AL). One of the things I still value about the book is Hermann's willingness to challenge beliefs about weight that have become so familiar that we stop examining them. She made me question things I had accepted as fact, and I think that's valuable whether or not I ultimately agree with every conclusion.
But questioning conventional wisdom has to work in both directions.
When I first read the book, I was interested in the ways explanations about biology and circumstance could allow us to underestimate our own choices. I still think that's worth examining. What I see much more clearly now is that our choices don't happen outside biology and circumstance. The fact that I have agency doesn't mean I have complete control over the conditions in which I exercise it.
That distinction has become important to me well beyond weight.
Agency isn't control
There are things I can do for my health and things I cannot do. There are circumstances I can change, circumstances I can work with, and circumstances that simply exist whether I approve of them or not.
Taking responsibility for myself doesn't require me to pretend otherwise.
In fact, I think agency becomes more useful when we're willing to look closely at what is and isn't within our control. Better information about my body doesn't make me less responsible for it. It gives me a better chance of making choices based on the body I actually have rather than the body I think I ought to have.
Sometimes that means changing a habit. Sometimes it means changing an assumption. Sometimes it means seeking medical treatment.
For me, it also meant discovering that something I had attributed more heavily to willpower changed when I changed the underlying biology.
I can't unknow that.
Would I still recommend Conquering Fat Logic?
Yes, though not in quite the same way.
When I first read it, I was excited by the possibility that many of the things we “know” about weight might not be true. I still am. I just include some of my own conclusions in the category of things worth questioning now.
That's the part of the book that has lasted for me: not a particular prescription for weight loss, but the willingness to examine what we think we know.
What is supported by evidence? What have we absorbed from other people? What have we concluded from our own experience? And how certain should we be that our explanation is the whole explanation?
I spent years in academia. You're supposed to change your interpretation when the evidence changes. Somehow that sounds perfectly obvious when we're talking about scholarship and becomes considerably harder when we're talking about our own lives.
But I don't want to become so invested in being consistent with my former self that I stop paying attention to what I know now.
Conquering Fat Logic (AL) changed my mind once.
Ozempic helped change it again.
I consider that progress.
Further Reading
Nadja Hermann wrote about several of the ideas in Conquering Fat Logic(AL) in The Guardian “I lost 13 stone – now I know the truth about obesity”
Intellect & Intuition
I write about the places where intellect and intuition meet — self-trust, discernment, healing, creativity, and what happens when lived experience complicates what we thought we knew.
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