Express: Beyond Weight Loss: Body Well-Being, Policy, and Marketing Implications of Weight Management Medications

Weight management medications (WMMs), particularly GLP-1 receptor agonists, have rapidly emerged as promising tools for addressing obesity, extending beyond their original use in treating type 2 diabetes. Their most noted side effect, significant weight loss, has fueled widespread off-label use and heightened public interest. While short-term physical outcomes are promising, the broader effects of WMMs remain underexplored. Unlike most chronic disease medications, WMMs are a distinctive class that is medically based yet often constrained by insurer-set discontinuation criteria. Drawing on studies that have analyzed obesity treatments from marketing, medical, and policy perspectives, this paper develops a multidimensional framework of body well-being encompassing intersecting biological, psychological, socio-cultural, and structural dimensions. This framework provides theoretical insight by identifying how body well-being dimensions not only intersect to influence one another but also shift over time as they are subject to different factors throughout the intervention lifecycle of consideration, use, and discontinuation. Building on this framework of well-being, the authors identify key challenges and propose actionable insights across three areas: communication and misinformation governance, insurance and discontinuation policy, and equity and structural access. The authors further outline a future research agenda that informs the long-term, systemic, and multidimensional implications of WMM use.