I won’t pretend the appetite-suppressing effects of weight loss injections or ‘skinny jabs’ aren’t appealing to me. As a woman in my mid-30s, living in a culture that treats thinness as a kind of moral achievement, this is to be expected. But weight loss wasn’t the reason I tried it.
What really caught my attention were the growing reports that weight loss jabs might dampen desire more broadly — not just hunger, but cravings of all kinds, including sex. Appetite, after all, is not just about food; it’s bound up with desirability, sexuality, and the idea that wanting less, physically and emotionally, is a form of discipline or virtue. We’re encouraged to see excess as something to be embarrassed about: whether that’s hunger, emotional need, or lust.
In my 20s, I struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, and I’m glad to say that at 36 I’m still sober. But getting sober didn’t solve all my problems: during my 30s I continued to struggle with other compulsions — namely unsuitable relationships and chasing sexual intensity that tipped into obsession. Sex, for me, often felt less like pleasure and more like pursuit, something fused with urgency and self-erasure. Sometimes, existing in this way felt like it brought me closer to something vital, like I was brushing up against the essence of what it meant to really be alive. But often I felt like a pinball in a machine, hurtling back and forth from one overwhelming desire to another, and I’d question whether I could really trust the forces that were driving me after all.
There have been observational reports from doctors and researchers noting that semaglutide sometimes appears to reduce cravings for more than just food. Anecdotal reports on Reddit mention semaglutide helping people with their shopping addictions and managing their debts, quitting vaping, and curbing other unwanted habits like nail biting. Research into why this happens is still ongoing, but experts suspect it’s because GLP-1s (of which semaglutide is one) target the brain’s reward system, diminishing the returns we get from these addictive, compulsive behaviours. I started to wonder if semaglutide could be the answer to the problems my errant sexual desires were causing, too. Who would I be without a constant hunger for validation and intensity? I decided to try it and find out.
I accessed semaglutide through an online pharmacy, navigating the increasingly common grey area of off-label prescriptions. I should say upfront that this isn’t recommended, and the risks — especially for people who aren’t diabetic or obese — are well-documented. But it also felt disingenuous to pretend that curiosity like mine exists in a vacuum. We live in a world where bodies are shrinking in real time. Desire is both sold to us and policed, and women are routinely encouraged to control ourselves, but just not too obviously.
Inevitably, I lost weight — weight that I’ve since regained, as I was already at a healthy size for my height and age. But more striking than the physical change was a sudden sense of freedom I hadn’t felt since learning what a calorie was at age 16.
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The quieting of ‘food noise’ — that constant internal negotiation about what to eat and when — is a well-known effect of semaglutide, but feeling it first-hand was extraordinary. I hadn’t realised how much mental space was occupied by thoughts of food until, almost overnight, the part of my brain that endlessly calculated calories seemed to switch off. Suddenly, I had energy to think about other things; or rather, I noticed how little I wanted to chase anything at all. My morning coffee — once sacred and essential — became unnecessary, and even the idea of smoking felt repulsive.
Then there was the question of sex. I’d just started dating someone new, and it was going surprisingly well. I worried that semaglutide might dampen the erotic spark of our early encounters, as well as quelling the desire for the more destructive, compulsive sex I’d had in the past. I explained what I was doing to him and he was supportive, so I decided to bring the drug into our sex life, rather than letting it get in the way.
The first night I planned to inject the drug, I invited him over and greeted him at the door in lingerie. I placed the pen in his hand and opened my legs. A quiet charge passed between us as he cleaned a patch of skin on my inner thigh with an alcohol swab. Then came the brief, sharp scratch of the needle as he pressed it in. Certainly, on that first night, desire wasn’t a problem.
After that, we looked forward to our erotic ritual, but I noticed as the weeks went by, I got less and less out of it. After around a month, sex, even with him, seemed less urgent. Not unpleasant or aversive, just oddly muted, like the volume had been turned down on a familiar song. Desire had lost its sharp edge. It was working, but maybe not how I wanted it to. The chaos was gone, but so was the current. I couldn’t tell whether I’d cured my compulsion or dulled something vital.
As my desire was fading, I met with a friend who was also taking semaglutide. As a fellow addict in recovery, and someone who had also experienced a compulsive relationship to sex, I wanted to understand how his emotional and erotic landscape had shifted.
He told me that since starting the medication, his mental state had changed so profoundly that he felt almost no craving at all — for alcohol, sex, or external stimulation of any kind — he was, as he put it, completely content with life as it was. I was struck by this and thought of other friends who had spent years in therapy or on meditation retreats trying to cultivate that same equanimity. In Buddhist thought, craving (tanhā) is seen as the root of suffering, and liberation (nirvana) comes not from suppressing desire chemically, but from seeing through it: developing awareness, compassion, and wisdom until it no longer binds us. But what if we could just inject enlightenment instead?
Naturally, I turned to Reddit to see what others were experiencing. Instead of freedom from unhelpful habits, many users described a strange emotional flatness, distinct from depression by its lack of negativity: “Not happy, not sad, just kind of nothing.” One user wrote, “I don’t seem to be interested in anything very much. All my desires and impulses seem low key”, while another expressed reduction in “not just desire but getting to climax, and suppression of intensity”.
Whatever these users were describing, it didn’t seem like nirvana to me. I stopped taking semaglutide after around six weeks because as the cravings fell away, I realised that desire itself wasn’t the enemy, but a part of what makes life textured and real — including sexual desire, with all its mess and risk.
Within weeks of stopping, I noticed things returning. Sex with the guy I was dating felt vivid again, like seeing a film in technicolour for the first time. That’s when the distinction became clearer to me: in trying to dull my compulsions with semaglutide, I had dulled my aliveness too. The destructive edge softened, but so did the generative spark. The drug didn’t differentiate between the kind of wanting that erodes you and the kind that animates you.
Perhaps freedom doesn’t come from erasing desire, but from understanding it: knowing which kinds sustain us and which consume us. I’ve since dedicated time in therapy to getting to the root of my compulsions, trying to listen to what they’re asking for rather than shutting them out completely. Semaglutide quietened the noise — but silence isn’t the same thing as peace. Desire is what makes us human: sexually, emotionally, creatively. The work is not to suppress it, but to live alongside it.
Jessica Key is a London-based writer exploring relationships, desire, and modern intimacy. Blending first-person reporting with cultural criticism, she examines how technology, sex, and shifting social norms are reshaping the way we love. She is currently working on her debut novel, Computer Love, a coming-of-age story about growing up online and learning how to love offline.
