Denise, a 51-year-old paralegal in suburban Phoenix, hadn’t voluntarily entered a gym in nine years. She’d tried — lord, she’d tried — joining Planet Fitness twice, buying a Peloton that became an expensive coat rack, downloading apps that sent her cheerful notifications she learned to ignore with the precision of a seasoned diplomat. Then her endocrinologist prescribed semaglutide for her Type 2 diabetes, and six weeks later, she found herself lacing up sneakers on a Tuesday morning and driving to a yoga class. Not because anyone told her to. Not because she’d watched a motivational TED Talk. She just — wanted to.
“It wasn’t willpower,” she told me. “It was like the argument in my head just stopped.”
That argument — the one Denise is describing — is the part of this story that nobody expected. We’ve been told Ozempic and its GLP-1 receptor agonist cousins are weight loss drugs. And they are. But the behavioral shifts happening in people taking them are forcing neuroscientists to rethink something fundamental about motivation, reward, and why we do — or don’t do — the things we know are good for us…