The first time Caroline went on Wegovy, it wasn’t a secret: She told her boyfriend, mother, and close friends. Over the course of six months, they watched as she shed 30 pounds, going from 130 back to what she calls her “healthy original weight” of 100 pounds. Even still, her loved ones worried about the extent of her weight loss and didn’t want her to lose even more.
“I had tried every way under the sun to lose weight,” Caroline tells SELF. The 34-year-old, who lives in Montreal, asked to use only her first name to protect her privacy. “I was really tired of trying.” At five feet four inches, she wasn’t obese and didn’t think her primary doctor would approve a prescription.
So she went online and found a doctor who prescribed the medication over the phone, unaware of how much Caroline actually weighed. Immediately after starting Wegovy, she says, “the weight started coming off incredibly fast.” After six months she decided she wanted to stop. But as soon as she got off Wegovy, the weight came back: She gained 10 pounds in a month. “I realized, I can’t stop,” Caroline says.
So for the past six months, she has been taking Wegovy again, this time at a maintenance-level dosage. But there’s one big difference: This time, she’s keeping it a secret from her boyfriend and family. “Now that we’re talking about kids, he’s seen all the impacts [of the drug] and he’s done with it,” she says. Since she lives alone, hiding her medication from him is relatively easy—she stashes it in the back of the fridge, since it needs to be kept cold. But she’s still worried he’ll see it, and when they travel together, she has to hide the medication in the hotel room fridge—or, if they’re visiting his parents, in their refrigerator. “So imagine, I’m hiding stuff in my parents-in-laws’ fridge, hoping they won’t see them,” she says. “It’s super awkward.”
Sometimes avoidance is the easiest option.
Caroline isn’t the only woman going to great lengths to keep her GLP-1 use a secret. On a recent thread on the r/GLP1microdosing subreddit, women shared their tips and tricks for hiding medication from their partners. One stashes them in a tomato paste box. Another uses a play food container from a child’s pretend kitchen. Still others have turned to an opaque feta cheese container, butter stick box, anchovy paste box, empty bottles of women’s probiotics and Alani Nu supplements, a plastic to-go container, a metal water bottle, a box of wine, and a baking soda box in the back of the fridge—all to conceal the weight loss medication.