Was It Worth It?
Adam Dalva’s essay on Ozempic, grief, and the theater of all-you-can-eat dining.
Cake friends,
We hope you’re having a nice start to May. If you pre-ordered a magazine, it should be at your door or heading to you shortly—thank you again for the support, we hope that you’re enjoying it. We’ve been having so much fun celebrating the launch of Steak Zine, and this week we’re highlighting Adam Dalva’s essay from the issue, Was It Worth It?
Centered around Ozempic and a visit to the Brazilian chain steakhouse Fogo de Chão, Dalva explores the strange logic of “getting your money’s worth,” not just at the buffet, but in life. What does it mean to “beat the buffet”? What does it mean to lose interest in winning at all? Read an excerpt below, and find the full essay in Longreads.
Was It Worth It?
Essay by Adam Dalva
Every Sunday evening, I open the fridge, reach into the vegetable crisper, grab a pen, screw in a needle, pinch my stomach, and inject Ozempic. It hurts a bit, but I’ve gotten used to it. Twenty-five pounds down, 20 to go. I put on the weight after my brother died—the distortion in the mirror, random heavy breathing, strange hunger panics around 4 p.m., the constant need to self-soothe—and I wanted to let go, move on, heal.
That’s one rendition of truth, the one I wish I could sell you. Claiming I’m injecting to recover from grief deflects simple humiliation into potential empathy, rendering me unmockable for taking a medication that I’ve seen called “easy mode” and “stolen valor” online, a workaround for people lacking the willpower to lose weight the old-fashioned way.
Really, though, my bereavement was internal and external justification for something I would have wanted to try anyway. I’ve trended toward heaviness my entire life, and food has always been a font of shame. When I eat in public, when I order in restaurants, I feel overly visible, fearing that every bite could contribute to the perception that I lack self-control. And so I sneak food. Mine is the panicked late-night nibble, then the easing of the fridge door closed. Mine is rearranging the contents of the garbage can to conceal wrappers and cores. It had been unclear to me, pre GLP-1, how to write without something salty or sleep without something sweet, and the theory that the medication might quiet “food noise” particularly appealed to me.
The man who prescribed my Ozempic is a plastic surgeon who didn’t even performatively gesture at weighing me, but he did tap my left temple, contemplate my receding hairline, and say, “you’ll be wanting minoxidil too, I expect.” Then he gazed at my forehead wrinkles evaluatively, forensically, activating spasms of dysmorphia hitherto unknown.
A week later, at a mediocre bar, my friends ordered nachos. They picked, I picked, matching their cadence of nibbles to avoid drawing attention to myself. Soon the chips were half done, and my friends expressed their fullness with the satiated calm of the thin, and the cheese and the steak had congealed together, and, reader, I didn’t think about those nachos even once. I had never experienced anything like it. Is this, I asked my friends, how it feels to be normal? Eight months later, the noise is still muted. At parties where I once would have conducted a hasty maneuver toward the finger foods, I chat with friends instead. I have lost what little interest I had in alcohol. I suspect Ozempic has cured my seasonal affective disorder too—in past years, I’d get hungry at dusk in November, throwing off my circadian rhythm, but in the absence of that need, no depression has hit.
A few weeks after I began injecting myself, in a period when I was eating very little, and mostly bland food when I did, a temporary diet of crackers and roast chicken, with gastrointestinal side effects too gnarly for even a habitually oversharing personal essayist to impart, I noted that I had become preoccupied with YouTube Shorts of people reviewing food. I’d watch video after video of influencers trying various dishes, often while sitting in their cars while cheery voiceovers played. In my strange absence of flavor, their glossy enthusiasm was captivating. I suspect that I was outsourcing my own eating.
Adam Dalva is the president of the National Book Critics Circle and a contributing editor of The Yale Review. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, and the last time he was in a steakhouse, he ordered salmon.
Bake: Monika Varšavskaja shared a really tasty-looking recipe for a choux with rhubarb jam and basil infused cream on their Substack.
Attend: Join Equator Magazine for their first New York event on May 11 at 7 PM at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Four artists and writers will respond to the narrowing space for public discourse around Palestine, preceded by a screening of Nan Goldin and David Sherman’s short film Gaza (2025) details here.
Prepare: Daily Bread contributor Adriana Gallo is hosting a Cooking for the End of the World talk and a DIY bouillon workshop at Telo Haus in Brooklyn next Tuesday, May 12—learn more here.
Eat: On Wednesday, May 6, @gelilasinterlude and @ariannashaljian are hosting an Armenian and Ethiopian dinner at @barzakh.cafe in Brooklyn. Food will be served à la carte, RSVP here.