Pharmaceutical Asceticism: GLP-1s Receptor Agonists, Ecstatic Fasting, and Altered Metabolic States

Saturday Night Live recently aired a faux commercial featuring comedian and guest host Ramy Youssef using the controversial GLP-1 Ozempic to help with fasting during Ramadan. Youssef quips, “I used to rush to eat a whole meal before dawn, but now I just grab my prayer beads and my Ozempic needle. As long as I shoot up before the sun rises, it’s halal”(Saturday Night Live, 2024). While Ramy and the other cast members are joking, this paper takes seriously the potential religious use of GLP-1 medications, and their place within a longer genealogy of asceticism and transhumanism. I argue that they function as contemporary pharmacological forms of fasting that, while secularized and technoscientific, are part of larger religious projects of (managing) embodiment and transcendence. Drawing on Christian religious, historical, and sociological perspectives, I interrogate how GLP-1s recast many religious and spiritual dimensions of fasting through a newly biomedical framework.