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

In spring 2024, Saturday Night Live 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,” he says as he self-injects the drug into his stomach (Saturday Night Live, 2024). While Ramy and the other cast members are joking, the exceptionality of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s) for their ability to suppress and nearly eradicate appetite offers a novel lens through which to explore technologized religious fasting practices, transhumanist discourse, and even drug-induced altered and ecstatic states. 

The dominant medical discourse lauds GLP-1s as revolutionary treatments for metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity; however, the drugs are also widely used by people without documented health conditions and often with very little weight to lose. The drugs mimic the body’s natural GLP-1 hormone to signal satiety, slow digestion, and regulate blood glucose. While there are differences between the most popular active ingredients, semaglutide and tirzepatide, GLP-1s boast appetite control and clinically significant weight loss. Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an expert in obesity medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, describes the recently approved Zepbound as “the most highly efficacious drug ever approved for the treatment of obesity” (Aleccia, 2023). If the manufacturers and researchers are correct, no anti-obesity medicine has ever had so much potential.

The use of these drugs generally, and particularly in those without obesity or co-morbidities, invites critical comparisons with historical practices of fasting, self-denial, and bodily discipline. This paper situates GLP-1 medications within this longer genealogy of asceticism and transhumanism, arguing that they can function as a contemporary, pharmacological form of fasting that, while certainly secularized and technoscientific, is part of larger religious projects of (managing) embodiment and transcendence. Drawing on predominantly Christian religious, historical, and sociological perspectives, this paper interrogates how GLP-1s recast many religious and spiritual dimensions of fasting through a newly biomedical framework. 

According to R. Marie Griffith, Christians have long understood the body as “an instrument for salvation,” which “necessitated particular forms of control, its appetites subjected to the scrutiny of the spirit and strenuously disciplined” (2004, 23). Christian ascetic practices have thus celebrated fasting as a means of spiritual purification and self-mastery, with figures from early desert monastics and medieval mystics to contemporary evangelicals using prolonged abstention to discipline the body and induce altered, transcendent states (Griffith, 2004; Walker Bynum, 1988). Take Catherine of Siena, an extreme ascetic prone to fasting-induced ecstatic visions, or The Daniel Fast, popular among American evangelicals, which explicitly links bodily discipline to spiritual purity (Walker Bynum, 1988; Lynne Gerber, 2011). At the same time, fasting has been remade by the broader diet and wellness industries, resulting in “never-die” biohackers, techbros, and longevity experts promoting prolonged fasting as a method for enhancing cognitive function and extending lifespan (Tumilty and Battle-Fisher, 2022). Many human performance enthusiasts are now microdosing GLP-1s to the same effect. Fasting, as described in self-proclaimed wellness spaces, relies heavily on scientific rationalism but does not wholly reject ascetic ideals, demonstrating instead how traditional religious practices are metabolized and reconstituted, especially within secular health and performance paradigms. And even if the modern secularism from which these movements emerged disavows any explicitly religious rationales, the cultural logics underpinning fasting endure, manifesting in the valorization of “clean eating,” intermittent fasting, food restriction, and pharmacologically induced appetite suppression. Not only do these have transhumanist impulses, but they also have ascetic and, often, ecstatic impulses inseparable from the religious and spiritual practices and histories from which they arise. 

In this context, GLP-1s do not simply function as medical interventions but as biopolitical instruments that simultaneously technologize fasting, shifting it from a devotional spiritual practice to a maintained pharmaceutical and metabolic state. Unlike historical fasting practices that emphasized self-denial, struggle, and divine reward, GLP-1s offer instead a seemingly frictionless form of bodily discipline that aligns with transhumanist aspirations toward transcendence of another sort and further alters (formerly) human states of desire and appetite. 

Finally, this paper closes with a brief meditation on how GLP-1s reinforce neoliberal self-regulation, efficiency, and productivity imperatives, aligning with the rhetoric and imaging of body optimization, post/transhumanism, and religious ascetic practices. However, the popularity of these drugs and the normalization of extreme GLP-1-induced caloric deficits raise crucial ethical questions besides compelling comparative ones: If appetites and hunger can be pharmacologically suppressed, what does this mean for our cultural understandings of food, desire, and embodiment? How do these drugs reconfigure agency over one’s body, particularly for many fat individuals whose hunger has long been medicalized and pathologized (Farrell, 2011)? By bringing fat studies, religious studies, and pharmaceuticals into conversation, my hope with this paper is to critically examine the ideological and fantastic dimensions of GLP-1 use, questioning how these drugs contribute to the ongoing secularization of ascetic traditions while upholding their deeply religious disciplinary functions, genealogies, and aesthetics. In doing so, I aim to illuminate how modern biomedicine might reconfigure religious practices, embedding them within health, medicine, and consumer capitalism regimes.

Works Cited

Farrell, Amy Erdman. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. New York University Press, 2011.

Gerber, Lynne. Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Griffith, R. Marie. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. University of California Press, 2004.

Saturday Night Live. “Ozempic for Ramadan - SNL.” YouTube, March 30, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-RETLnHNpM. 

Tumilty, Emma, and Michele Battle-Fisher. Transhumanism: Entering an Era of Bodyhacking and Radical Human Modification. Springer Nature, 2022.

Walker Bynum, Caroline. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. University of California Press, 1988.