No holding back. Saturday Night Live took plenty of shots at Hollywood in their Oscars red carpet cold open sketch on Saturday, March 11, and they even mocked Ozempic, the controversial weight-loss drug making waves among celebrities.
Michael Longfellow impersonated Mario Lopez while Heidi Gardner was “either Maria Menounos or Kit Hoover — they haven’t told me which yet.” The duo were hosting the pre-show for the Academy Awards.
“You’re about to watch the 95th annual Academy Awards, sponsored by Ozempic,” Longfellow-as-Lopez said.
Gardner’s character added the company’s slogan: “Ozempic, I guess everyone in Hollywood has diabetes!”
Semaglutide injections, like Ozempic and Wegovy, have become increasingly popular and contentious among the stars. The drugs were initially approved by the FDA to improve the secretion of insulin in individuals with diabetes. Weight loss was an unintended side effect. The medications have since been deemed appropriate for overweight people with at least one weight-related health condition (high blood pressure and/or cholesterol, type 2 diabetes).
Dr. Thomas Su, a plastic surgeon, explained the controversial products. “The drug was never meant to be for people who are near their ideal weight. It’s not even approved by the FDA for casual weight loss,” the Artistic LipoSculpting Center owner, 54, exclusively told Us Weekly earlier this month. “There are exact stipulations that patients need to meet to qualify for Wegovy as a weight loss medication [including] their BMI requirement [and] they have to be over 30. So for casual weight loss, it’s not approved and would be considered an off-label use.”
He added: “Now that being said, will it work for weight loss is someone who is closer to their ideal [weight]? Yes, it will. It’s not a good idea for someone who hopes to keep it off because one thing that we know is when you stop the medication, whether it be a few months down the road or a year later, your weight will come back pretty rapidly. It’s not a good weight loss measure if you’re really planning to keep something off.”
That hasn’t stopped Hollywood from using the injections. Golnesa “GG” Gharachedaghi admitted that she was using “weight-loss shots” to meet her goals, despite not being overweight.
“I am on the weight-loss shots, honey, OK. I’m just not going to lie about it because I always keep it real about what is fake,” the Shahs of Sunset alum said via Instagram in February 2023, noting that she went from 137 pounds to 126 in four weeks.
“If you see people out there who just got skinny so fast all of a sudden and claimed they got healthy for the first time in their lives or that they got sober from alcohol that was causing them to gain so much weight … most likely, they’re just doing the shots,” she continued. “We know who you are. We see how skinny y’all are getting. It’s not rocket science. Just saying.”
