Was It Worth It?

Adam Dalva| Longreads | April 29, 2026 | 2,084 words (9 minutes)

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.

These days, I once again enjoy the taste of food. The medication works well, save for one unfortunate side effect. I’m still obsessed with those eating videos. I’ve watched thousands of them (I’m frightened to know the real number, and sometimes I think I’ve actually reached the bottom of YouTube, when I’m served videos made by people with no followers and one view, just mine). I’ve learned that each of the influencers has a gimmick: UA Eats, a pseudo everyman who’s overly obsessed with meat char; Kaitlyn Lavery, a peppy New Yorker with an unfathomable dining budget; Jack’s Dining Room, a loathsome industry plant; ShoPhoCho, who weighs food to assess value; KarissaEats, a Disneyfied culinary optimist.

These content creators’ occasional mukbangs and habitual ASMR crinkling of chip bags do nothing much for me. No, my interest is most piqued by the shorts in which they review all-you-can-eat restaurants and ask, “did I beat the buffet?” Did they, in other words, get beyond their money’s worth? There’s a scarcity mindset in this moment of late-stage capitalism, which is understandable; times are hard. But the min/maxing strategies that ignore gastronomical pleasure in favor of eating oneself sick alarm and titillate me in equal measure, in this time where pleasure itself feels more and more difficult to access. 

Take the many reviews of Fogo de Chão, the relatively upscale Brazilian all-you-can-eat steak restaurant. Don’t waste time, every reviewer cautions, on delicious starch, on the buffet’s greens, on sweets, on poultry, on cheese with honey. Maximize cow: beef rib, picanha. Joe Rogan has raved about the salad bar’s sirenic temptations on his interminable podcast (“and you’re eating fucking artichoke hearts and cheese”); YouTuber UA Eats’s face contorts into a pained bliss reminiscent of Peter Hujar’s 1969 “Orgasmic Man” photo when he tries the fatty ribeye. 

Even sans Ozempic, I have never been a big block-of-meat eater. I think of Passover pot-roasts with some horror, find hot poultry uninteresting, believe that pork chops are odious, and have written off lamb legs as habitually gamey. But still, I developed the fantasy of going to Fogo de Chão myself. My desire was memetic. I had seen so many of these videos that I wanted to participate in one, wanted to see if I could experience the hypothetical pleasure of beating the buffet. Fogo was especially captivating for another reason: I have a vague memory, decades ago, perhaps in Philadelphia, of going to a Fogo de Chão. All I really know is that I was young. I think I went with my first-ever girlfriend. I remember marveling at the abundance, the new flavors. I’d laugh when I ate, back then. Dumb phone in my pocket; all that future ahead; the restaurant filled with sun. Was that self forever lost to grief and medication and plain old time? 

And so one evening earlier this year, I drank a cup of tea and ate a mid-sized Honeycrisp with a swipe of peanut butter to preserve my stomach. The next morning, I headed off to my studio space to write until my reservation. My neighbor, a jeweler, said that she had made an extra chicken katsu sando, and asked if I wanted it. I replied that I did want it but was starving myself to go to a buffet. Off my sando went into the ether. 

That night, I passed laughing tourists taking pictures of Trump Tower, rounded the corner past MoMA, and walked into FdC. I was told to wait in the lobby while the host sent groups down a long flight of stairs, an inefficient system that was, frankly, stressing everyone out. Fogo de Chão was founded a quarter of a century ago by Brazilian brothers who, as the brand story goes, had learned the traditional grilling methods of the churrasco in their youth. There are now hundreds of locations, with more coming all the time. The chain was recently purchased for over a billion dollars by Bain Capital—a private equity firm which some will recognize from oppo research that targeted Mitt Romney’s retroactively normal-seeming 2012 presidential campaign. Private equity is part of our current global trend of vulture economics—these firms are one reason, I’ve learned from my YouTube Shorts, that chain restaurants are doling out smaller portions. (Another is Ozempic.)

The dining room was dark, save for the tantalizing buffet station, which gleamed like the full moon over the cloudless Aegean. Once seated, I ordered “The Churrasco Experience”—80 dollars—and was given a cardboard disc with instructions to flip it from red to green when I was ready to receive meat. And then I lost my mind at the Fogo de Chão salad bar. This isn’t a bit. I felt genuine panic as I circled the many options, the stirring of that late afternoon need that I associate with my pre-Ozempic self. Frenzy, dizziness. I used to microwave cheese into rice in these moments. I would steal five percent of my roommate’s ice cream. 

All my pre-planning collapsed into a still-now-overwhelming-to-contemplate bacchanalia of trying stuff. The pepper bacon was crunchy but too spicy, the elote was fine, the cured meats and cheeses were fine, the caprese and smoked salmon were bad, the citrus chicken was good, and the two best things were, disastrously, the most filling: the potato salad, the bean stew. Perhaps all my pre-envisioning had undone me. I even went back for more, ignoring the causal potentiality of a sniffling child in pajamas who was exactly the height of the food in the buffet and kept leaning in under the sneeze guard to inspect every offering up close. 

Meanwhile, something insidious had occurred: plantains, yucca fries, and mashed potatoes—cheap, filling traps—had been placed on my table while I was gone. The spuds were good enough that I had to fold a napkin into them to cut myself off. I already knew from the “beat the buffet” shorts that FdC uses assorted strategies to keep patrons from eating too much expensive meat. The drinks are all high calorie save for the “Skinny Caipirinha,” which I ordered. The most energetic of the waiters kept offering diners shots of pineapple rum. The honey with cheese was as delicious as I’d feared. The salads were flanked by bread. Even when I flipped my POG to green, the cheap cuts came first, chicken and sausage, a complex choreography of misdirection, creating a scarcity mindset, restricting especially the picanha, a top sirloin that is purported to be the chain’s best bite. 

The Churrasco Experience turned out, for me, to be kind of like being on a subterranean cruise ship, mingling the constant feeling of potential indulgence and disappointment. When the waiters (mostly men, a.k.a. gauchos) carrying fatty skewers zagged away, I felt that the other diners were getting opportunities that I deserved. When they zigged toward me, I didn’t particularly crave any of what they had on offer, but I did want to be asked, and wanted to be able to say no. Alas, much of the meat wasn’t, I believe, particularly good. Even the much-ballyhooed ribeye was chewy and devoid of flavor. But despite these issues, many of the diners, many of whom had dressed up in leather or lace, were having a fabulous time. They seemed to my eye to be tourists (a curious Manhattan phenomenon is that tourists are more prevalent than locals in chain restaurants, in pursuit of familiarity, or perhaps, in our social media era, of the same mimetic experience I was chasing). As I chewed, I felt an unusual melancholy, as what I had seen on the videos intersected with reality, all that remembered enthusiasm running headlong into my lack of it, and I slipped out of my body, just a bit, adrift. I felt sad for the animals whose corpses were being ceremonially paraded around and rejected, and felt sad for myself too. 

Then came the phenomenon I’ve come to think of as “Ozempic full,” in which I simply lose interest in eating. I sent my friend C, a veteran of the all-you-can-eat circuit, a picture of the buffet options and she suggested that I steal and eat a display pomegranate to revitalize my hunger. It worked—I still don’t understand why—but when the picanha finally arrived, that one cut I was waiting for, there was no burst of pleasure, neither narratological nor culinary, and no time-travel to my younger self. As I’d feared, I’d come to prefer the consolations of the screen. I flipped my token to red. At the table next to me, a thrilled woman in her twenties, as young as I once was, thrice exclaimed, louder and louder, to every waiter who passed: “who’s going to stop me?” And I realized, in my case, what the answer to that question was, and so on the subway platform afterward, bloated with salt and fat, while I listened to a busking guitarist accompanying Astrud Gilberto’s English-language rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema”—another export—I canceled my YouTube Premium subscription. My one remaining side effect was cured. I didn’t beat the buffet, but I did beat that.

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.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald