Bio Mass Index
content warning: diet talk and restriction, weight and body size
If you have been living in the Midwest or on the East Coast during Winter 2026, I am sorry for your hard winter but also extremely envious. The West is suffering the exact opposite. Weather forecasters for the week of March 14–21 post statements like “Something never seen before” when referring to the one-hundred-degree temperatures. The US National Weather Service predicts cities from Flagstaff to Salt Lake will hit records. We also have no snow. I perform a lot of mental acrobatics to stave off a complete climate crisis nervous breakdown. I know it will require huge governmental and policy shifts to undo or even mitigate global warming. But I also know individuals can do a lot themselves—or at least make themselves feel like they’re doing something when they ride their bikes or install solar panels or eat less meat.
Last October, thinking that I needed more shirts with long sleeves, appropriate for winter, I ordered three from ThredUp, an online thrift store that lets you sort by size, color, even brand name. It took me years to become talented at shopping at brick-and-mortar thrift stores, and shopping at online thrift shops like ThredUp made it easier to sort by size, color, even brand. You didn’t end up with a lot of unplanned surprise purchases like you might when at your local Goodwill. However, I was surprised when I tried on the size ten, stretchy fabric, button-down Banana Republic shirts I’d ordered. They didn’t fit. I had, or I believed I had, always worn size ten Banana Republic shirts.
I stepped on the scale. 157—down from 160 pounds which I hit last summer as I recovered from ductile carcinoma in situ surgery and traveled too much for work to exercise heartily. I stepped off the scale and pushed the reset button to test not only my weight but also the percentage of fat, 25.1%, water, 51%, and muscle mass, 111 lbs. Although these latter numbers make it possible to wear some size ten clothing, my body mass index is still too high. I run three times a week. But! I also love food. I love steak with bearnaise, steak with red wine reduction, chicken with gravy, pork chops with a cherry butter sauce. I love butter so much. I love to hold half a stick in my hand, squeeze a bit off, drop a knob in a reduction of any kind of juice or broth, swirl the butter into that thin residue, and watch the magic of emulsion happen. I have been known to stick a fingernail into refrigerator-hard butter and eat it like a piece of stolen cheese.
I’ve been trying to lose ten pounds for ten years, but this butter and meat habit isn’t helping. I don’t care that much about my weight. On top of the running, I take long walks and hard hikes. I swim when I can. I paddleboard. I lift weights. I love salads. There’s not a vegetable I avoid. I look OK in my embroidered, flowing shirts, which keep me cool—something I will apparently now need for all four “seasons” of the year. I believe that a variety of body shapes is more interesting than the singular, platonic, model-thin version of women advertisers believe sell their products best. But, as I take online quizzes to determine what sort of weight-loss regimen to follow, I do check the boxes that ask if I’d like to feel better about my body. I’d like to look better in my clothes. And maybe this medicine could curb my cravings for meat.
I have been suspicious of these new GLP-1 weight-loss drugs—I didn’t want to lose muscle or gain wrinkles or find out in twenty years that the drug triggers cancers worse than my recently ousted breast cancer. I took an online screening. I passed the test for a microdosing program. I paid $76 for the first month, $563 for the next five months, but I planned to cancel before the big payment. I don’t have $500 to lose twenty pounds but I have $76 to try to lose ten. I received a vial with a month’s worth of semaglutide.
I have never stuck myself with a needle. I followed the instructions, sucking air into the syringe, pushing it into the vial, drawing out between eight and twenty-four units. I shook the syringe, but I couldn’t be sure I got all the bubbles out. I may well have been giving myself an embolism. But at least it would be a sanitary one, for I did indeed swab with alcohol the vial, my stomach, and whatever else I was going to touch. I pinch a fold of skin near my belly button and thought, “They let normal people do this?”
The same week I injected myself with the weight-loss drug, Nautilus Magazine reported that 95% of the biomass of mammals is the combined amount of domesticated livestock and humans. The remaining 5% comprises every other species of mammal on the planet—from the blue whale to the Etruscan shrew, from the koala bear to the Norwegian rat, and every furry creature in between. Since 1850, the ratio has changed from equal distribution of 50% humans and livestock and 50% wild animals to this current incongruity. Domesticated animals currently outweigh wild mammals tenfold, which puts substantial pressure on natural resources. Raising livestock demands significant amounts of water, land, and feed. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef.
Livestock also contribute some 12% of the world’s greenhouse gas emission. At the rate we’re contributing methane and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the mean global temp will rise far above the 1.5 degrees centigrade. Above 1.5 degrees, climate scientists imagine catastrophic results—including a change in the jetstream that subjects the East Coast to colder and more frequent storms, and the US West to fewer storms and higher temperatures. The mountain peaks that define Flagstaff Dookʼoʼoosłííd, which mean "the summit which never melts" or "the mountain peak that never thaws” in Navajo have no snow. Three days in March mark 105 temperatures—breaking records by ten degrees. In the West, we count the number of cows we see on forest lands and in national parks. We know how many there are. If we could imagine them all together, one gigantic mass, perhaps we could understand how much methane they burp into the atmosphere. Seen in such quantity, perhaps we would not think of cows as one of our primary food sources. If humans ate less beef, ranchers would grow fewer cattle. Cattle would burp less methane, a primary greenhouse gas and one that holds more heat than even carbon dioxide. Clear-cutting huge swaths of rainforest to raise cattle would be pointless. Transporting animals from grazing lands to slaughterhouses wouldn’t be necessary.
I crave meat. I can eat an entire sixteen ounces of prime rib. When my friends threw me a birthday party at the Wine Loft, I brought a pound of mortadella in my bag to snack on. For a while, these same friends asked me if I had any “purse meat” when I saw them. For New Year’s Eve, where we celebrated in Phoenix, I ordered both beef marrow bones and eight ounces of Wagyu beef.
The only other diet I’d ever tried, besides GLP-1, and one on which I did lose weight, was the Atkins Diet. When I moved home from Portland, weighing 157 pounds, most of those accumulated from Oregon’s cutting-edge beer scene, I quit the beer and ate bacon for breakfast, a hamburger patty on lettuce for lunch, and pot roast for dinner, and I dropped twenty pounds. But now those pounds have grown back thanks to slowing metabolism, butter’s siren call, and raising kids, which requires the consumption of carb-filled pizza and pasta.
This Ozempic project was an opportunity to control my meat addiction as well to put a dent in both my human and livestock biomass. Humans across the globe don’t contribute to the biomass percentage equally. In the US, as we are often told, our population trends toward the overweight. There are many reasons for this—some of them paradoxical: For some of us, every kind of food is available. For others who live in food deserts, only highly caloric, processed foods are available. We gain weight. We go on a diet. We lose weight. We gain it back. Yo-yoing our metabolism into frenzies. We rely on cars more than bikes or walking. Advertising makes us salivate over Popeye’s chicken and McDonald’s hamburgers. We receive mixed signals from nutritionists: Eggs are bad! Eggs are good! Low-fat is good. Low-carb is good. We are not mindful of what we eat and yet we think about it every day, all day long.
On this month-long Ozempic adventure, I ate less meat. I made one NY Strip Roast because it was on sale at the grocery store. I stabbed the meat with garlic, roasted it for an hour, and then made Yorkshire pudding with the drippings. The next day, French dip sandwiches with au jus. For the rest of the week though, I ate a grain bowl, a piece of salmon, a Brussel sprout salad, and a Chile relleno. I didn’t long for steak frites or queso birria tacos. I also didn’t lose that much weight. Maybe two pounds. Half a pound per week is the expectation with microdosing. If I kept it up, well, maybe those button-downs would fit. I watched as people around me magically diminished, I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of revolution. At Tucci’s, a restaurant in New York, in response to the GPL-1 trend, the chef offers smaller portions. Grocery stores note that although beef prices have risen, that rise doesn’t account for the 60% of Americans who consume less beef.
Perhaps it’s too easy and it’s not all good news. Just because Americans are contributing less biomass by shrinking themselves and shrinking their beef consumption, doesn’t mean they’re intentionally becoming climate conscious. The temperatures keep climbing. And as efficiency and ease mark much of the environmental problems—driving from store to store, having food dashed to your house, asking AI to write your emails—this get-out-of-jail-free weight loss may not be exclusively advantageous. Still, perhaps with smaller humans and fewer cattle, more room will be made for the other mammals. Perhaps one day we could even return to that pre-1860 fifty-fifty ratio. Perhaps my shirts from Thredup, now seasonally appropriate again, will fit! To further offset the imbalance, perhaps GLP-1 drugs should come with a bargain—for every pound you lose, you plant a tree.
