The Secret ‘Ozempidemic’ on Sorority Row

Listen to writer Angelina Chapin read her feature.

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The first time Laura gave herself the shot, she didn’t want to be alone. The 19-year-old was afraid of needles and walked down the hall of her dorm to Claire and Marie’s room for company. She pulled down her sweatpants, sat on their ottoman, and held the needle over her inner thigh. As a disco ball spun above her, Laura thought she might vomit. While she psyched herself up, her friends did their best to distract her; they tried on going-out tops as “Take It Easy,” by the Eagles, played over the Bluetooth speaker. Then she slowly pushed the needle into her skin and the other girls let out little cheers. Laura was relieved. She was officially part of their “skinny shot” club.

As the winter rush season got underway, Laura, Claire, and Marie jabbed themselves with a GLP-1 every week to try to lose the freshman 15. They all wanted bids from the top sororities at their prestigious southern school, where the girls looked not just skinny but “coke skinny.” They tucked their vials behind a Brita filter in a mini-fridge so none of their other friends would accidentally catch a glimpse while reaching for a can of Alani. At first, Claire felt weird giving herself an injection as her roommate put on eyeliner. It wasn’t exactly how she pictured her college experience. But soon, it became normal to casually poke herself in the stomach while they talked about their crushes. Sometimes, there were reminders that it wasn’t normal, as when one of their guy friends knocked on Claire and Marie’s door just as Laura was about to give herself the shot. She quickly pulled up her pants and shoved the syringe in a drawer. As he lingered on the couch, Laura became increasingly fidgety until Marie said, “We need 15 minutes of girl time. Can you go away?” “It almost became like a secret society,” Marie says now. “We wouldn’t tell our other friends about it.” They hoped to look effortlessly thin in bikini photos, surrounded by their sorority sisters on a beach during spring break.

The life of a sorority girl has never been more aspirational. In the years since #BamaRush and RushTok turned the recruitment process into a cultural phenomenon, teenagers’ feeds have been flooded with girls sharing their outfits of the day (“Skirt from Aritzia, stack from Amazon”) and doing elaborate choreographed dance routines in front of their sororities’ neoclassical mansions while lip-syncing to “Mambo No. 5.” Their outfits are always coordinated: matching extra-small Alo sets, LoveShackFancy florals, and so much butter yellow. They are almost uniformly white, blonde, and very, very skinny.

Every generation of college girls has been obsessed with being thin, but never before has there been such an effective, accessible way to lose weight. In dorm rooms and sorority houses across the country, women are stashing Wegovy pills under their twin beds and sharing vials of compounded retatrutide they ordered from China with their roommates, hoping if they shrink down enough they will get into the sisterhood of their dreams. Students told me there’s an “Ozempidemic” on campuses in which everyone is taking it but nobody is talking about it. When someone comes back from vacation 20 pounds lighter, rumors start flying that they’re “on the Big O.” But many would rather risk being discovered than stand out in a house full of double zeros.

For many young women who have just arrived on campus, thinness feels like the ticket into the best possible college experience. “As a 20-year-old, I want to have the hottest guys in my phone,” one tells me. “I want to be hanging out with the pretty girls. I want to feel pretty.” If that means spending thousands of dollars a year to suppress their appetites, so be it. “People say college is what you make it,” Marie tells me. “But college is what people see when they look at you.”

It’s a good time to be a Southern university. Between 2014 and 2023, the number of undergrads from the Northeast flocking to schools in the Southeastern Conference jumped by 90 percent, students desperate to partake in the kind of tailgates, formals, and debaucherous frat parties they see on TikTok. Even freshmen with no plans to pledge may change their minds once they realize sororities and fraternities are the center of campus social life. Not rushing at an SEC school would be like going to Vegas without gambling.

But not all sororities are created equal. The touses (“top houses”) are usually part of the old-row sororities that are steeped in tradition and generational wealth, while the bouses (“bottom houses”) are likely to be part of the new row that accepts more out-of-state members who don’t have blonde hair or vacation homes. (There are also houses in the middle, where girls may be known for academics or their focus on community service.) Where the girls end up determines whom they’re friends with, whom they date, and which parties they’re invited to. For many of the young women lured into this hierarchy, nothing feels more important than being able to post the right Greek letters in their TikTok bio. Girls whisper that guys from top frat houses don’t want to hang out with and certainly don’t want to hook up with girls from bouses, whose members they dismiss as “fat” and “weird.” The same rules don’t apply to the boys. “There’s not really a bad fraternity here,” Claire says. “Everybody goes to fraternity parties regardless.”

Marie always knew she wanted to join a sorority (like most other girls in this story, she has been anonymized to protect her privacy). As a child, she struggled with binge eating, and by the time she got to high school, she says she was known as the “chubby girl.” From her suburban Connecticut bedroom, she fantasized about going to a prestigious university, becoming the head cheerleader, and dating the football captain. On RushTok, she watched freshmen gathered in stadiums filming themselves screaming (and sometimes crying) as they opened bid envelopes, throwing up hand signs for Chi Omega or Delta Delta Delta. “I based my life off my favorite TV shows,” like The Sex Lives of College Girls, Marie says. “I just wanted that stereotypical college experience.”

Her campus looks like it could be the set of a movie. She couldn’t wait to wander around the grassy quads and streets lined with oak trees that turn into massive parties where students do whippets and shotgun beers for days on end. Frats and sororities host mixers with themes like après-ski or Y2K along with formals and dance battles. More than a third of the school’s students are members of a sorority or fraternity, and even more take part in rush week. Marie was excited to be one of them.

Before the semester even started, Marie had her sights set on one of the school’s top sororities, filled with girls who tan in front of their houses in bikinis and go to class in off-the-shoulder tops that show off their collarbones. “I thought being in a sorority like that would affirm that I’m pretty and skinny,” she says. “It felt like such a no-brainer.” Marie, who is blonde, could see herself fitting in. By the start of her freshman year, she was down 85 pounds from her heaviest weight in high school. She felt good in crop tops for the first time, and when she went out to a bar at night, both boys and girls told her she looked pretty. It was a fresh start.

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Because rush at her university doesn’t happen until the spring semester, Marie had time to find her footing socially. In the dorms, she became fast friends with her roommate, Claire, and with Laura, girls who had also spent their high-school years focused on GPAs and extracurriculars. They were ready for their college glow-ups. But when the guy Marie had been seeing in the first few weeks of school broke up with her, she began DoorDashing mac ’n’ cheese to her dorm at 2 a.m. and spending all day in bed, obsessing over how skinny her ex’s new girlfriend looked on Instagram. When Marie did show her face, people said she looked drained. In her state, she wouldn’t be choreographing TikTok dances with the top-tier sorority girls anytime soon. She needed to lose weight, fast: “I was about to meet 100 girls who I had never seen before and would be judging me off a 15-minute interaction.”

Claire and Laura also complained about how big they looked in photos or how tight their jeans suddenly felt. One day in November, as they were joking about how badly they wanted to go on Ozempic, Marie said in all seriousness, “You know what? I’m going to do it.” She persuaded her mom, who had been taking Zepbound for two years, to pay for a semaglutide compound from a weight-loss clinic she found online. Within two months, Marie had lost 15 pounds and says she was no longer thinking of doughnuts every minute of the day. Laura, who had felt “chunky” since high school and had gone through periods of bingeing and restricting, was inspired. “I didn’t realize that someone who was 19 and also not super-overweight could get on it,” she tells me. “I was like, I gotta hop on.”

Claire was more ambivalent. She thought GLP-1’s were for people with real medical issues, not teenagers who wanted to look better in Revolve skirt sets. “We’re basically still kids,” she says. “I thought that was wrong.” Couldn’t Marie just hit the gym a little harder? She also worried about the drugs’ potential long-term effects since they’re so new, but Marie was living in the moment. “I don’t really care,” she says. “I’m in my prime, so I’d rather look cute now.” Claire was also jealous. As a dancer, she had always been aware of how she looked in a leotard. In high school, she started to gain some weight, and her mom, a former sorority girl, was always encouraging her to lose a few pounds — especially if she wanted to rush. “Sororities are going to look at your size,” Claire remembers her saying. “Wouldn’t you rather start now?” She was only a size 8 and had never felt that much bigger than other girls until she got to campus and looked around.

Back at home over winter break, Claire told her mom that Marie was on a GLP-1. Her mom admitted she was on one too and had lost 30 pounds. “Now that you know I’m on it, would you feel a little better about doing it as well?” Claire remembers her asking. The answer was “yes.” Her mom got her supply from a friend, who started shipping compounded tirzepatide to Claire’s dorm. When Laura found out, she asked Claire to hook her up. Then she called her mom — who is also on a GLP-1 and once paid Laura $10 a day to cut out sugar when she was in sixth grade — to ask her to cover the $100 a month it would cost. “Everyone’s on it,” Laura told her. “And my mom was like, ‘Sure, I’ll pay.’” In a matter of weeks, with their mothers’ permission, all three girls were injecting themselves with weight-loss drugs that could forever warp their sense of how thin they need to be.

By the time Claire and Laura started their shots, sorority recruitment was already underway. There wasn’t enough time to transform into campus Barbies. Marie, meanwhile, looked the part. She had spent months, and $2,000, shopping for rush-week clothes, including a pink Reformation dress she planned to pair with kitten heels and a Free People shirt with a fringe belt. She took long walks, went to the gym every day, and got lymphatic-drainage massages — anything to make herself look thinner. She had already sent the top sorority her résumé, highlighting her 3.9 GPA, along with a few letters of recommendation from her mom’s friends who were alums of the house. The first official step in the recruitment process was to record a video introducing herself to all the sororities. Marie spent hours giving herself “driver’s license” makeup and doing 40 takes to make sure she hit her angles. She talked about how she liked to go to the gym, do Pilates, and get smoothies. “I was trying to say things that made me seem skinny,” she says. “I was definitely playing it up.” In a few weeks, when rush week began, she would find out which houses were interested in meeting her in person.

When she opened the university’s Pan-Hellenic app in January, her first thought was There’s been a mistake. She’d gotten invitations from only the bottom two houses. She asked to speak with someone on the Pan-Hellenic council, and the president confirmed the results. Then she went into a bathroom stall, called her mom, and sobbed. “What is wrong with me?” she said. “I lost all this weight, and it’s still not enough. Is there an issue with me as a person?”

Others were also surprised and told her they’d thought she was a shoo-in for her top house. Marie developed a few theories. Maybe, despite all the contouring, her face looked too puffy. After all, she hadn’t been on a GLP-1 for very long. It was also possible she had been blacklisted by the top sororities for unknowingly hanging out with one of the girls’ crushes or going to a party where freshmen weren’t welcome. Laura and Claire had gotten the same results and were equally devastated. “I just felt sad that nobody wanted to talk with me in person,” Claire says. “Like, really? We’re going to shut somebody out just based on how they look?” They continued the rush process anyway, going through three rounds of house visits and interviews, and comforted one another by saying that at least they’d be “hot shit” in their bouses. “They’ll post us on socials,” Marie said. “Like, they’re gonna want us in leadership.”

A month later, Marie found out through one of her sorority sisters that she had accidentally submitted one of her outtake videos during recruitment week. It felt good to have a reason for her rejection, whether it was true or not. A friend who had gotten into one of the touses told her about a particularly sadistic hazing ritual in which new girls were woken up in their dorms, taken to a senior’s apartment, and made to take turns sitting on a washing machine while the older sisters circled any jiggling fat on the new girls’ bodies with a marker. It sounded horrible but also gave her fomo. Marie could have dropped her house and rushed again the following year, but she couldn’t face the possibility of another crushing rejection. “What if I kept putting all of that pressure on myself to lose weight and I got dropped again?” she says. “It would have wrecked my self-confidence.” Both she and Claire settled into their respective bouses, bonding with the other girls — whom they said were “gorgeous” despite the unflattering stereotypes. All three girls kept taking a GLP-1, though; they still wanted to fit in with the cool girls on campus. Laura couldn’t bring herself to be part of a sorority that was the butt of constant fat jokes, like “Phi Moo.” She decided to rush again this winter, hoping that after a year on tirzepatide, she will be top-sorority-girl material. “I’m glad Marie and Claire were able to look past those labels,” she says. “I’m too shallow. All the girls I want to be in with are super-skinny.”

The women I heard from were convinced their BMIs had doomed them. But were they really rejected from top houses because they weren’t thin enough? Don’t members consider many factors, like personality, style, GPA, social-media presence, and family name? Competition is fierce. In your average rush season at a school like the University of Alabama, 2,500 students may be vying for 250 spots at a top house. “We call it the Super Bowl for girls,” one rush coach tells me. Maybe without a certain pedigree they had never stood a chance.

Every year, before rush even starts, sisters make a shortlist of girls who have powerful parents or friends in the sorority, or who just seem cool on TikTok. A University of Alabama alum, who posts as McCall Carlie on social media and was involved in recruitment for one of the school’s top houses, Zeta Tau Alpha, in 2024, says roughly a fifth of the spots went to these “star girls.” “If they had any relation to Alabama football players or coaches, they automatically got a bid,” she says. “Like the daughter of Nick Saban” — the school’s former football coach — “was able to walk right into a top house.”

Being from the right place also helps. Bethany, a sophomore at Auburn University, says about 80 percent of the girls in top houses are from Birmingham and already know one another from high school. As a small-town girl, she was clear-eyed about her chances of joining the ranks of Alpha Gamma Delta or Kappa Delta: “I don’t look like them. I’m not from Birmingham. I’m not getting into those sororities.” Most houses accept recommendation letters from alums, so any girl with an aunt who was in her house of choice also has a leg up.

But if you don’t have the money or the connections to glide through recruitment, looking the part is crucial. McCall says the year she recruited for Zeta, no girl bigger than a size 4 made it to the in-person round. While nobody had explicitly cut girls because of their weight, they used euphemisms like “She’s not Zeta material.” “I feel like the whole standard is changing,” McCall says. “It’s like, ‘Well, there’s no excuse for people to be fat because they could just get a GLP-1. Why would we accept somebody who wants to be fat?’” A recent University of Southern California alum said her sorority sisters had the same mentality. The aesthetic there might have seemed different — more vintage designer than Lilly Pulitzer — but still allowed for no variation in appearance. “Most girls who got in were probably size 2, zero, and double zero,” the USC alum says.

If you do get into a top house, the pressure to stay thin only intensifies. While the best houses may have a token bigger girl, nobody wants to be her. One University of Texas at Austin alum who was a size 8 says the sisters in her top sorority always asked her to take the photos. “If I was in them, they’d never get posted to the account,” she says. When Samantha, a senior at the University of West Georgia, came back to school for her junior year, she had suddenly become the biggest girl in her sorority. Her sisters were shrinking, and some admitted to her that they were on a GLP-1. Someone from a different sorority called her “big and ugly” on Yik Yak, an anonymous social-media app that’s popular at her school. Even her boyfriend was ordering retatrutide online from a Chinese supplier. Eventually, Samantha snapped and called her mom, begging to go on a GLP-1; her mom agreed to pay for her tirzepatide.

Not everyone gives in. In her sophomore year, McCall, the University of Alabama alum, lived in a house with 40 other girls, none of whom weighed more than 135 pounds. Nobody ate before going out to the bar, and they went on seven-day juice cleanses before trips to Panama City Beach. McCall restricted her calories and exercised constantly and still found it hard to lose the weight she wanted to. When she walked in on her roommate and two of their friends injecting themselves with a GLP-1, she was furious. McCall had noticed her roommate slimming down, but when she asked her about it, she claimed it was from eating nothing but vegetables. Now she knew her supposed best friend had lied to her and had made McCall feel like she wasn’t even good at having an eating disorder. “I’m all for people doing GLP-1’s if they need it,” McCall says. “But seeing my roommate, who didn’t even work out, take it? I just felt so betrayed.” She canceled her spring-break plans with the group and backed out of the lease for an apartment they were all supposed to live in together in the fall.

If you admit to taking the drugs, you’re seen as a cheater. If you lie, you help create an unrealistic body standard that makes other women feel like shit. As one college student puts it, “You have to be skinny, but you also need to love yourself. You need to lose weight, but you need to do it the right way.” It’s a tension Alyvia thinks about a lot. After she failed to get into her choice of sorority at Miami University in Ohio, she ordered a semaglutide compound from the telehealth company Fridays. When she came back from winter break 15 pounds lighter, people noticed. One night at a bar, one of her guy friends straight-up asked if she was on Ozempic. “I was just like, ‘Girl, I go to Pilates,’” she says. It was none of his business. Still, as a TikTok influencer who posts a lot about her recovery from an eating disorder, Alyvia feels she’s being dishonest with the girls who look up to her. She posts content of herself lifting weights, but her followers don’t see her giving herself a shot. “People in my comments are like, ‘Please post your workout routines,’” she says. “I feel a little weird, like, not sharing the full story of how I’m able to look like this.”

Marie doesn’t want her sorority sisters to find out she’s taking a GLP-1 either. What if they think she’s a superficial top-sorority wannabe? Or maybe they’d be offended and think, Are you calling the rest of us fat? She feels lucky to have Claire and Laura to confide in. They share their weigh-ins and remind one another to eat enough protein. If one of them feels tired or sick, they’ll ask, “Did you just take your shot?” It’s nice to troubleshoot the drug’s side effects together. As on St. Patrick’s Day, when they all drank from a big plastic jug filled with vodka, water, and lemon-lime electrolyte drops — known as borgs, or “blackout rage gallons” — and Claire started throwing up. That could have been because she was chugging vodka on a hot day. But Marie knew tirzepatide had affected her own tolerance; she went from being able to handle eight shots of Fireball and half a pitcher of beer to feeling sick after just a few drinks. She told her friend something similar might be happening and put her to bed. The girls still go out just as much and push through the consequences. Marie isn’t willing to give up vodka shots entirely. “It’s definitely a bummer,” she says. “I love to go out and get drunk and dance.”

Because these college girls often get their GLP-1’s from WhatsApp groups, friends, or random telehealth companies, they’re left to navigate the side effects on their own. One cardiologist told me she’s seeing more young women on the drugs coming into her office with heart palpitations. Sometimes they have an underlying heart condition that gets exacerbated by the medication; other times they’re just severely dehydrated, unaware that they’re supposed to drink more water. And if they didn’t have an eating disorder already, “losing that 20 pounds in a month is a risk factor for developing one,” says Dr. Rebecka Peebles, who treats adolescents at Monte Nido, a national eating-disorder clinic. One doctor told me she actually thought using GLP-1’s for casual weight loss could become “its own type of disordered eating.” Alyvia, who has struggled with anorexia, says the drugs are a better alternative to starving herself. But she has noticed some of her old habits reemerging, such as delaying her first meal of the day by drinking a lot of caffeine.

Compared with other drugs being passed around campus, Ozempic doesn’t seem so bad. “A little GLP-1 ain’t going to hurt nobody,” says Alyvia, who points out that all her peers are snorting ketamine and vaping. At least she’s “health and wellness focused and not doing hard drugs. If you’re doing shit like eating Takis with Red 40 every day, you can’t throw a stone in a glass house.” Marie has similar feelings. On the social network Fizz, girls at her college talk about getting skinny in one of two ways: Ozempic or cocaine. “I’d rather be on Ozempic,” she says.

This year, Laura’s living in a dorm suite with Claire, Marie, and another girl, who is not on a GLP-1, once more taking their “skinny shots” under the same roof. It’s hard not to feel competitive with one another. In the spring, Marie had stopped losing weight while Laura kept getting thinner. “I remember being so upset by that,” Marie says. “I was like, I started this before her; why does she look so skinny? ” In July, a mutual friend posted a few TikToks of Laura that made Claire do a double take; she almost didn’t recognize her. Her friend’s collarbone was “very prominent,” and her legs were a lot slimmer. “You look skinny!” she texted her. Laura responded that, actually, she hadn’t been taking her meds while traveling for a month and felt bloated. “I feel like I’m gaining weight,” she said, and sent Claire a few photos. “It’s all in your head,” Claire replied. But it was on the scale as well. Over the summer, Laura gained nine pounds. Before that, “I was literally one pound away from my goal weight,” she says. “That’s the most frustrating part.”

Next semester, Laura will compete again for a spot in a top sorority. Claire worries that if her friend gets into a touse, she might become too cool for them. Recently, Claire was talking with a guy from her school on Snapchat and he asked what house she was in. When she told him, he deleted her from his friend list. “I was like, Wow, are you serious? I just think that’s so shallow.” As we talk about it, she starts to cry. “I don’t think a sorority is that serious,” Claire says. “But sometimes it feels that serious.”

Still, Claire doesn’t plan on quitting the tirzepatide anytime soon. She lost 40 pounds and recently decided to drop her goal weight by another five. She feels more confident wearing low-rise jeans, making friends, and flirting with guys, and once she graduates, she thinks being thin will help her find a job. And what if everyone around her just keeps getting skinnier? “I would never get too scarily thin in terms of being unhealthy,” she says. “But when is it time to call it quits? I kind of worry about that for everyone.”

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