The GLP-1 Narrative Shattering Story of Serena Williams

Dave Knapp
Sep 18
3 min read

Original posted at obesity.news/ on Aug 21, 2025

They tell us it is simple math.

Calories in, calories out.

A tidy equation, sealed tight, like the law of thermodynamics itself.

But we are not engines. We are not machines.

A rocket does not have a mother who starved herself at sixteen.

A furnace does not carry the trauma of years of dieting that left bones brittle and hormones silenced.

A jet engine has no microbiome, no tangled garden of bacteria whispering signals to the brain.

It does not know shame. It does not pray. It does not weep in the grocery store aisle when food stamps will not stretch far enough.

People are not equations. People are stories.

Serena Williams told hers. The greatest athlete of a generation, a body sculpted by discipline, sharpened by years of training that most of us cannot fathom, still she stood in front of the world and said that her weight, her hunger, her body were not governed by some squeaky clean arithmetic. Even she felt betrayed by the old lie. Even she needed the world to know that broken biology isn’t fair, never simple, rarely conquered by calorie counts, and never fully tamed by even the most elite training. She was able to level the playing field of broken biology with GLP-1 treatment.

If the champion of champions can say it, how

dare we keep silencing the rest?

Yes, energy moves through the body. But that body is not blank steel. It is memory at a cellular level. It is damage. It is genes and hormones, gut and brain locked in a broken conversation.

It is a woman sitting in a doctor’s office being told, once again, to just eat less and move more, though she has been eating less and moving more all her adult life.

It is a man swallowing the weight of the world with in the drive thru each day, storing pain in fat cells that his body will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve.

Thermodynamics explains why the rocket lifts. But it does not explain why you cannot sleep because hunger gnaws so loud it robs you of rest until you quiet it with a snack.

It does not explain why two people can eat the same meal and one will wear it as fat while the other will burn it clean.

It does not explain why willpower fails when biology has already set the terms.

Serena’s story is not a crack in the narrative, it is a shattering. It is proof that greatness, discipline, wealth, and access to the best coaches and trainers on earth still bow before the messy, maddening truth of human metabolism.

Calories are only a fraction of the story. The soul of the story lives in the unevenness of biology, the stubbornness of hormones, the fragile tether between body and mind.

And so, to those who chant “It is simple thermodynamics: calories in, calories out” as if the human experience of obesity were equally applicable: know this. You speak of rockets, of steel, of energy that dutifully obeys its laws. But we are not rockets. We are human.

And human bodies, human lives, human hungers, cannot be reduced to arithmetic.