By the time he turned ten, Jenna Ceriani’s son was too heavy to play football.
The local league kicked the budding ballplayer out after he tipped the scales at 155 pounds — well above their 125-pound cap. The middle schooler’s weight had become a safety liability for smaller players on the team, they explained.
“Every time I tackle someone, they call me a fat ass,” Ceriani, who comes from the Boston area, recalled her rejected son telling her. She recounted that even before he got the boot, he’d stopped wanting to go to practice. “There was name-calling. It really did a number on his confidence.”
Always a “bigger kid,” hovering in the 99th percentile for weight, he’d already been struggling with sleep apnea, had undergone surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids, and was advised to lose weight by his doctors.
And with health problems running in the family, the issue extended beyond fitting into a uniform. “You want them to grow up healthy and not have diabetes,” she told The Post.
With limited options remaining, the Cerianis made a provocative choice — to put their son on a GLP-1.
And not only for their son, but also their 14-year-old daughter, who struggled with food noise, metabolic dysfunction, and was an extremely picky eater.
Ceriani told The Post that for her son especially, the decision to try a GLP-1 came only after years of stress and frustration following visits with a revolving door of specialists attempting to resolve his growing health issues, and feeling helpless.
“Does he need medication to do everything?” she questioned her doctor’s treatment plans. “Even the sleep apnea doctor said he needs to lose weight, so why is it so hard for him to find a doctor to help him?
Once reserved for adults with obesity, drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound are now emerging as increasingly popular solutions for overweight children.
The parents and health professionals alike insist they’re not being used as cosmetic weight-loss drugs for children, but as a tool to treat chronic diseases before it becomes a lifelong burden.
Nevertheless, it’s a controversial practice, not least because pediatric GLP-1 use remains relatively rare.
Experts, however, say it is poised to grow. Yale researchers estimate that nearly 17 million adolescents and young U.S. adults ages 12 to 25 meet current GLP-1 therapy criteria.
And as studies have found meaningful improvements in cardiometabolic and renal health aside from weight, parents are increasingly curious about their options.
But a recent JAMA Pediatrics study of over 2 million adolescents with obesity found that fewer than 1% had received a prescription — often due to barriers like cost and insurance.
Some doctors are also cautioning that adverse effects or potential impacts on puberty or development have not been properly examined yet, and should raise red flags with parents.
More than just weight loss
The co-founder of the virtual pediatric obesity clinic Hey Nouri, which treats Ceriani’s son, disagrees, and argues that the era of treating childhood obesity as a “lifestyle” issue for kids to be trained out of is long over.
“People hear ‘obesity’ and think about how a body looks,” Dr. Anna Trepekli told The Post. “They’re not thinking about how a body functions.”
Trepekli says that framing GLP-1s as a treatment for a medical condition, rather than solely weight loss, allows clinicians to create what she calls a “window of opportunity” for children to build healthier habits through nutrition, exercise, and behavioral support.
“A majority of the kids who are referred to see me in my field are being sent because it’s not just their weight that’s an issue. It is their weight plus other comorbidities that have set in at a very young age that we need to correct, or we need intervention for,” Dr. Shaista Safder, a pediatric obesity specialist at Orlando Health, told The Post.
Safder began treating children with obesity after seeing young patients develop fatty liver disease that can eventually progress to liver failure. Safder said physicians are increasingly trying to interrupt that trajectory before irreversible damage occurs.
“If the writing is on the wall, early intervention is so important,” she added.
”That’s where the GLP-1s have helped change the narrative for some of these patients who were really struggling otherwise. So there are real, true, valid, medically indicated reasons to use this.”
Finding the root cause
For frustrated Pennsylvania mom Angela, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her daughter’s privacy, the decision wasn’t about making her daughter thinner — but rather about understanding why an otherwise active teenager couldn’t stop thinking about food.
The teenager, who plays various sports, had struggled with compulsive thoughts about food for years despite nutrition counseling, endocrinology visits and extensive blood work.
As puberty progressed, she also hadn’t begun menstruating, raising concerns about possible PCOS and underlying metabolic dysfunction.
At 5’3″ and 171 pounds, her mother noticed her weight starting to balloon at 9-years-old when her daughter was being homeschooled during COVID.
“Whenever they were stuck at home and not in the regimen of school, there was this major focus on food,” Angela told The Post. “What’s my next food? My next meal? This constant obsession with snacking.”
Like any parent, she gave her daughter room to be herself. Still, the preoccupation with food became alarming when she would eat snacks in her room late at night, followed by bullying and self-esteem issues so profound it impacted her desire to go to homecoming and wear a dress.
“I was really trying to get to the root cause,” Angela told The Post.
Six weeks after starting Wegovy, Angela says the biggest change hasn’t been weight loss.
“She wasn’t thinking about food as much,” adding that she too has always struggled with extra weight and had found success on her own GLP-1 journey, losing 30 pounds.
“If this can help jump-start healthier habits now, I’m for it.”
But Angela is adamant about keeping her daughter’s treatment private because of previous bullying she experienced for being overweight.
The backlash begins
But as pediatric GLP-1 use has expanded, so too has the backlash.
The debate has spilled onto social media, where parents are accused of taking shortcuts, fueling diet culture or medicating children for cosmetic reasons.
Even Ceriani has experienced it.
“I get what people are saying: ‘You don’t know [the side effects]. “I haven’t spoken to a lot of parents because most of the kids are tiny — I wish I had more people to talk to about it.”
Ceriani told The Post she’s aware there’s a stigma around young GLP-1 use but is sure “we’re not the only family doing this.”
Trepekli, who runs the obesity clinic, defended the families who come to her, and her own practice, insisting that the families who arrive at her clinic have already tried nutritionists, sports programs, counseling and lifestyle changes before turning to medication.
“You never tell a child with asthma, ‘Hey, just breathe better,” she said.
“There is a big perception that kids will just grow out of it, but we know that that’s actually not what happens. Approximately 80% of these kids actually grow into obesity, not just obesity, but also all the comorbidities that exist around it,” she said, adding that mental health is also extremely overlooked.
“With the weight loss, there is more confidence. They finally feel like they’re successful in something they’ve been maybe trying to do and have tried and failed,” Trepekli said, adding that many of their patients report feeling more confident in their clothes and being around their friends.
The unknowns
Despite the positive lifestyle effects, many physicians do not share Trepekli’s enthusiasm for the concept of GLP-1’s for children — among them health care professionals who happily prescribe the drugs for their adult patients.
“They’re a much more vulnerable population,” Dr. Amanda Kahn, a longevity medicine doctor who regularly suggests the drugs to her adult patients, said to The Post. “We don’t fully understand the long-term effects of these medications when you’re putting them in a system where hormones and biology are changing drastically over time.”
Kahn says that while the reasons parents give are valid, she worries particularly about the drugs’ studied effects on the dopamine and reward pathways, especially in developing brains. Early data shows that GLP-1 generally has positive effects in adults.
“We know it affects the reward pathway. So people don’t smoke as much, they don’t drink as much alcohol. Is it flattening a child’s affect? That would be something I would watch out for,” she said.
“Children face a lot of the same kind of social pressures: they should be a certain weight and look a certain way, and I imagine that’s particularly amplified when they’re going through puberty and the focus on your body becomes really, you know, front and center,” she added.
Beyond the scale
Despite the concerns, the parents that spoke with The Post explained that putting their children on the drugs has been a life-changing experience.
Ceriani recalled being so relieved to find Dr. Trepekli and Hey Nouri — she cried “tears of joy.”
After nearly two months on Wegovy, she said her son’s choices and behavior are improving. She has even been able to get him off ADD medication.
“He is starting to be aware of the difference between boredom and true hunger. He’s eating less, and he actually said ‘I am full’ one night,” Ceriani said, adding that although she hasn’t had many parents to confide in, she would encourage them to try it if their child was struggling.
And in Pennsylvania, Angela shares a similar sentiment.
“I’m trying to ensure that the confidence outside matches what’s on the inside,” she said of her daughter. “If this can help her jump-start these habits — then I’m for it for any child.”
“We don’t know every long-term answer,” Angela admitted. “But we also know what happens if we don’t treat obesity.”
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