Melissa Baird, a health care executive based in Seattle, knows first-hand the stigma around weight at work.
“I struggled with weight my whole adult life,” Baird, COO of Hims & Hers Health, a telehealth and wellness pharmaceutical company that sells prescription over-the-counter medication, tells Fortune in an exclusive interview. Now, Baird’s commitment to her job is attributable to much more than cashing in her return on investment in a rapidly growing industry. She has a personal stake in the matter.
In May, the company, which had been growing over 50% in revenue year over year, began offering compounded GLP-1s—a type of injectable weight loss drug for people with obesity. Baird became their third customer.
The demand for weight loss drugs, which can cost upwards of $1,000 per month before insurance, has skyrocketed, leading to nationwide shortages. Compounded semaglutide GLP-1s, which have the same active ingredients as the wildly popular Ozempic and Wegovy, is how Baird’s company is filling the gap.
Compounded drugs are not FDA-approved. The agency warns consumers that "quality standards for compounded drugs differ depending on the setting where compounding occurs. Drugs compounded in outsourcing facilities are subject to current good manufacturing practice (CGMP) requirements." According to safety guidelines on Hims & Hers Health's website, their compounded drugs are "produced exclusively in FDA-regulated 503B facilities."
“I knew exactly what the supply chain looked like. I was like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna try these.’” Hims & Hers Health predicts their compounded GLP-1 offering—which has an out-of-pocket price tag starting at $199—will generate $100 million by the end of 2025.
The path to GLP-1s
Baird began to notice how her weight gain during the pandemic inhibited her from partaking in the activities that bring her joy. And working from home with a demanding job that kept her at her desk into the evening hours made it harder to adhere to a strict eating schedule.
“I wasn't getting down on the floor to play with my baby nephew because I was worried I wouldn't be able to get up off the floor,” she recalls. “I was so out of shape and so heavy that I was worried my knees wouldn't be able to support me getting up.”
Baird has a family history of high blood pressure and obesity, and her grandmother developed late-onset diabetes. She remembers watching the women in her family attend Weight Watchers meetings and struggle to maintain a healthy weight. In 2022, Baird dedicated herself to making exercise and lifestyle changes to propel her toward a healthier weight and reduce her risk of developing the chronic conditions that ran in her family. She hired a trainer because she said a typical online workout felt too advanced, and she tested out a myriad of diets, including Weight Watchers, the 30-10 diet, and keto.
Her approach worked initially. Baird lost 30 pounds and felt more energized. However, the weight loss stalled, and no amount of diet and exercise was working.
“I crossed the barrier into the 40s, so losing weight started getting a little more difficult,” Baird, now 46, says, recalling that it was much easier to maintain a healthy weight in her 20s.
When Hims & Hers Health began investing in the weight management market, Baird knew she wanted to try the GLP-1 injections right away. In the last two months, Baird says the drugs have helped her lose weight and have also improved her metabolism.
Weight loss drugs and changing the conversation
The market for GLP-1s has been booming for the last couple of years. The drugs trigger the release of insulin to lower blood sugar, slow the emptying of the stomach, and affect the areas of the brain that process hunger so people feel more satiated or full.
As one in eight people live with obesity, which increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and early mortality, the drugs have garnered a lot of attention as a way to help treat the condition. At the same time, this groundbreaking treatment has sparked backlash. People who take them have admitted feeling criticized for not having the willpower to lose weight on their own. Others, who forgo the drugs, sometimes say they fear they will be shamed for not taking control of their health. Neither could be further from the truth, Baird says, who is ready to change the fatphobic narrative—especially in the workplace.
“I have a really hard time understanding the argument where you would shame someone for wanting to be a healthier person. That just doesn't make sense to me,” she says. “In my mind, I'm a little immune to that because I just don't see how you wanting to be a better, healthier person that can chase your baby nephew around the living room floor is a bad, shameful thing.”
Baird is open to any questions from her colleagues about her personal journey. She gives the product and engineering teams screenshots of her health care experience as a member using GLP-1s to help with improving the program’s flow. She hopes her openness not only helps break the stigma of taking weight loss drugs and dispel misinformation about weight management, but also helps make her company’s product better able to serve consumers' needs.
“I've been very open about it at work. I've been telling everybody that I'm taking them,” she tells Fortune. “What I found is that it's sort of broken a lot of the stigma internally, where now other people talk to me about it, too. It's almost like a little support group at work where they're like, ‘Oh yeah, I'm on the week whatever of the titration.’ I find that people are actually excited to talk about it because it does work.”
Baird wants to remind her colleagues and friends that “nobody looks at you sideways” for going on medication for a host of other conditions, she says.
“This is a medical condition. It's not some sort of failure of morality,” Baird says. “This is not anything that you did, right? This is just something that you can go to a provider and help fix. You can go feel better, and it's not about looking better, necessarily. It's about feeling better, being healthier, and being able to do things.”
Leaders are often encouraged to bring their whole selves to the office, and Baird believes that being vulnerable about her health journey propels her on that track.
“As far as my business leadership goes, it's made me a lot more passionate,” she says. “It's just so personal to me because I know that I have needed help. I just know that I can help bring this to more people. It's really invigorated the excitement of what we can do in this space.”
Her work is very personal because Baird remembers going to her doctor in her 30s and not knowing how to talk about weight. A doctor would put her on a scale and tell her to lose 10 pounds, and that was that. “Then there's nothing after that, right? Like zero tips on how to do that,” she says. “Providers are just like, ‘Good luck with losing the weight.’ I didn't really know that there was an option to talk to a provider about weight management until maybe four or five years ago when I started realizing that there are weight management specialists out there.”
Two years ago, Baird asked her doctor about access to GLP-1s. At the time, her BMI indicated obesity. Still, her insurance would not cover the medication because she did not also have a chronic condition, like diabetes. “It was super frustrating because here I was going to a doctor for help and not being able to get it,” she says. "I know that being at the weight that I was was not a healthy state, and I was probably going to develop one of those [chronic conditions]."
Baird understands that medication for weight management is not for everyone. But she hopes her story sends the message that it can be the right path for some and that there should be no shame in the matter—especially at work.
Since being on the GLP-1 program for the last 11 weeks, Baird has lost 17 pounds. And she plans to stay on the medication until she gets to a healthier weight and says she will continue sharing her experience along the way.
“I still have quite a few pounds to lose, so I'm gonna stay on it for quite a while,” she says. “Once I get to a healthy weight, I might start looking at other options just because it would be nice to go off of the medicine and just manage it through diet and exercise.”
For more on weight management:
- 7 habits that can help you lose weight—and keep it off—according to experts
- The 5 biggest weight loss myths that ‘need to die,’ according to an obesity doctor
- GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy are all the rage—but people are quitting them too fast to achieve meaningful weight loss, finds 170,000-patient study
- This is the best time of day to exercise for people living with obesity, new study shows
