Summary

This article examines how compulsive eating is interpreted through religious frameworks in Brazil and what GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Mounjaro®) reveal about the relationships among body, agency, and meaning. Drawing on phenomenology, material religion, and Brazilian minimal religiosity, the analysis contrasts three widely available religious repertoires: Catholicism, Kardecist Spiritism, and Neo-Pentecostalism. Each offers a distinct lens for experiences of contested agency. The article argues that the spread of biomedical language around these drugs intensifies a dispute over how to interpret bodily experiences involving intrusive thoughts and loss of control. It proposes three analytical tools: a model of religious translations of compulsive eating; a typology of biomedicine-religion relationships (displacement, integration, adaptation); and the notion of pharmacological asceticism—a heuristic for examining contemporary forms of desire regulation. By placing pharmaceutical interventions within broader shifts in subjectivity, the article contributes to Latin American debates on religion, health, and the body, and outlines a research agenda at the crossroads of pharmacology, spirituality, and embodied experience.