When Oprah Winfrey talks about her battle to lose weight, she fights back tears

On Monday, Oprah Winfrey talked about her struggles with weight loss on a TV show. For more than 20 years, people have been interested in her body.

Winfrey said in the special “An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution” that making fun of her weight was a national sport for 25 years.

Winfrey began the special by saying, “I wanted to do this special for the more than 100 million people in the United States and the over one billion people around the world who are living with obesity.”

“That could be you or someone you love.”

Talking about weight shame on Oprah Winfrey’s show comes at a good time, since people are talking more and more about weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. A study by the data-analytics company Trilliant Health found that between early 2020 and 2022, the number of orders for Ozempic in the US quadrupled every three months. “I never thought that one day we would be talking about medicines that would give hope to people like me who have struggled for years with being overweight or obese,” Winfrey said.

“The main reason I want to have this conversation is so that we can stop judging and stigmatizing each other for being overweight and for how they choose to lose or not lose weight. “More importantly, I want us to stop shaming ourselves.”

The 70-year-old woman also said she quit the Weight Watchers board because she didn’t want a “perceived conflict of interest” for the TV show. She gave “all of my shares at Weight Watchers to the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.”

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When Winfrey saw herself on the cover of TV Guide’s “Best and Worst Dressed” in 1990, she felt bad because she was called “bumpy, lumpy, and downright dumpy.”

“I was ridiculed on every late-night talk show for 25 years, and tabloid covers for 25 years,” she shared.

Winfrey then read out loud a bunch of news stories about herself, such as “Oprah: Fatter than ever” and “Oprah warned, ‘diet or die’.”

Winfrey talked about her appearance on a talk show in 1988, where she walked in pulling a red wagon full of fat as a sign of how much weight she had lost. “To get rid of all the shame, I starved myself for almost five months and then wheeled out that wagon of fat that the internet will never let me forget,” she said.

“And after losing 67 pounds on a liquid diet, the next day, the very next day, I started to gain it back.” A lot of people have been through the shame of losing weight and feeling like they’re failing.

“There’s a spectrum of obesity,” said W. Scott. Butsch, Director of Obesity Medicine in the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic and one of the doctors who spoke on the show. It’s not just one disease; there are many types.

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“You don’t have to be strong-willed.”

The doctors who were on the show also talked about the possible side effects of weight-loss drugs and the risks and factors that someone should think about before taking them as part of a bigger, more comprehensive care plan.

“All these years, I thought that people who never had to diet were just stronger than me and had a lot of willpower,” Winfrey said.

“I see now that you guys weren’t even thinking about the food.” “The important thing I learned is that it’s not that you had the willpower; it’s that you weren’t crazy about it,” she said. During the show, Winfrey talked to both happy and unhappy patients. One of the happy patients was a 13-year-old girl who had bariatric surgery and was taking a weight-loss drug.

She also talked about how she quit the Weight Watchers board so that there would be “no perceived conflict of interest” during the special 60-minute show.

The TV star has been on the board since 2015, when she bought a $43 million (£34 million) stake in the company. She said she wouldn’t run for re-election at the shareholder meeting in May.

Winfrey told People magazine when she first said she was taking the weight-loss drug, “I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing.” In my lifetime, the fact that there is a medically approved prescription for keeping healthy and controlling my weight feels like a gift, a relief, and not something to hide behind.