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Earlier this year, she seemed to resist resorting to weight-loss drugs. As she pondered whether to use medication, Winfrey said, “I felt, ‘I’ve got to do this on my own. I’ve got to do this on my own.’ Because if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.”
Reader, she took it — and good for her and for her decision to go public about that choice. From a self-reported high of 237 pounds, she is a svelte, stunning 167, just seven pounds over her goal weight. “The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier … feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for,” Winfrey told People magazine.
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For all the social-media-driven craze over Ozempic and other weight-loss medications, for all the speculation about whether Kim Kardashian jabbed her way into a vintage Marilyn Monroe dress for last year’s Met Gala, this is a significant moment, and a welcome one, in the never-ending debate about obesity, responsibility and blame.
Follow this authorRuth Marcus's opinionsFollow
Because Winfrey is America’s national scale. Even as some of us — most of us — have struggled with weight in private, we have witnessed her excruciatingly public ups and downs with an unattractive blend of judgment, horror and schadenfreude. “It was public sport to make fun of me for 25 years,” she said. “I have been blamed and shamed, and I blamed and shamed myself."
A decade ago, the American Medical Association declared obesity a chronic disease requiring medical attention. But only since the recent recognition that Ozempic and other diabetes medications could be used for weight loss has the debate started to shift from seeing weight as a test of self-discipline and personal responsibility for poor choices to understanding it as a mixture of contributing factors: genetic predisposition, brain chemistry and environmental influences.
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“I realized I’d been blaming myself all these years for being overweight, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control,” said Winfrey, who turns 70 next month. “Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it’s about the brain.”
As someone who has struggled with weight throughout my adult life — never quite reaching the technical marker of obesity but rarely at a weight that felt comfortable or healthy — I get this. With the help of Ozempic, I’ve lost, and kept off, more than 40 pounds in the past two years. It took me months to get past Winfrey’s initial reaction — that relying on medication was “the easy way out” — and to be straightforward about my Ozempic use.
But it’s also important to recognize that the experience of individuals who are overweight or obese encompasses a spectrum of needs. We are only at the early stages of figuring out what role medication should play, for what populations, and how it can be made affordable for patients and insurers. To channel Oprah, a regime of “You get a jab!” and “You get a jab!” and “You get a jab!” isn’t economically sustainable.
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The experience of WeightWatchers, where Winfrey has an ownership stake and sits on the board, helps illustrate the new world that has been ushered in by the availability of this growing class of drugs, which include Ozempic and its weight-loss twin, Wegovy, and Mounjaro and its newly approved equivalent, Zepbound.
Recognizing the changed landscape, WeightWatchers has adopted the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-acquire-’em approach: It bought a telehealth company that connects patients with physicians who can prescribe weight-loss medication. (It might not be a coincidence that Winfrey’s disclosure came the day before WeightWatchers rolled out its new WeightWatchers Clinic service incorporating the new prescription program. WeightWatchers’ stock dropped 15 percent after her previous comments calling the drugs an “easy way out,” comments that Winfrey said were misconstrued. The stock rose more than 6 percent Thursday.)
WeightWatchers’ new, tech-savvy CEO, Sima Sistani, has apologized to members for its previous stance that willpower would suffice. “Unknowingly, we introduced the shame for people [for whom] diet and exercise were not enough,” Sistani said on the panel with Winfrey. “We want to be the first to say where we got it wrong.”
Advertisement
But how to get it right with the availability of these new medications? The Food and Drug Administration has said they are appropriate for patients with a body mass index of 30 or greater or a BMI of 27 plus a weight-related medical issue. BMI, though, is an imperfect measure of obesity. In many cases, it matters where your fat is located. Some ethnic groups tend to carry a higher fat mass than others; for them, even a lower BMI could be problematic.
And what of someone who is chronically 20 pounds overweight but doesn’t cross the established limits? Is she consigned to fruitless efforts at summoning the willpower to lose that weight and keep it off, while others are eligible for medical intervention? Does she have to gain more weight before being allowed access to the medication that will enable her to lose it? Where is the right place to draw the line? How to know?
There aren’t simple answers here. But Winfrey’s wise words — that the availability of this medication feels like “like redemption, like a gift” — offer a jumping-off point for some honest talk about how to handle this wonderful new opportunity that science has brought us.
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Oh-oh-oh-oh-Oprah!
Oh, yes. The world’s most famous yo-yo dieter has revealed: She, too, is on the drug known as Ozempic or one of its weight-loss cousins. Winfrey has liquid-dieted, losing 67 pounds only to gain most of it back. She has counted WeightWatchers points. She has lamented feeling “like a cow.” She has spent, she wrote in 2017, “literally years on more diets than I care to count,” and claimed she was done with dieting.
Earlier this year, she seemed to resist resorting to weight-loss drugs. As she pondered whether to use medication, Winfrey said, “I felt, ‘I’ve got to do this on my own. I’ve got to do this on my own.’ Because if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.”
Reader, she took it — and good for her and for her decision to go public about that choice. From a self-reported high of 237 pounds, she is a svelte, stunning 167, just seven pounds over her goal weight. “The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier … feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for,” Winfrey told People magazine.
For all the social-media-driven craze over Ozempic and other weight-loss medications, for all the speculation about whether Kim Kardashian jabbed her way into a vintage Marilyn Monroe dress for last year’s Met Gala, this is a significant moment, and a welcome one, in the never-ending debate about obesity, responsibility and blame.
Because Winfrey is America’s national scale. Even as some of us — most of us — have struggled with weight in private, we have witnessed her excruciatingly public ups and downs with an unattractive blend of judgment, horror and schadenfreude. “It was public sport to make fun of me for 25 years,” she said. “I have been blamed and shamed, and I blamed and shamed myself."
A decade ago, the American Medical Association declared obesity a chronic disease requiring medical attention. But only since the recent recognition that Ozempic and other diabetes medications could be used for weight loss has the debate started to shift from seeing weight as a test of self-discipline and personal responsibility for poor choices to understanding it as a mixture of contributing factors: genetic predisposition, brain chemistry and environmental influences.
“I realized I’d been blaming myself all these years for being overweight, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control,” said Winfrey, who turns 70 next month. “Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it’s about the brain.”
As someone who has struggled with weight throughout my adult life — never quite reaching the technical marker of obesity but rarely at a weight that felt comfortable or healthy — I get this. With the help of Ozempic, I’ve lost, and kept off, more than 40 pounds in the past two years. It took me months to get past Winfrey’s initial reaction — that relying on medication was “the easy way out” — and to be straightforward about my Ozempic use.
But it’s also important to recognize that the experience of individuals who are overweight or obese encompasses a spectrum of needs. We are only at the early stages of figuring out what role medication should play, for what populations, and how it can be made affordable for patients and insurers. To channel Oprah, a regime of “You get a jab!” and “You get a jab!” and “You get a jab!” isn’t economically sustainable.
The experience of WeightWatchers, where Winfrey has an ownership stake and sits on the board, helps illustrate the new world that has been ushered in by the availability of this growing class of drugs, which include Ozempic and its weight-loss twin, Wegovy, and Mounjaro and its newly approved equivalent, Zepbound.
Recognizing the changed landscape, WeightWatchers has adopted the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-acquire-’em approach: It bought a telehealth company that connects patients with physicians who can prescribe weight-loss medication. (It might not be a coincidence that Winfrey’s disclosure came the day before WeightWatchers rolled out its new WeightWatchers Clinic service incorporating the new prescription program. WeightWatchers’ stock dropped 15 percent after her previous comments calling the drugs an “easy way out,” comments that Winfrey said were misconstrued. The stock rose more than 6 percent Thursday.)
WeightWatchers’ new, tech-savvy CEO, Sima Sistani, has apologized to members for its previous stance that willpower would suffice. “Unknowingly, we introduced the shame for people [for whom] diet and exercise were not enough,” Sistani said on the panel with Winfrey. “We want to be the first to say where we got it wrong.”
But how to get it right with the availability of these new medications? The Food and Drug Administration has said they are appropriate for patients with a body mass index of 30 or greater or a BMI of 27 plus a weight-related medical issue. BMI, though, is an imperfect measure of obesity. In many cases, it matters where your fat is located. Some ethnic groups tend to carry a higher fat mass than others; for them, even a lower BMI could be problematic.
And what of someone who is chronically 20 pounds overweight but doesn’t cross the established limits? Is she consigned to fruitless efforts at summoning the willpower to lose that weight and keep it off, while others are eligible for medical intervention? Does she have to gain more weight before being allowed access to the medication that will enable her to lose it? Where is the right place to draw the line? How to know?
There aren’t simple answers here. But Winfrey’s wise words — that the availability of this medication feels like “like redemption, like a gift” — offer a jumping-off point for some honest talk about how to handle this wonderful new opportunity that science has brought us.
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