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Oprah Ozempic.jpg

Oprah Admits She's On A Weight-Loss Drug (Oh, And She's Never Gone To Therapy)

By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | December 13, 2023 |

By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | December 13, 2023 |


Oprah Ozempic.jpg

If a celebrity loses a significant amount of weight, in this, the year of our Lord 2023, there will be cries of “Ozempic!” “Mounjaro!” “Wegovy!” That’s exactly what happened last week when Oprah showed up to the premiere of The Color Purple in this pretty purple dress that showed off her figure.

69-year-old Oprah has been open about her struggles with her weight since the ’80s. She went on an all-liquid diet and dropped 67 pounds in 1988. On her show, she wheeled out a little red wagon containing 67 pounds of animal fat, just to show her audience what she’d accomplished. Later, Oprah called the stunt “one of the biggest ego trips” of her life. She regained the weight as soon as she returned to “real food.”

Over the years, Oprah’s weight continued to fluctuate. I vividly remember a 2009 cover of O magazine featuring Oprah, then 200 pounds, standing beside a 2006 picture of herself at 160 pounds. The headline read: “How did I let this happen again?” At the time, I was totally obsessed with my own weight, and the first thing I Googled when I got home was “Oprah height.” You know. Just to compare her BMI to mine. She’s 5’6”, by the way.

This past July, Oprah hosted a panel called “The Life You Want Class: The State of Weight” alongside obesity specialists, a psychologist, and the CEO of WeightWatchers (Oprah’s a WW board member, shareholder, and former spokesperson). There, she admitted she’d contemplated trying weight-loss drugs, especially after getting double knee surgery. But she said that she felt like she needed to lose weight on her own: “Because if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.”

Cut to today. Oprah’s on the cover of this week’s PEOPLE, and she has something to say! She takes a weight-loss drug, okay? She says:

“I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing,” she says, opting not to name the specific drug she takes.

“The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for. I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”

Oprah says that she had an “a-ha moment” while hosting that panel in July:

“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.” She adds, “Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it’s about the brain.”

Oprah says that, after being “blamed and shamed” about her body for 25 years, she’s “released” her own shame. She goes on to explain that her recent 40-pound weight loss isn’t just the result of the weight-loss meds, it’s “everything”:

“I know everybody thought I was on it, but I worked so damn hard. I know that if I’m not also working out and vigilant about all the other things, it doesn’t work for me.”

She adds that she took the medication before Thanksgiving because she knew she was “going to have two solid weeks of eating”: “instead of gaining eight pounds like I did last year, I gained half a pound … It quiets the food noise.”

Even though Oprah says it’s “not about the number,” she notes that she’s 7 pounds away from her goal weight of 160. So, like, it’s a little bit about the number. Which is understandable; when your body changes, it’s hard not to get obsessed with the scale. That’s why I smashed mine with a hammer (a move that was very therapeutic in the moment, but, ultimately, solved nothing).

Here’s Oprah’s PEOPLE cover:

So, that’s the big Wednesday headline about Oprah. But I also wanna talk about the nugget Oprah dropped yesterday on The Drew Barrymore Show: she’s never been to therapy. Heh? The Queen of Daytime Talk Show Therapy never went to a shrink? Oprah dropped this scalding hot tea during her and Drew’s discussion about this 1990 interview:

Drew says that, looking back, Oprah had “so much wisdom”. But Oprah disagrees. She says that she didn’t yet have “the wisdom,” but she did “pay attention and I did listen to the audience and I did feel like I was the representative for all of you.” Then, she reveals:

“I never have been to therapy. But I had all my therapy on the show, in front of everybody. You know, when I first started in 1986 with the national show, nobody was going to therapy. Even speaking about therapy on television was taboo. And now everybody has gone to therapy.

So I did my therapy in front of, exposed to, everyone at a time when people were still just adjusting their own consciousness to the idea of accepting somebody else being able to counsel you about your life… to help them see things differently.”

I don’t really think you can have therapy in front of millions of people, because, um, you’re putting on a show. You can’t be your true, disgusting, asshole self. But, obviously, Oprah isn’t a normal person. She’s a goddamn billionaire. Here’s the clip:

By the way, Drew got shit online for holding Oprah’s hands and caressing her arm during their interview. Some people thought it was too touchy-feely and Drew was crossing a physical boundary.

Later, TMZ caught up with Oprah on the street and asked her about this “controversy” (snort). Oprah told them Drew didn’t make her uncomfortable at all, and she was “actually comforted by the stroking of the arm.” In fact, she went home and told Stedman that he needed to start stroking her arm. Great, now Stedman has a new chore. Thanks a lot, Drew!