After decades of weight loss and gain in the spotlight, Oprah Winfrey says that prescription weight-loss medication has helped her maintain a healthier lifestyle.
Winfrey revealed that she takes a weight-loss medication in a new conversation with People, telling the outlet, “I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing.”
“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,” she continued. “I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”
Winfrey had previously said that she'd considered taking a weight-loss medication but decided not to. She revealed in September, “Even when I first started hearing about the weight-loss drugs, at the same time I was going through knee surgery, and I felt, ‘I've got to do this on my own.’ Because if I take the drug, that's the easy way out.”
In the new interview she explained why her attitude changed, and it came down to understanding weight as a result of predisposition, not willpower. Around the same time that she revealed she wasn't on medication, she spoke to experts about its uses, and said, “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…. Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower—it's about the brain.”
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Winfrey added that her health journey, which began after a knee surgery in 2021, includes far more than medication. She monitors her food intake and hikes regularly, and without those lifestyle changes, she says, the medication alone would not be effective. “I know everybody thought I was on it, but I worked so damn hard,” she said. “I know that if I’m not also working out and vigilant about all the other things, it doesn’t work for me.”
