Oprah Winfrey once again took to the airwaves to talk about her weight loss experiences, this time focusing on how medications like Wegovy and Zepbound can change the lives of people with obesity.
During the hour-long ABC broadcast, An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss RevolutionThe media mogul highlighted how stigma has shaped her struggle with weight and how medications have changed not only her body size but also her understanding of what causes obesity and what to do about it. He didn’t say what medication he was taking, but the special highlighted new injectable weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.
“I never thought in my life that we would be talking about medicines that bring hope to people like me who have struggled with overweight or obesity for years,” Winfrey said during the special, which is now available on Hulu.
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“So I came to this conversation with the hope that we can start to remove the stigma, the shame, the judgment, to stop shaming other people for being overweight or how they choose to lose weight or not,” Winfrey said. “And more importantly, stop shaming ourselves.”
Here are some key takeaways from the special, including tips from Oprah and several medical experts who joined the conversation on weight loss.
It’s Time to Get Rid of the Shame Surrounding Obesity
One message was heard loud and clear: Shame doesn’t solve anything.
During the special, Winfrey recalled how she thought about herself and her body and how weight-loss medications helped her distract from those negative thoughts.
“There’s a sense of hope now, number one, and number two, you don’t blame yourself anymore,” he said of his experience with weight-loss drugs. “How many times do I tell you that I blame myself and you think, ‘I’m smart enough to figure this out,’ and then you hear that it was you who was fighting your brain all along?”
Crash Diets Don’t Really Help in the Long Term
In the past, Oprah has said that she thinks of dieting and losing weight as an exercise of willpower.
He recalled that what was portrayed as a victory against obesity early in his career—the day he pulled out a carload of fat on his talk show to represent his “wildly successful” weight-loss efforts in the late 1980s—came because he was “starving.” himself for five months.
“After losing 67 pounds on a liquid diet, the next day, the very next day, I started gaining it back,” Winfrey said.
New Drugs Could Silence ‘Food Noise’
Some people have a name for obsessive thoughts about what to eat: food noise. In summary, food noise involves intrusive thoughts about eating that may contribute to an eating disorder.
Oprah said food noise may have played a role, given her previous struggles with her weight. Medications help quiet that noise, he said.
For people who think medications can help with silence, “bless you for people who think this might be the relief, support, and freedom you’ve been looking for your whole life, because there’s room for all kinds of points of view,” says her inner monologues about food.
Food Tracking Isn’t Always Enough for Long-Term Weight Loss
During the special, Winfrey, who left the WW (Weight Watchers) board last month after a decade promoting the brand, said she invited Sima Sistani, WW International’s chief executive, to the stage to address a truly thorny issue: why? Some people are successful in losing weight, some are not. Sistani talked about why WW is now embracing weight-loss medications and his long-standing support for lifestyle changes.
“We are the most clinically tested, evidence-based, science-based behavior change program, but we were missing the third prong, the biology,” Sistani said. “Because it’s biologically based, there may be someone who needs medication, and for us it was important to provide that care and also help people get rid of the embarrassment.”
Reiterating Oprah’s message throughout the special, Sistani also acknowledged that dieting alone is not enough for people to keep their weight under control.
“Some of the people who came together and undertook the change of behavior left without success,” Sistani said. “And what I want to say to those people is, it’s not your fault.”
Weight Management Is Not One Size Fits All
Oprah was joined by two doctors for the special: W. Scott Butsch, MD, director of obesity medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Bariatric and Metabolic Institute in Ohio, and Amanda Velazquez, MD, director of obesity medicine at Cedars-Sinai. Los Angeles. Both have financial ties to companies that produce weight-loss drugs and have talked about how these drugs could unravel the biological underpinnings of obesity.
“Obesity has a wide spectrum; “This is not one disease, but many different subtypes of one disease,” says Dr. Butsch. Without realizing this, it’s easier to believe the false idea that people with obesity are making poor choices that fail to control their weight with good eating and exercise habits.
“This is a reflection of someone’s uneducated belief that this is a self-inflicted condition, as if people with obesity want to have obesity,” Butsch added. “These are weaker people who have no will and cannot cut it, and the weaker ones have will and can cut it.”
Losing Weight Is Definitely Not About Willpower
Oprah, who has thought for years that gaining and losing weight is a matter of willpower, now has a new perspective. And with that knowledge, he said, he found a new way to combat the shame and stigma that can come with having obesity or taking weight-loss medications to treat the condition.
“All these years, I thought people who never had to diet were just using willpower and were stronger than me for some reason,” Winfrey said.
“But now I realize you all aren’t thinking about food,” Oprah said. “It’s not like you have willpower. You weren’t even thinking about it. You weren’t obsessed about it.