Oprah Winfrey is becoming genuinely about her weight reduction venture, conceding that for “25 years, ridiculing my weight was a public game.”
Winfrey said all through the 1980s and ’90s, tabloids were spread with titles like “fatter than at any other time,” “hits 246 pounds,” “last standoff with Steadman sends her into taking care of craze” and “Oprah cautioned: diet or pass on.”
She said she even saw herself portrayed on a 1990 front of television Guide as “rough, knotty and tremendously dumpy” by design pundit Mr. Blackwell.
The 70-year-old said she once starved herself on a fluid eating routine “with an end goal to battle the disgrace” for almost five months in 1988 “and afterward rolled out that cart of fat [on her show] that the web won’t ever allow me to neglect and in the wake of shedding 67 pounds on a fluid eating routine, following day, you all , the exceptionally following day, I began to restore it.”
Winfrey was discussing her yo-yo dieting on “An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,” an ABC special discussing obesity drugs that aired this week.
She admitted late last year that she has been prescribed drugs to help manage her weight.
The former daytime host discussed the “disease of obesity” with experts during the show in which several guests were brought on to talk about their experiences with obesity and losing weight on medications like Ozempic and Wegovy.
Winfrey remembered how controversial alcoholism being considered a disease was when she first talked about it on her show, with critics saying things like: “Just put the bottle down” and “There’s no such thing as alcoholism being a disease.”
She said, “Now, of course, we know differently. Alcoholism is a disease for many people,” although, she said, “it’s not a disease for everyone who drinks too much.”
“Many people have the disease of obesity,” she continued. “Everybody who is overweight does not have the disease of obesity, but if you have the disease of obesity, you’re always going to go back to that set point.”
She said people who don’t have the disease are able to diet and exercise to lose weight “and all of the things that we’ve heard over the years.”
Winfrey added that it’s “wrong to be shaming people” when people don’t understand the complexity of the disease.
“When I tell you how many times I have blamed myself because you think I’m smart enough to figure this out and then to hear all along it’s you fighting your brain.”
She continued, “All these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower and they were for some reason stronger than me, and now I realize y’all weren’t even thinking about the food. It’s not that you had the willpower. You weren’t thinking about it. You weren’t obsessing about it. That is the big thing I learned.”
In December, she told People magazine that she uses medication as she needs it to keep her from yo-yo dieting.
“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 told the outlet. “I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”