#Oprah Says She’s Using a Medically Approved Prescription for Managing Her Weight After Years of “Yo-Yoing”

Oprah Winfrey says that she’s “released my own shame” about using a prescription weight loss drug after years of media scrutiny about her body and guilt about her “yo-yoing” weight.

The media mogul revealed she had added a weight loss drug to her existing “holistic approach” to diet and exercise in a new People cover story, published on Wednesday. The Color Purple producer — who recently spoke to The Hollywood Reporter for a December cover — revealed she began using it after she began rehabilitation following knee surgery in 2021.

Winfrey has been open about how the media’s fixation on her weight has played a role in her feelings of self-shaming and her search for solutions. The former daytime host and author told the magazine that weight fluctuations “occupied five decades of space in my brain, yo-yoing and feeling like, why can’t I just conquer this thing, believing willpower was my failing.”

“It was public sport to make fun of me for 25 years,” Winfrey said. “I have been blamed and shamed, and I blamed and shamed myself.”

But it wasn’t until after hosting Oprah Daily’s “The Life You Want Class: The State of Weight” panel, she says she began to question her long-standing beliefs about her own weight management. While speaking on the panel back in September, she pondered whether “we all just be more accepting of whatever body you choose to be in?”

“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,’” she continued.

It would be that very panel where she realized, “obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it’s about the brain.”

“I had the biggest aha along with many people in that audience,” she recalled to People. “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.”

Winfrey, who admitted she was “actually recommending [the drug] to people long before I was on it myself,” said she’s also “released my own shame about” taking the prescription, which she declined to name. She now uses it as she feels she needs 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 explained. “I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people, and particularly myself.”

Just days before her People cover, the media mogul denied that she had began off-label use of Ozempic, the prescription diabetes medication that many, including those in Hollywood, have begun turning to in order to slim down. Instead, she told Inside Edition that she had stuck to hard work, diet and exercise.

“You all know I’ve been on this journey for most of my life. My highest weight was 247 pounds,” she said. “I felt, I’ve got to do this on my own. I’ve got to do this on my own, cause if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.” 

In her People cover, Winfrey opened up about her approach to diet and exercise, including “hiking and setting new distance goals each week,” which began after her knee surgery. She worked her way up to hiking three to five miles every day, alongside “a 10-mile straight-up hike on weekends.” She’s also sticking to eating before 4 p.m., drinking a gallon of water a day and uses WeightWatchers points system.

“I felt stronger, more fit, and more alive than I’d felt in years,” she says about changing her habits following her surgery. “I had an awareness of [weight-loss] medications, but felt I had to prove I had the willpower to do it. I now no longer feel that way.”