6 Lessons From Oprah’s TV Special on Weight Loss Drugs
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Oprah Winfrey has once again taken to the airwaves to talk about her experiences with weight loss, this time focusing on how medications like Wegovy and Zepbound can transform the lives of people with obesity.
During the hourlong ABC broadcast, An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution, the media mogul stressed how stigma shaped her struggles with weight and how medications changed not just her body size, but also her understanding of what causes obesity and what to do about it. She didn’t say which medication she takes, but the special did highlight newer injected weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound.
“In my entire life, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me who have struggled for years with being overweight or with obesity,” Winfrey said during the special, which is now available on Hulu.
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“So I come to this conversation in the hope that we can start releasing the stigma and the shame and the judgment … to stop shaming other people for being overweight or how they chose to lose and not lose weight,” Winfrey said. “And more importantly, to stop shaming ourselves.”
Here are some key takeaways from the special, including tips from Oprah and several medical experts who joined her for the conversation about weight loss.
It’s Time to Let Go of the Shame Surrounding Obesity
One message came through loud and clear: Shame doesn’t solve anything.
During the special, Winfrey recalled how she used to think about herself and her body, and how weight loss medications helped her move away from those negative thoughts.
“There is now a sense of hope, number one, and number two, you no longer blame yourself,” she said of her experience with weight loss drugs. “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.”
Crash Diets Don’t Really Help in the Long Run
In the past, Oprah said she thought about dieting and weight loss as an exercise in willpower.
She recalled that what was cast as a triumph over obesity earlier in her career — the day in the late 1980s when she wheeled out a wagon of fat on her talk show to represent her “wildly successful” weight loss efforts — happened because she “starved” herself for five months.
“After losing 67 pounds on a liquid diet, the next day, the very next day, I started to gain it back,” Winfrey said.
New Medications Can Silence ‘Food Noise’
There’s a name some people have for obsessive thoughts about what to eat: food noise. In a nutshell, food noise involves intrusive thoughts about eating that can contribute to disordered eating.
Oprah said that, looking back on her previous struggles with her weight, it’s possible food noise played a role. Medications helped quiet that noise, she said.
“For the people who think that this could be the relief and support and freedom that you’ve been looking for your whole life, bless you, because there’s space for all points of view,” she says of people who think medicines might help silence their own internal monologues about food.
Food Tracking Isn’t Always Enough to Achieve Long-Term Weight Loss
During the special, Winfrey, who left the board of WW (Weight Watchers) last month after a decade promoting the brand, said she invited Sima Sistani, the chief executive of WW International, to join her onstage to tackle a really tough topic: why some people succeed with weight loss and others don’t. Sistani described why WW now embraces weight loss medicines along with its long-standing support for lifestyle changes.
“We are the most clinically tested, evidence-based, science-backed behavior change program, but we were missing the third prong, which was biology,” Sistani said. “There could be somebody who needs medication because they have that biological underpinning, and what was so important is for us to provide that care and also to help people release the shame.”
Echoing Oprah’s message throughout the special, Sistani also acknowledged that dieting isn’t necessarily enough on its own for people to manage their weight.
“For all those people who came side-by-side and took on the behavior change, some of them walked away without the success,” Sistani said. “And to those people I want to say, it’s not your fault.”
Weight Management Isn’t One-Size-Fits All
Two physicians also joined Oprah for the special, W. Scott Butsch, MD, the director of obesity medicine at the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and Amanda Velazquez, MD, the director of obesity medicine at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. They both have financial ties to companies that make weight loss drugs, and they talked about how these medicines can address the biological underpinnings of obesity.
“There’s a spectrum of obesity; it’s not one disease, it’s many different subtypes of a disease,” Dr. Butsch says. Without recognizing this, it’s easier to believe the false idea that people with obesity made poor choices that failed to control their weight with good eating and exercise habits.
“This is just a reflection of someone’s uneducated belief that this is a self-inflicted condition, as if people who have obesity want to have obesity,” Butsch added. “That these are weaker people who have no willpower and who can’t cut it and people who are thin have willpower and can cut it.”
Losing Weight Is Absolutely Not About Willpower
After years of thinking that gaining and losing weight was a matter of willpower, Oprah now has a new perspective. And with that knowledge, she said she’s found a new way to combat the shame and stigma that can come from having obesity or taking weight loss medicines to treat this condition.
“All these years, I thought all the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower and they were for some reason stronger than me,” Winfrey said.
“But now I realize y’all weren’t even thinking about the food,” Oprah said. “It’s not that you had the willpower. You weren’t even thinking about it. You weren’t obsessing about it.”
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