Oprah Winfrey has revealed the emotional details of her weight loss journey on Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast, admitting she has used medication to maintain her figure. Tearing up, Winfrey, 70, discussed her lifelong struggle with body image and the moment she understood it was beyond her control.
“I was like whoa it’s not even my fault – all these years, all those diets, all those times I tried, I came back and I tried again and I lost it. I’m climbing up the mountain I’m suffering, I’m starving,” she described, wiping away a tear.
“I’m not my fault,” Winfrey, who has previously admitted to using weight loss drugs, simply said. “That was the moment and that was 2023.”
Winfrey recounted a pivotal moment when a doctor informed her that obesity is a disease, as reported by Daily Mail. This revelation shifted her perspective, helping her understand that her struggle to lose weight was not due to a lack of willpower.
“I’ve done hundreds of shows about weight loss and had I can’t even tell you how many conversations about it but still carry my own shame,” she admitted. “I had a big revelation on that State of Weight on Oprah Daily [in 2023] when [I had] one doctor after another doctor saying obesity is a disease – and I was like ‘I didn’t get that memo.'”
“What I understood from the State of Weight [discussion] that I had not understood for the past 48 years of battling my weight, is that there’s something in the brain that allows people – like myself – to metabolize fat differently than other people,” she explained.
“No matter what I do I’m always going to go back to the set point that my brain thinks it needs to hold the weight.”
She recounted the extreme measures she took to lose weight, including a 1988 segment where she displayed a cart with 67 pounds of fat after using Optifast and not eating so much of a “morsel” of food for five months. She admitted that the weight returned afterward.
“Three days [after the show] I was five pounds heavier and a week later I was 10 pounds heavier,” she recalled.
Just two and a half weeks after her weight loss, Winfrey revealed she gained over 10 pounds. Embarrassed by the rapid weight gain, she avoided holiday parties to avoid being seen.
“I wouldn’t go because I thought I was too fat to go,” she bluntly recalled. “I’d gone from 145 [pounds] on the day of the show and I think I was 157 in the course of like a week and a half or two – and the shame started again,” the author anguished.
She candidly shared a heartbreaking moment when she landed at the bottom of a worst-dressed list in TV Guide, appearing on the cover with a headline highlighting her fashion misstep reading: “Bumpy, lumpy and downright dumpy.”
“I was so proud of myself because I’d won the Bob Hope Award and they took the picture from that and it was ‘bumpy, lumpy and downright dumpy’ and it was on the cover of all the magazines,” she recalled.
She admitted that she became accustomed to people using her weight as a punch line. “I accepted that this thing that people have labeled me with: being fat, being overweight, being unable to control my willpower, not having any willpower,” Winfrey recalled.
“For 25 years, every single week in one form or another there was a tabloid story or some exploitation of my weight – making fun of my weight was national sport for 25 years,” she continued morosely.
“Comedians did it. The best comedians did it, the highest comedians did it – people with their shows did it. It was just accepted that you could make fun of me and my weight.”
Upon turning 70, Winfrey decided to no longer carry the burden of others making fun of her weight into the next decade. She also discussed the enormous pressure she faced to avoid weight loss drugs and to prove she could lose weight through diet and exercise.
“I was judgmental [about people using weight loss drugs] because I have been so judged,” the TV mogul admitted.
