Oprah Winfrey is opening up about her experience using weight-loss drugs. The media mogul is sharing some of the realizations she has found after being under an undisclosed GLP-1, which is a type 2 diabetes medication that results in weight loss.
The billionaire is talking about the truth she discovered about "thin people" after having almost reached her goal weight of 160 pounds. "One of the things that I realized the very first time I took a GLP-1 was that all these years I thought that thin people had more willpower,' Winfrey confessed during a conversation with Dr. Ania Jastreboff on her podcast.
"They ate better foods. They were able to stick to it longer. They never had a potato chip," she continued, explaining that it was not willpower but the absence of intrusive hunger thoughts.
"They're eating when they're hungry and they're stopping when they're full," she said. "I realized the very first time I took the GLP-1 that, they're not even thinking about it," Oprah said, adding that it is a different way of thinking when people struggle with obesity.
The former television host shared a vulnerable moment during her career, after feeling "publicly humiliated" for her weight. "Every week [I was] exploited by the tabloids, anytime any comedian wanted to make fun or make a joke about it, they would make a joke about it. And I accepted it because I thought I deserved it," she explained.
Now Oprah says she is done with the shaming after incorporating exercise into her diet and going through a transformation. "I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing," she said to People about the weight-loss drug.
"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."