Oprah Winfrey, 70, tears up as she reveals the moment that completely changed her weight loss journey

Oprah Winfrey has opened up about her emotional weight loss journey and the one moment that completely changed her perspective: She wiped away a tear as she admitted she had been taking medication to maintain a trim figure.

The 70-year-old talk show host was a guest on Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast, where she talked with tears in her eyes about the battle she has been fighting with her body for most of her life and the moment she realized that she was had no control over.

“I thought, it’s not even my fault – all those years, all those diets, all those times I tried, I came back and I tried again and I lost.” I’m climbing the mountain that’s bothering me, I’m hungry,” she described, wiping away a tear.

“It’s not my fault,” said Oprah, who has previously admitted to using weight-loss drugs. “That was the moment and that was 2023.”

Oprah has never shied away from publicly sharing her weight loss journey, recalling the moment her perspective completely changed when a doctor told her that obesity was a disease – and that her struggle to lose weight was not her fault or lack of control. willpower was.

“I’ve done hundreds of shows about weight loss and I can’t even tell you how many conversations about it, but I still carry my own shame,” she admitted.

“I had a big epiphany about that state of weight on Oprah Daily [in 2023] when [I had] doctor after doctor said obesity is a disease – and I thought, “I didn’t get that memo.”

She said learning to reframe weight gain as a disease, and not as loss of willpower, changed everything.

‘What I understood about the state of weight [discussion] “What I hadn’t understood over the past 48 years of battling my weight is that there’s something in the brain that allows people – like me – to metabolize fat differently than other people,” she explained.

“No matter what I do, I always go back to the set point that my brain thinks should support the weight.”

She described the extremes to which she tried to lose weight – citing her infamous 1988 segment where she paraded around a cart full of 67 pounds of fat – and admitted that she hadn’t eaten that much ‘piece’ of food for five months with the help of of Optifast and the weight came back afterwards.

‘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 later, Oprah said she had gained more than 10 pounds, and she was so ashamed that she didn’t even go to holiday parties for fear of being seen.

“I wasn’t going to go because I thought I was too fat to go,” she bluntly recalled.

‘I was gone from 145 [pounds] on the day of the show and I think in the course of a week and a half I was 157 – and the shame started again,” the author agonized.

She also candidly revealed another heartbreaking moment when she landed at the bottom of TV Guide’s worst-dressed list, also on the cover with the headline: ‘Bumpy, lumpy and downright dumpy.’

“I was so proud of myself because I had won the Bob Hope Award and they took the picture of that and it was ‘bumpy, lumpy and downright dumpy’ and it was on the cover of all the magazines,” she remembers.

Devastatingly, Oprah admitted she had become used to people using her weight as a punchline.

“I’ve accepted that people label me as fat and overweight, that I can’t control my willpower and have no willpower at all,” Oprah recalls.

‘For 25 years, every week there was some tabloid article or my weight being taken advantage of in some way. Making fun of my weight was a national sport for 25 years,” she continued somberly.

“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.’

However, when she turned 70, Oprah made the decision not to bear the burden of everyone making fun of her weight for the next decade.

She also talked about the enormous pressure put on her not to use diet pills in the past and to prove she was losing weight through diet and exercise.

‘I was judgmental [about people using weight loss drugs] because that’s how I’ve been judged,” the TV mogul admitted.

Oprah admitted that she now takes medication to maintain her weight, but would not reveal which ones. She added that taking medication to aid her weight loss has made her feel “liberated.”

“The bottom line is we don’t know what the drugs do in the long term, but we do know what obesity does in the long term,” she emphasized.

She continued, “Yeah, so the damage to your body versus taking the risk of ‘I’m going to control the weight [and] manage the weight as best I can.”

‘If I didn’t have to use it, I wouldn’t, but I feel a sense of liberation from it. I feel a sense of relief knowing that feeling I felt as I sat there, [eight] “I’m pounds heavier than I was a month before I knew I don’t know what I’m going to do because I can’t walk higher, I can’t run faster,” she noted.

In An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, the 70-year-old fought back tears as she revealed how the medication had meant she was no longer “constantly thinking about what the next meal was going to be.”

Along with online messages of support, some viewers have criticized Oprah, accusing her of “promoting big pharmaceutical companies and pushing Ozempic,” and criticizing her for taking the drugs after nine years of promoting Weight Watchers.

The show was released days after Oprah left her role on the Weight Watchers board, citing a potential “conflict of interest” with the show, which featured weight loss brands heavily.

The talk show presenter weighed 107.5 kg at her heaviest, she previously revealed.

She said undergoing knee surgery in 2021 started a journey for her to improve her health and live a “more vital and vibrant life.”

The broadcast icon said she now eats her last meal at 4pm, drinks a liter of water a day and uses the Weight Watchers principles of point counting, along with regular walks.

She added that her fitness and health routine are integral to maintaining her weight loss, saying, “It’s everything. I know everyone thought I was working on it, but I worked so damn hard. I know that if I don’t also train and be vigilant about everything else, it won’t work for me.”

She said, ‘I had a sense of [weight-loss] medication, but felt I had to prove I had the willpower to do it. I don’t have that feeling anymore.’

In the documentary, Oprah will also interview people who have used popular weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as professionals with experience in the field.