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Oprah Winfrey took trendy weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy to task during an enlightening panel discussion. “Shouldn’t we all just be more accepting of whatever body you choose to be in? That should be your choice,” she said during Oprah Daily’s “The Life You Want Class: The State of Weight” panel discussion recently. “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,’” she continued, via PEOPLE. “Because if I take the drug, that’s the easy way out.”
Oprah reportedly noted that she was systematically “shamed in the tabloids every week about for 25 years” for “not having the willpower” to lose weight quickly and dramatically. “You all know I’ve been on this journey for most of my life,” she said elsewhere in the conversation, per TODAY. “My highest weight was 237 pounds. I don’t know if there is another public person whose weight struggle has been exploited as much as mine over the years. So I am ready for this conversation.”
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Psychologist Dr. Rachel Goldman, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford and Dr. Melanie Jay, joined the media magnate for the discussion, as well. Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford said she never uses the term “willpower” with her patients. “It’s hard to see you ostracized in the way that you’ve been,” she said of obesity. “Because this isn’t about willpower. It’s not your fault It’s how our bodies regulate weight and each of us is different, each of us is unique, not one is superior to another. We’re just different and acting on those differences and treating the differences in the heterogeneity of the population is how we’re going to actually make change in this disease.” She added that “obesity is a chronic disease.”
Oprah brought it all full circle with hope for better attitudes towards weight and individual weight loss journeys. “It should be yours to own and not to be shamed about it,” she said. “As a person who’s been shamed for so many years, I’m just sick of it. I’m just sick of it. I’m just sick of it. And I hope this conversation begins the un-shaming.”
