These days, it’s more common than ever to hear about celebrities trying GLP-1 treatments like Ozempic. But television personality, actress, producer, and author Oprah Winfrey’s drug experience was revolutionary for the industry. Recently, Oprah shared her first experience taking a viral weight loss drug on her podcast. She sat down with Dr. Ania Jastrebov, an endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine at Yale University, to discuss drugs such as Ozempic, Wigovy, Munjaro, and Zepbound.
Oprah talks about her GLP-1 experience: “I thought thinner people had more willpower.”
Winfrey’s first GLP-1 challenge challenged her beliefs about people who don’t suffer from obesity. During the chat, she reassured fans that she also believes that people who don’t suffer from obesity “only eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full.” But she learned her body wasn’t an outlier, just experiencing what people in the comments called a “mental game changer” of learning the difference between hunger cues and stress cues. Afterwards, she relaxed.
The pair explained that the environment that favors obesity confuses the need to nourish the body with stress eating. Winfrey admits that while she doesn’t really enjoy fast food, she does enjoy snacking like everyone else. “I eat a lot of potato chips,” Starr says. For most of her life, Winfrey’s stressed-out body craved all sorts of salty relief, but her experience with GLP-1 medication changed the way she looked at eating as a whole. The weight loss pill, which Winfrey originally called “the easy way out” on her podcast, teaches her body what it’s like to eat when it’s hungry, rather than when it’s stressed. It was given to me. It fundamentally changed the way she thought about diet, weight loss, and GLP-1 drugs.