Oprah Winfrey Opens Up About Trying to 'Beat' GLP-1 Drugs by Quitting, Weight and Her Relationship

Now, the one-time queen of daytime television has co-written a new book on obesity and shared the key understanding that she only achieved in recent years that's completely changed her perspective on weight and her own body.

It turns out, it's not always about how hard you're working. "I thought it was about discipline and willpower. But I stopped blaming myself," Winfrey said in a new interview with People.

She explained that the "aha moment" for her came in July 2023 while she was taping a show about obesity. "I came to understand that overeating doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating," she said. "And that’s the most mind-blowing, freeing thing I’ve experienced as an adult."

After admitting that she had begun taking GLP-1 weight loss medications to manage her health back in 2023, though, Winfrey said that she still "tried to beat the medication" and prove to herself that she could manage her weight on her own.

Basically, she explained, she still felt this compulsion to prove to herself and the world she could keep the weight she'd just lost off all on her own. And so, six months after starting, she quit taking the drugs "cold turkey" on her 70th birthday in January 2024, while maintaining her strict dietary discipline and exercise regimen.

"Everybody was saying if you get off the medication, you’re going to immediately put the weight back on," Winfrey said, but she was determined to prove them wrong. She almost did, in that she didn't put it back on "immediately." But over the next 12 months, she said she did put on 20 pounds.

So she learned of the weight loss drugs, "It's going to be a lifetime thing," comparing it to other medications people have to take to manage their bodies. "I'm on high blood pressure medication, and if I go off the high blood pressure medication, my blood pressure is going to go up. The same thing is true now, I realize, with these medications. I’ve proven to myself I need it."

That's another mental shift that flies in the face of the notion that obesity is a matter of choice that anyone can beat with enough discipline and hard work. Winfrey's co-author on their new book, Enough: Your Health, Your Weight and What It's Like to Be Free, is Dr. Ania M. Jastreboff of the Yale Obesity Research, and she believes that genetics and environment help to create a unique "Enough Point" for every person.

This is the weight that each person's body seeks to settle at, regardless if that is the body weight you might want, Winfrey explained. She said that her "Enough Point" has turned out to be 211 pounds, but emphasized, "I was not healthy at 211."

"A lot of people tell me they can be overweight and healthy. I was not," she explained. "I was pre-diabetic, and my cholesterol numbers were high."

That's why she's realized that, like with blood pressure, she is a person who needs medication to maintain a healthier weight. And with that realization, she said, came "no more shame" about her struggles with managing her weight throughout her life.

"If you have obesity in your gene pool, I want people to know it’s not your fault," Winfrey emphasized in the new interview. "And people need to stop blaming other people."

"Don't say, 'Why don't you just work out more and eat less?' That is not the answer," she asserted. "I want people to have the information, whatever you choose to do with it, whether you get the medications, or whether you want to keep dieting. That's the lesson I learned: I stopped blaming myself."

In the book, Winfrey opens up about her lifetime of struggle with her weight, including how it has had absolutely no impact on her long relationship with her partner, Stedman Graham, over the past four decades.

"He has absolutely been nothing but supportive through all of it," she told People, reminding the outlet that she was 200 pounds when they met, "and it's never made one iota of a difference."

But while Graham has been steadfast in his commitment to Winfrey at any size, she's actually struggled with feeling worthy of his support and presence. She recalled her biggest moment of self-doubt in their relationship coming in the early years when they went to a boxing match featuring Mike Tyson in 1988.

"I remember the announcer saying Mike Tyson's weight: 218 lbs," Winfrey recalled, adding that she thought to herself, "Wow, Here's this handsome guy sitting with somebody who weighs as much as the heavyweight champion of the world."

In her book, per People, she wrote, "In that moment, I felt sorry for Stedman."

Again, when she was at her heaviest and attending the Daytime Emmy Awards in 1992 at 237 pounds, she said she struggled to find clothing that fit well and found herself struggling as well with feeling her worth.

"I was confident that we should win Best Talk Show and Best Talk Show host, but I just didn't want to be in that overweight body," she admitted, adding that when she did win and was walking on the stage, her euphoria was overshadowed by embarrassment "that people were going to be looking at me from behind."

Now, with the aid of the GLP-1 injections she takes once a week, her entire mental outlook about her body, weight, and food has shifted to a healthier place. "I've seen all of my relationships improve because the energy and presence and vitality and clarity that I bring to them is so different," she told People. "I just feel like I have more to give to everybody."

As for her relationship with her body and food, Winfrey happily said that she's satisfied after she eats, adding, "I'm not constantly punishing myself. I hardly recognize the woman I've become. But she's a happy woman."

Enough: Your Health, Your Weight and What It's Like to Be Free is set for release on January 13.