Oprah Winfrey reveals ‘hurt’ about being ashamed of her body and how she felt ‘sad that it was a public sport to make fun of me’… after taking weight loss medication

Oprah Winfrey has opened up about the immense pain she felt after being body-shamed for decades.

The 69-year-old star, who rose to fame for her daytime talk show, was one of television’s rounder personalities.

And haters who always made fun of her were bigger, even though she carried her weight well and shaped herself perfectly to show off her curves.

Now she tells People she is acutely aware that she was being shamed all this time and that she had to deal with it. “It was a public sport for 25 years to make fun of me,” she told the publication.

And only recently did she realize that she had been blaming herself for her obesity all these years.

This comes after she finally admitted to using weight loss drugs for her dramatic body transformation – after previously denying she would ever use Ozempic or similar drugs to lose weight.

“The things that were said about me, said to me, around me, the jokes that were made. There was no way you could get away with it today,” the star said.

“I was on the cover of a magazine and it said: Dumpy, Frumpy and Downright Lumpy,” Winfrey said of a cruel headline she wrote early in her career.

‘I just accepted it as it is, and I didn’t get angry. I felt sad. I felt hurt. I felt shame. But it didn’t occur to me that I could even get angry.

‘I swallowed the shame and accepted that it was my fault.’

She changed the way she viewed shame in July Oprah Daily’s Life You Want series.

“I had the biggest aha, along with a lot of people in that audience,” she said.

“I realized that I had been blaming myself for being overweight all these years, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower can control.”

She then said: ‘Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower, it’s about brains.’

Winfrey said she had looked into obesity, talked to a doctor and taken medication.

Only then did she ‘let go of my own shame about it’.

“I now use it as I feel I need to, as a tool to keep me from yo-yoing,” she said.

“The fact that there is a medically approved prescription to maintain weight and stay healthier in my lifetime feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and be ridiculed for again.

“I’m done with shaming other people and especially myself.”

It comes after Winfrey said during a conversation with WeightWatchers CEO Sima Sistani that she would not use Ozempic and similar drugs in the weight loss drug class because she viewed them as an “easy way out.”

The star revealed that she took the medication before Thanksgiving because she knew she would have “two solid weeks of eating,” and credits the medication with helping her gain only half a pound instead of eight pounds, and adds that it “calms the food noise.”

Winfrey said she is now seven pounds away from her goal weight of 160 pounds, but said, “It’s not about the number.”

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 WeightWatchers principles of counting points, 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 was aware of it [weight-loss] medication, but felt I had to prove I had the willpower to do it. I don’t have that feeling anymore.’

Winfrey said she was encouraged to use medical weight-loss medications after July’s recorded panel discussion with weight-loss experts and doctors — which led to her “biggest aha moment.” The conversation was posted online in September, and Winfrey adamantly denied ever taking weight-loss medications.

She said: ‘I realized that I had been blaming myself for being overweight all these years, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower can control. Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower, it’s about brains.

During the discussion, the experts emphasized that obesity is a metabolic disease in which some bodies are “more prone to storing more fat” – also called adipose tissue.

‘One of the things I was so ashamed of, and even when I first heard about the weight-loss drugs, I was having knee surgery at the same time and I thought, ‘I have to do this on my own.’ own, because if I take the medicine, that’s the easy way out.”

‘There is a part of me that feels – as I think a lot of people feel about bariatric surgery – that I have to do it the hard way, that I have to keep climbing the mountains, that I have to keep suffering and I have to do that, for otherwise I have deceived myself somehow.”

She concluded, “As a person who has been disgraced for so many years [about my weight]I’m just sick of it.’