Oprah Winfrey commented this week on the role she has played in perpetuating diet culture over the years during a recent live webcast.
The well-known presenter spoke to her followers in person and virtually last Thursday, May 9 at the Making The Shift: A New Way to Think About Weight (Making Change: A New Way of Thinking About Weight), about the arrival of a “turning point in the way we talk and think about our bodies.”
At the beginning of the broadcast, Winfrey took a moment to talk about her own role in “diet culture” over the years.
“I want to acknowledge that I have been a perennial participant in diet culture through my platforms, through the magazine, through the talk show for 25 years,” she said.
And he added: “I have contributed a lot to it. I can't tell you how many weight loss and makeover shows I've done. “They have been a staple since I have worked in television.”
Winfrey referred to a specific moment on her show The Oprah Winfrey Show, in 1988, when she rolled a car of grease onto the stage, calling it one of her “biggest regrets.”
“I sent the message that you should starve yourself on a liquid diet and set a standard for people who saw me that I, nor anyone else, could maintain,” he explained. “The next day, I started to gain the weight back. “Maya Angelou always said, ‘When you know better, you do better,’ so these conversations are for me an effort to do better.”
Winfrey added: “I am responsible for what I have done, and now I want to do better.”
After serving as a member of the board of directors of WW, the company formerly known as WeightWatchers, since 2015, he announced in February that he was leaving the board of directors and would not stand for re-election at the next shareholder meeting in May.
Over the decades, Winfrey has been honest about her healthincluding your experience with weight loss.
Five months after announcing she was joining the WeightWatchers board, Winfrey showed off a 26-pound weight loss in the April 2016 issue of O, where she shared the cover with nine women to celebrate her “better figure.”
In the issue, Winfrey said: “It was my idea to share the cover with other women who are on the same journey as me.”
“My own struggles with weights are well known,” he added. “I have never believed that I should hide them. What I do believe in: unity is strength.”
Winfrey is on the list of celebrities who take weight loss medications, including Ozempic and Mounjaro.
In December 2023, Winfrey revealed in an interview with People magazine that I had started taking a weight loss medicationalthough he did not confirm which one.
He explained at the time that he used it “because I felt like I needed it, as a tool to manage the weight ups and downs.”
“The fact that there is a medically approved prescription to control weight and stay healthier has been a relief in my life, a redemption, a gift, and not something I hide behind and for which I can once be ridiculed.” ”, he explained to the media.
Winfrey added: “I'm absolutely sick of others shaming me. and, in particular, that I do it to myself.”
