Oprah Winfrey weight loss book details personal obesity journey struggle

Oprah Winfrey opens up about her weight loss journey.

During a recent interview with People magazine, the 71-year-old television personality opened up about her new book, “Enough,” which she co-wrote with obesity expert Dr. Ania M. Jastreboff, which details her journey with obesity, saying “I feel more alive and vibrant than ever.”

“I feel like I have more to give to everyone. I’m just more open to everyone,” she said. “I was a huge tequila fan. I literally drank 17 shots one night…I haven’t had a drink in years. The fact that I don’t even want it anymore is pretty amazing.”

The former talk show host began taking GLP-1 weight loss medication more than two years ago, when she realized her lifelong struggle with her weight was due to obesity, a word she previously “avoided.”

Winfrey shared that she drank 17 shots in one night. (Lanna Apisukh/WWD via Getty Images)

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Her epiphany came in 2023 when she hosted a special featuring experts on obesity, saying that filming the special helped her realize that “eating too much doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating”, calling the moment “the most mind-blowing and freeing thing I’ve experienced as an adult”.

“If you have obesity in your genetic makeup, I want people to know that it’s not your fault,” Winfrey said. “I want people to stop blaming themselves for genes and an environment that you can’t control. I want people to have the information, whatever you choose to do with it, whether you take the medication or want to continue dieting.”

After starting GLP-1 treatment, Winfrey feels like “everything is calmer and stronger” by helping her “deal with the messages that are being sent to your brain about overeating.”

Without the constant messages about food, the “A Wrinkle in Time” star said she’s been given “a quiet strength that comes with everything I do.”

Winfrey said the medication calmed the constant overeating messages she was getting from her brain. (Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images)

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Winfrey discussed her struggles to lose weight and the media’s obsession with her size during a March 2024 ABC special, titled “An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution.”

During the special, she admitted that she once starved herself on a liquid diet “in an effort to combat shame” for nearly five months in 1988 “and then pulled out that fat cart.” [on her show] that the internet will never let me forget and after losing 67 pounds on a liquid diet, the next day, y’all, the very next day, I started putting it back on.”

She then added that it’s “wrong to shame people” with obesity if we don’t fight the problem, because it’s hard to truly understand what the person is facing.

“All these years I thought that all the people who had never been on a diet were just using their willpower and that they were, for some reason, stronger than me, and now I realize that you weren’t even thinking about food. It’s not that you had the willpower. You weren’t thinking about it. You weren’t obsessing about it. That’s the big thing I learned.”

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Winfrey shared that she started taking GLP-1 in December 2023. (Gail Schulman/CBS via Getty Images)

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Winfrey told People in December 2023 that she began taking weight-loss medications.