Oprah Winfrey's Weight Loss Journey: Everything She's Said About Her Health Routine
The entertainment icon has faced public scrutiny over her body throughout her career, a topic she frequently addressed during the 25-season run of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
'It was public sport to make fun of me for 25 years,' Winfrey told PEOPLE in 2023. 'I have been blamed and shamed, and I blamed and shamed myself.'
Winfrey debuted a new approach to weight loss in 2021, following a knee surgery that helped her reconnect with exercise, telling PEOPLE that she progressed from physical therapy to doing a '10-mile straight-up hike on weekends.'
The former TV host voiced her support for WeightWatchers in 2015, announcing that she had acquired a 10% stake in the company and attributed 26 lbs. of her weight loss to their points-based diet program.
Almost 10 years later, Winfrey stepped down from the WeightWatchers board, shortly after revealing she had begun using a doctor-prescribed GLP-1 medication to manage her weight, which she described as 'a relief.'
Here's everything Oprah Winfrey has shared about her weight loss journey over the years.
After an operation in 2021, Winfrey found a new approach to fitness. "After knee surgery, I started hiking and setting new distance goals each week. I could eventually hike three to five miles every day," she told PEOPLE in 2023. "I felt stronger, more fit and more alive than I'd felt in years."
On a segment celebrating Al Roker's 70th birthday on Today, Winfrey shared that the knee surgery came with a wake-up call.
'There is a sense of knowing that there isn't as much time left and I am at peace with that knowing,' she explained. 'There's a sense of urgency for me about living well.'
Part of Winfrey's desire to change her lifestyle came with a deeper sense of gratitude for movement, as she experienced increased pain with age.
'I had been becoming more and more debilitated to the point where it was hard to walk down even two steps just to get into the car,' she said.
Ultimately, though, the knee surgery kicked off a new era of movement and wellness for Winfrey, who said that, despite feeling intimidated by the surgery at first, she considered it 'the best thing' she'd done.
'I really felt like I've had a new opportunity to live inside my body in a way that I hadn't been able to for years because being overweight, and being overweight causing the knees to be even worse," Winfrey said.
Winfrey has opened up about her use of a weight-loss medication as part of her holistic wellness routine.
She began to rethink her approach to weight in July 2023, after hosting a recorded panel with medical experts on obesity and weight loss as part of Oprah Daily's The Life You Want series, titled The State of Weight.
"You all know I've been on this journey for most of my life," she told the audience. "My highest weight was 237 lbs. I don't know if there is another public person whose weight struggle has been exploited as much as mine over the years."
She said the panel helped her let go of the shame she'd long carried about her weight, opening the door to considering doctor-prescribed medication.
'I realized I'd been blaming myself all these years for being overweight,' Winfrey told PEOPLE. 'And I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control.' The Tony winner said the medication has helped her manage weight fluctuations. 'I now use it as I feel I need it—as a tool to avoid yo-yoing,' she explained.
Winfrey also shared that the medication, whose name she's chosen not to disclose, feels like a 'relief.'
"The fact that there's a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for," she said. "I'm absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself."
However, the Emmy winner also shared that the medication was not a 'magic bullet,' stressing that she had to work at her overall lifestyle to keep her results.
"It's not one thing, it's everything," she told PEOPLE. "I know everybody thought I was on it, but I worked so damn hard. I know that if I'm not also working out and vigilant about all the other things, it doesn't work for me."
Winfrey has shared her personal experiences with the social bias that comes with weighing more, saying she was treated poorly when she was over 200 lbs., especially when it came to shopping.
"It's that thing where people are like, 'Let me show you the gloves. Would you like to look at the handbags? Because we know that there's nothing in here for you,' " she said during The State of Weight. "There is a condescension. There is stigma.' "
The stigma didn't end in the store, either. Winfrey has shared that people have felt free to comment about her weight throughout her career since the very beginning, recalling her national television debut on The Tonight Show in 1985 when Joan Rivers urged her to lose weight.
Winfrey shared the demoralizing experience in her 2017 cookbook, Food, Health, and Happiness.
'Joan sat behind Johnny's big wooden desk, telling me that she didn't want to hear my excuses and that I shouldn't have let this happen," she wrote. "The audience laughed nervously as she wagged her flawlessly manicured finger at me, pointed out that I was still 'a single girl,' and challenged me to come back 15 pounds lighter next time she hosted. And the whole time I just sat there smiling breezily, wanting nothing more than to crawl under my chair."
The Oscar nominee told PEOPLE in 2023 that comments like these prompted internal shame, saying it took her a long time to realize she could be angry.
'I just accepted that as that's what it is, and I didn't feel angry. I felt sad. I felt hurt. I felt shame. But it didn't occur to me that I could even feel angry,' she said. 'I swallowed the shame, and I accepted that it was my fault.'
Winfrey hasn't shared a number for her weight loss, saying in a 2020 WeightWatchers Q&A that she's not trying to hit a target weight.
'I don't have a goal in mind, I'll know what it is when I get there,' she said.
However, Winfrey may have revealed one of her goals in a 2020 interview with PEOPLE, saying that her long-time partner, Stedman Graham, could now 'pick her up and carry her to the pool.'
At the time, the media mogul had revealed she had lost 26 lbs. through her diet with WeightWatchers.
'I would like him to pick me up and carry me to the pool,' she joked. 'I've lost enough weight, he can pick me up and carry me to the pool. I can straddle him without breaking his back.'
Winfrey also expressed a desire for people to be more accepting of others' bodies on her 2023 panel, The State of Weight.
"Shouldn't we all just be more accepting of whatever body you choose to be in? That should be your choice,' Winfrey said.
During her 2020 WeightWatchers Q&A, Oprah shared that she'd felt controlled by food, specifically potatoes, for decades.
'I have been controlled by potatoes for 40 years,' Winfrey said. 'Any kind of fried potato, baked potato, scalloped potato – oh my god.'
She joked that of all of her achievements as one of the most famous women in entertainment, eating only 10 crinkle cut potato chips in a sitting was her greatest accomplishment.
'Of all the accomplishments that made in the world, all the red carpets, and the awards and those things that I've done. The fact that I could close the bag and not take another chip – it's major for me," Winfrey said.
She had previously expressed her tendency to turn to food for comfort in her 2017 cookbook.
'So many of us just want to fill up on a large helping of unconditional love. When I was a girl, there wasn't always enough of that to go around. As an adult, though, I came to realize that even when people have the time and strength to care for you, the deepest care must ultimately come from your own self-acceptance, self-respect, and hard-earned truth,' Winfrey wrote.
Before stepping away from WeightWatchers in 2021 after revealing she was using weight-loss medication, Winfrey served as a board member, spokesperson and investor.
While she divested from the company, giving her shares to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in February 2024, she's still a supporter of the program and still uses the point system as the foundation of her diet.
"I eat my last meal at 4 o'clock, drink a gallon of water a day, and use the WeightWatchers principles of counting points,' she told PEOPLE in 2023.
Three years prior, at the start of her recent weight loss, Winfrey shared that she could see herself sticking to the diet for life.
'I don't feel like I'm on a diet that I'm ever going to go off of again,' she said during a call for WeightWatchers members. 'I feel like I'll be counting points for the rest of my life.'
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