Since hitting The Color Purple red carpet a week ago, tongues have been wagging about Oprah Winfrey's svelte appearance. In a People cover story that's out Wednesday, the magazine describes her current frame as the culmination of "steady weight loss over the last two years" that was kick-started by knee surgery in 2021. After the procedure, "I started hiking and setting new distance goals each week. I could eventually hike three to five miles every day and a 10-mile straight-up hike on weekends. I felt stronger, more fit and more alive than I'd felt in years." Exercise is just one part of the equation, which the 69-year-old also confirmed involves a weight-loss drug that she declined to name.
"I eat my last meal at 4 o'clock, drink a gallon of water a day, and use the WeightWatchers principles of counting points," Winfrey says, explaining that while she was aware of the buzz around new weight-loss drugs, she felt she "had to prove I had the willpower to do it. I now no longer feel that way." She dates the mental change to July, when she hosted a panel of weight loss experts and clinicians and had an "aha" moment. "I realized I'd been blaming myself all these years for being overweight, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control. ... Obesity is a disease. It's not about willpower—it's about the brain."
That realization allowed her to stop feeling any shame and seek a prescription from her doctor. "I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing." By way of example, she says she took it prior to Thanksgiving "because I knew I was going to have two solid weeks of eating. Instead of gaining eight pounds like I did last year, I gained half a pound ... It quiets the food noise." She says "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. I'm absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself." (Read the full interview here.)
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