Oprah Reveals She Stopped Using GLP-1s for 12 Months — and Shares Exactly What Happened (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• In 2023, Oprah Winfrey revealed that she was taking GLP-1 weight loss medication, telling PEOPLE the drugs were "a gift"
• But just months after starting GLP-1s, Winfrey stopped taking the injections and tried to "beat the medication," she says in a new PEOPLE cover story
• Winfrey says she learned from the experience that being on the drugs "is going to be a lifetime thing"

Oprah Winfrey says she was "shaking" when she first revealed in a PEOPLE interview two years ago that she was taking a GLP-1 weight loss medication.

"I knew that admitting to being on medication was going to be a big freaking deal," says Winfrey in PEOPLE's new cover story. "I knew I was going to get lots of push back. And I did."

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What Winfrey didn't realize at the time was that she'd find herself pushing back a few months later.

Less than six months after she started taking GLP-1 injections, Winfrey says she stopped "cold turkey" on her 70th birthday in January 2024. "I tried to beat the medication," she now says.

After a lifetime of struggling with her weight, Winfrey decided to turn to the new drugs after an "aha moment" in July 2023 while taping a show about obesity with a panel of experts. "I came to understand that overeating doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating. And that’s the most mind-blowing, freeing thing I’ve experienced as an adult," she says.

Despite that epiphany, she couldn't shake the feeling of wanting to prove she could keep the weight off on her own. “I said, ‘I’m going to see if the science is right. I want to see if I can do without it.’

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She stopped the medication, but kept up a healthy diet and workout routine, and thought she could defy predictions. "Everybody was saying if you get off the medication, you’re going to immediately put the weight back on."

It wasn’t immediate, but over the 12 months without the shots, she put on 20 lbs. And she learned a lesson: "It's going to be a lifetime thing. I'm on high blood pressure medication, and if I go off the high blood pressure medication, my blood pressure is going to go up. The same thing is true now, I realize, with these medications. I’ve proven to myself I need it."

Winfrey, who has cowritten a new book with Dr. Ania M. Jastreboff, director of the Yale Obesity Research Center, Enough: Your Health, Your Weight and What It's Like to Be Free, says she's come to understand that without the GLP medication, her body is always trying to get back what Dr. Jastreboff calls its "Enough Point" — a set weight your body maintains based on environment and genetics. For Winfrey, that's 211 pounds. And for her "I was not healthy at 211." Winfrey says she was pre-diabetic and had high cholesterol.

The GLP-1, which she typically injects weekly (she declines to share which specific brand of medication she uses) has been such an important life change for her that she has been paying out of her own pocket for weight loss medication for several acquaintances who couldn’t otherwise afford it.

But whether or not someone opts for medication as she did, she has a message.

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“If you have obesity in your gene pool, I want people to know it’s not your fault,” Winfrey says. "And people need to stop blaming other people. Don't say, 'Why don't you just work out more and eat less?' That is not the answer. I want people to have the information, whatever you choose to do with it, whether you get the medications, or whether you want to keep dieting. That's the lesson I learned: I stopped blaming myself."

And, she says, she no longer feels ashamed that she needs help in her own battle against obesity. "No more shame," she says. "Let the people say what they will."

Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It's Like To Be Free will hit shelves on Jan. 13 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

Read the original article on People

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