Oprah 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 a GLP-1 weight loss drug, telling People that the drugs were a “gift”.

• But a few months after starting GLP-1s, Winfrey stopped taking the injections and tried to “beat the drug,” she says in a new People cover story.

• Winfrey says she learned from the experience that being on drugs “is a lifelong thing.”

Oprah Winfrey says she was “comp” when she revealed in a PEOPLE interview two years ago that she was taking the weight-loss drug GLP-1.

“I knew admitting to taking drugs was going to be a big, big deal,” Winfrey says in a new People cover story. “I knew I was going to push back a lot. And I did.”

What Winfrey didn’t realize at the time was what she was about to find to myself Pushing it back a few months.

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 drugs,” she says now.

After a lifelong struggle with her weight, Winfrey decided to turn to newer drugs after her “aha moment” in July 2023 while taping a program about obesity with a panel of experts. “I learned that overeating doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating. And that’s the most touching, liberating thing I’ve ever 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.’

She stopped the medication, but maintained a healthy diet and exercise routine, and thought she could defy the predictions. “Everybody said that if you go off the medication, you’re going to put the weight back on right away.”

It wasn’t immediate, but in 12 months without the shots, she put on 20 pounds. And she learned a lesson: “This will be a lifelong thing. I’m on high blood pressure medication, and if I go off the high blood pressure medication, my blood pressure will go up. The same is true now, I realized with these medications. I proved to myself that I needed it.”

Director of the Yale Obesity Research Center. Anya M. Winfrey, who co-authored a new book with Jastreboff, Enough: Your Health, Your Weight and What’s Like to Be Free, says that without the GLP medication, her body is always trying to regain what Dr. As Jastreboff says – maintain an environment based on your weight. For Winfrey, that’s 211 pounds. And for her “I wasn’t healthy at 211.” Winfrey says she was pre-diabetic and had high cholesterol.

GLP-1, which she usually injects weekly (she declines to share which specific brand of drug she uses) has been such a life-changing change for her that she’s been paying out of pocket for the weight-loss drug for many acquaintances who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it.

But whether or not anyone chooses medicine as she did, she has a message.

“If obesity is in your gene pool, I want people to know it’s not your fault,” Winfrey says. “And people should stop blaming other people. ‘Why don’t you exercise more and eat less?’ That is not the answer. I want people to be informed, what you choose to do with it, whether you get medications, or whether you want to continue 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 January 13 and is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold.

Read the original article on People