Oprah Winfrey Tears Up Over Being Fat Shamed In Weight Loss TV Special
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00:00 Hi everybody. I wanted to do this special for the more than 100 million people in the United States
00:08 and the over 1 billion people around the world who are living with obesity.
00:15 Maybe that's you or maybe it's somebody you love and I do thank you all for joining us here.
00:20 Oprah Winfrey is trying to kill the stigma surrounded by weight loss drugs.
00:24 This seven-year-old media mogul's and Oprah special, Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,
00:30 aired March 18th on ABC and she opened up the conversation by sharing some heartbreaking headlines
00:36 about her weight that she read for 25 years.
00:40 In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope
00:46 for people like me who have struggled for years with being overweight or with obesity.
00:53 So I come to this conversation in the hope that we can start releasing the stigma and the shame
01:01 and the judgment to stop shaming other people for being overweight
01:07 or how they choose to lose or not lose weight and more importantly to stop shaming ourselves.
01:14 I have to say that I took on the shame that the world gave to me.
01:20 For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport and I'll never forget a day in 1990.
01:28 I saw myself on the cover of TV Guide's best and worst dress list and I remember thinking at first,
01:33 "Oh look, there I am on the cover." And then I read the headline that Mr. Blackwell,
01:40 the tastemaker of the time, called me bumpy, lumpy and downright dumpy.
01:47 I was ridiculed on every late night talk show for 25 years and tabloid covers for 25 years.
01:53 Here are just a few of the thousands of headlines written about me.
01:57 Oprah, fatter than ever. Oprah hits 246 pounds.
02:01 Final showdown with Stedman sends her into feeding frenzy. Oprah Warren, diet or die.
02:09 So in an effort to combat all the shame, I starved myself for nearly five months
02:16 and then wheeled out that wagon of fat that the internet will never let me forget.
02:21 And after losing 67 pounds on liquid diet, the next day, y'all, the very next day, I started to gain it back.
02:30 The hour-long special featured several guests who shared their personal experiences with obesity
02:36 and weight management, including Oprah, who teared up as she shared her own painful memories from over the years.
02:42 Have you released the shame for yourself completely?
02:46 Yes. There are so many people like me that if you had told me when I was a little girl
02:53 that I would be sitting here talking about those sounds, those noises in my head,
02:56 I would have told you you were crazy. I'm not going to talk to anyone about that.
02:59 And there's this whole world of us that get it. So that helps me reduce the shame.
03:04 You know what I get? This is what I got for the first time after I, you know, took the medication.
03:10 All these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower
03:17 and they were for some reason stronger than me.
03:21 And now I realize y'all wasn't even thinking about the food.
03:27 It's not that you had the willpower. You weren't thinking about you weren't obsessing about it.
03:33 That is the big thing I learned.
03:35 Medical experts also gave their professional opinions when it comes to weight loss management.
03:40 W. Scott Bush, the director of obesity medicine in the Bariatric and Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic
03:47 and Dr. Amanda Velazquez, an obesity expert at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles,
03:53 were among Oprah's special guests. And Dr.
03:55 Bush explained how being obese is a "complex disease."
04:00 Many people have the disease of obesity.
04:03 Everybody who is overweight does not have the disease of obesity.
04:08 But if you have the disease of obesity, you're always going to go back to that set point.
04:13 If you don't have it, then you can diet, lose weight, exercise, all of the things that we've heard over the years.
04:21 Am I on the right track here? Absolutely. Are you all following this?
04:24 Because if you all are tracking it, it means the rest of the world will track.
04:26 But there's a spectrum of obesity as well. It's not one disease.
04:30 It's many different subtypes of a disease. So it's complex. Quite complex.
04:34 And that's why it is so wrong to be shaming people because you don't understand the complexity of each person's situation.
04:43 And I think, as Amy said, this is just a reflection of someone's uneducated belief that this is just a self-inflicted condition.
04:53 As if people who want to be, who have obesity, actually want to have obesity.
04:57 It's looked at, these are weaker people who have no willpower, who can't cut it.
05:02 That's right. And people who are thin can cut it.
05:05 So let's talk about willpower.
05:07 It's not a matter of willpower, because as we just learned, people who perhaps are thin might never think about food the way people who have obesity.
05:17 Side effects to the weight loss drugs that are currently on the market were also explained by the professionals.
05:22 And Oprah shared that for her, it is a tool that helps her manage her weight.
05:26 But that's not all she does in order to work on herself.
05:29 I felt exactly what Amy described here.
05:31 I'm not constantly thinking about what the next meal is going to be.
05:35 I use it as a tool also combined with hiking three to five miles a day or running, because I have found that in order to balance everything.
05:45 So it's not just one thing. It's multiple things for me.
05:48 It's also weight resistance training and all the things that go along with eating a healthy diet.
05:56 Yeah, a multi-pronged approach is the way it has to be.
05:58 And I think a lot of times people think I can just pick up this medication, take it without any other counseling.
06:04 And the key is that you're working with a health care team that's multidisciplinary.
06:07 They're coming at it from all different angles, the same way we would treat cancer.
06:10 You wouldn't just go in and grab some chemo.
06:11 And do you have to be on it for the rest of your life?
06:14 Yeah, the data would support that.
06:16 I mean, we have good trials showing that when these patients stop the medication, the disease comes back.
06:21 The former talk show host also got emotional with a guest in the audience about how she felt once she understood that obesity was a disease and it was all in her brain.
06:30 You tell us why that happened, that you're able to show up.
06:33 I think that's I'm going to cry, too.
06:35 Now, we cannot start crying.
06:37 Where is it coming from?
06:39 I think the reason that happens is because there is now a sense of hope, number one.
06:45 And number two, you no longer blame yourself.
06:49 Yeah, because when I tell you how many times I have blamed myself because you think I'm smart enough to figure this out and then to hear all along, it's you fighting your brain.
07:05 At the end of her inspiring special, Oprah made one final attempt to try and urge viewers to, quote, stop the shaming and blaming when it comes to obesity and weight loss.
07:15 And I hope that this has been an eye opening conversation for everybody.
07:19 I hope it has for people who feel happy and healthy and celebrating life in a bigger body and don't want the medications.
07:26 I say bless you.
07:28 And for all the people who believe diet and exercise is the best and only way to lose excess weight.
07:34 Bless you, too, if that works for you.
07:37 And for the people who think that this could be the relief and support and freedom, as you said earlier, that you've been looking for your whole life.
07:46 Bless you, because there is space for all points of view.
07:50 Oprah recently ended her decade long partnership with Weight Watchers as her special approached, revealing to Jimmy Kimmel in a recent interview that it was a, quote, conflict of interest.
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