First of all, welcome back.
I haven't been here since that great moment with Barbara.
Barbara, that last hurrah. Yeah, that last hurrah.
You know, in this book, well, you do know Oprah, this book, you write about how for years you've been ridiculed in the press and tabloids, made fun of by comedians for your weight struggles. You say that you accepted it because you actually thought you deserved it. Please explain that to me.
I felt, and thank you so much for asking that, because the reason why I've done this book with Dr. Ana is because what I felt all those years, the shame and the blame that I gave to myself. I felt it because it was my fault. I felt it was my fault I was overweight. And so when comedians made fun of me, I felt like, well, it's okay for me to be the butt of their jokes because I should be losing the weight. I should be able to keep the weight off. And I felt embarrassed every time I put the weight back on. So I accepted it because I thought they were right.
You know that horrible moment that I had on the Tonight Show when I was so excited to be there for the first time and I bought these new shoes and I spent my entire paycheck on the Stuart Weitzman shoes and Joan Rivers said to me, 'Shame, shame, shame on you for not losing the weight. How did you gain the weight? How did you gain the weight?' And Joan, how did you gain the weight? And I remember leaving feeling embarrassed, but that she said I could come back if I lost 15 pounds. So I wasn't even like upset with her. I thought, I got to get on it. I got to lose those 15 pounds.
Oh boy. Well, you were not alone. There were so many women like you and me and everybody else who couldn't lose. That's right. Even 10 we couldn't lose.
So then I went back to the show, which was called AM Chicago at the time, and said, 'All right, everybody, we got to lose the weight.' And so the fact that I was ridiculed in the tabloids every single week for like 20 years, I just grew to accept that as a way of being.
So Dr. Ana, you've been treating patients with obesity for over 15 years, I understand. And you say that one of the most important things you want people to understand is that obesity is not a choice. Something you were just saying, it's actually a disease. Yes. So can you explain that so people understand that?
Yeah. Obesity is about biology. Obesity is not a choice. It is not a personal failure. It is not something that someone decides to have. Two-thirds of Americans did not wake up one morning and decide to have a disease. And I think understanding that obesity is a disease starts to shift from that.
That's what shifted me. That's what got me to use the medications and to come out about using the medications and no longer feel shame about the medications because I've been on blood pressure medication for as long as I can remember because both of my parents have high blood pressure. High blood pressure runs in the Black community. A lot of people do have it. And if I stop taking the blood pressure medication, my blood pressure will go up. And I use it to manage my blood pressure in the same way that I use the GLP-1s to manage the obesity that I carry. So this is what I wanted everybody to know: that all these years I thought I was overeating. I was standing there with all the food noise, what I ate, what I should eat, how many calories was that, how long was it going to take. I thought that that was because of me and my fault. Now I understand that if you carry the obesity gene, if that is what you have, that is what makes you overeat. You don't overeat and become obese. Obesity causes you to overeat. Obesity causes you to have all of that food noise. And what the GLP-1s have done for me, and I know a number of other people, is to quiet that noise. Yeah. And so the new freedom is having the calmness and the space to do other powerful things in your life without worrying about what you just ate and how much it was and how many calories. Isn't it? We bored ourselves for years. Yeah, we bored ourselves for years. This book does a great job, I think, explaining the journey, explaining the biology. So, thank you. It's going to help so many people and take away that shame that people have even over taking the medication. People have shame over it.
But let me ask you this, Oprah, because I think something that people love about you is that you were always very open about your struggles with weight and all the diets that you've tried. You said somewhere that you've tried almost every diet that exists, right? And then in 1988, I remember watching you roll that wagon full of animal fat onto the stage. You had lost 67 pounds from a liquid diet, which isn't sustainable we know now, but then it was amazing. But you say that that was the moment you regret the most.
Yes. You know why? It's one of my biggest regrets because I think that moment contributed to the diet culture in a way to say, look at what I've done, now you can do it. And even though everybody said to me, 'Oh, you're going to put it back on.' Because I thought it was my fault. And because I always thought, like so many of you in the world are thinking, it's about willpower. It is not. Because I thought it was about willpower. I thought that moment had proven that I have the willpower because I went four months and I didn't eat a morsel of food. My regret is...
