Oprah Winfrey famously struggled with her weight for years, so she’s tackling a subject that’s fascinating to both her and many other Americans: new weight-loss drugs that are reducing appetite and changing people’s relationship with food.
They include Type 2 diabetes medications such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, which doctors are prescribing off-label for weight loss, and Wegovy, which has been specifically approved for shedding pounds.
More than 2 billion adults — one quarter of the world’s population — are overweight or obese, with obesity killing more people than malnutrition, Winfrey said on her show “Oprah Daily” on Wednesday.
“You all know I’ve been on this journey for most of my life. My highest weight was 237 pounds. I don’t know if there is another public person whose weight struggle has been exploited as much as mine over the years,” Winfrey said. “So I am ready for this conversation.”
Stigma of being overweight
The American Medical Association declared obesity a chronic disease in 2013, but many people can’t wrap their brain around what that really means, she pointed out. Winfrey compared it to her efforts decades ago trying to explain that alcoholism is a disease, with many people refusing to believe it.
Obesity is a disease because there’s dysfunction in how the body is regulating weight, said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, on the show.
Stanford serves as an adviser to Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy; and has received consulting fees from Eli Lilly, the company that makes Mounjaro, according to Open Payments.
‘It’s going on in our brains,” Stanford said. “It’s about how much we take in and how much we store.”
The brain knows where it wants body weight to be and it’s going to do whatever it can to bring a person back to that set point, she noted. Some people’s bodies defend “a very lean set point,”…
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