Oprah Winfrey, who has a net worth of $3.20 billion and is 71 years old, is making the talk show and podcast rounds to sell her newest book, which is titled Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It's Like To Be Free. She co-wrote the book with Dr. Ania Jastreboff and this week appeared on ABC's The View.
Now, I know everything I just said doesn't matter to you, because to be honest, it doesn't matter to me. I spend very little time in my life thinking about the person Rush Limbaugh used to call "The Oprah."
What matters to me, though, and why I'm drawing your attention to it, is something she said about weight loss when she appeared alongside the gaggle of bitter leftist women in front of an audience of bitter leftist women.
The long and short of it is that she said that willpower is not enough if you want to lose weight. Do drugs. But not just any old drugs, but rather the kind of weight loss drugs she recommends.
The other thing she wants you to know is that you don't get obese by eating and not exercising. Rather, she thinks, you're obese by nature, and if you're already obese, then when you eat, that's how you gain weight. Is your head starting to spin yet?
Oprah says the reason she "wrote" the book was to deal with all the "blame and the shame" she felt all the years she was overweight, and that she felt it was her fault. I'll go out on a limb and speculate that her new understanding about weight is more likely the result of therapy and not some diet drug. But now she's had an epiphany that it wasn't her fault. Good for her.
Still, can you imagine a billionaire celebrity paying some people around her to tell her that her weight gain is not her fault? I can. Of course, it's her fault, but not in a shameful way. Most Americans are at least a little overweight, and every one of them had something to do with how they gained weight.
In the course of the interview, Oprah described the common cycle everyone who's overweight goes through. You feel you deserve the wisecracks about your weight because you are, in fact, overweight. And that you know you should lose the weight. If you're nodding your head right now, Oprah sees you. Because this is how she sells books. She makes you relate to her and gives you a sense that she relates to you. This is her empathetic icebreaker, and it works every time.
Spoiler alert: She doesn't see you.
Oprah told a revisionist story about an appearance she had on the Tonight Show with Joan Rivers, where today, Oprah makes it sound like Rivers ambushed her with questions about her weight. But when you watch the beginning of this clip, you can see that not only was the weight discussion pre-planned with Oprah (these interviews are practically pre-scripted), but she actually plugs a promotion she did at the time. At the 28-second mark, she promotes a branded "Diet with Oprah" thing she was doing at the time. "Diet with Oprah" clearly was in place before Rivers asked her any questions. This is no ambush.
So, today, when she talks about how embarrassed she was in that interview with Rivers, that's disingenuous to say the least. Of course, Rivers is not here to defend herself.
In her appearance this week on The View, sitting next to her co-author, Oprah then went to work to encourage viewers to "use the medication and then to come out about using the medication and no longer feel shame about the medication." If you counted three uses of the word "medication" in that sentence, know it's no accident. Oprah knows repetition is the key to persuasion and sales. She wanted to imprint that word on your brain.
She compared obesity to high blood pressure, and that if you use blood pressure medication to manage blood pressure, why not use certain GLP-1 weight loss medications to manage weight?
GLP-1 medications (glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists) are a class of drugs that mimic a natural hormone in your body called GLP-1. This is a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar, appetite, and digestion. Ozempic is a GLP-1 medication.
Moving past the drugs, Oprah then took a bizarre path on the matter of mindset and weight loss. The mental gymnastics were so dynamic that if your brain felt like it turned it into a pretzel, your brain would be correct.
Did I hear that right?
— Jack (@jackunheard) January 15, 2026
Oprah Winfrey says you don’t become obese from eating too much and that you are born that way.
"You don’t overeat and become obese. Obesity causes you to overeat."
My word. The View has to be a social experience.
pic.twitter.com/qxx4WJJSak
"All these years I thought I was overeating. I was standing there with all the food noise – what I ate, what I shouldn't eat…" she said. "How many calories are there? How long is 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…and what the GLP-1s have done for me is to quiet that noise."
Well, I'm no doctor or scientist, but I have questions. When Oprah talks about "noise," what is she really talking about? Is weight management a mindset thing? I mean, if there's this noise that needs to be quiet, is that in her head? If so, then isn't weight loss still a self-discipline thing? Can't people train their minds a certain way to take their minds off food in order to lose weight?
In other words, are drugs really the answer?
To be sure, Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have done a lot for people who have struggled with their weight. But when you're as powerful and influential as Oprah is, you know there are people who will pay more attention to you on The View than listen to their own doctors. That kind of influence carries certain responsibility. Telling your millions of fans that GLP-1s are the way to go, without giving the old-fashioned diet and exercise approach its due, seems irresponsible to me. All drugs have side effects, and each drug affects one person differently from the next.
What Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications actually do is to mimic a natural gut hormone that increases insulin when blood sugar is high. They suppress glucagon, slow stomach emptying, and reduce appetite. Altogether, these effects help people feel full longer, often leading to weight loss.
When I read that, my take is that some people have better willpower than others, and those people don't need a drug to lose weight.
As for Oprah's latest story about her weight loss, the women on The View were eating this up (pun intended), and they were hungry for more (okay, I'll stop), but I couldn't help but wonder if there will ever come a day when Oprah drops the shtick and speaks from the heart when she's not trying to sell a book or promote something in a business sense.
The minute she opens her mouth, I'm conditioned to expect the trained empathetic appeal, the pitch, the call to action, and the close. She's very good at this. One of the best. But I think at this point in her career, it's time to hang up the huckster hat and quit being fake real.
