Oprah jumping on the Ozempic bandwagon is, frankly, just sad

Watching Oprah Winfrey on her new special promoting weight-loss drugs to her youngest guest, an overweight teenage girl, made me want to throw up my raspberry mochi ball dessert. The show’s called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, and the real shame is Oprah made it.

Or rather, how she made it. The show is billed as being about the stigma of the disease of obesity and how drugs like Ozempic help with it. Really, it’s all about Oprah and her life’s main struggle –weight. Still eminently relatable, yet somehow it feels one of the world’s most celebrated media forces has morphed into a crass shill for Big Pharma.

Oprah Winfrey, pictured last week, has a new TV special on weight loss drugs.Credit: AP

Developed as a diabetes therapy, Ozempic has become a global obsession. We’re at such a strange place in time, with wars and Trump 2.0 and disappearing royals and climate change, and somehow what we’re talking about is celebrities who’ve become unfeasibly thin really fast.

At least Oprah owns it. None of this “I quit grog” or “I walk”. Weight has weighed on my mind forever, a hangover from growing up in the ’70s watching mums always on the grapefruit or Scarsdale diets to stay in hostess shape. Almost every woman I know has at least flirted with disordered eating.

I’m secretly rapt my 1991 wedding dress still fits, but that takes five weekly workouts. So on one judgemental and outdated hand, weight-loss drugs feel like cheating. Do the work, all you A-listers who made this year’s Oscars a freak show of human ironing boards. Just eat and move well. Especially because you have chefs and personal trainers.

But on the other, I get what a glorious magic bullet they must be for people whose size threatens their health and happiness. Early adopter friends tell of the difference Ozempic has made in everything they do and how they feel about themselves. That feels like what modern medicine is for. Changing lives.

Yet Oprah somehow turns her weight issues into our fault: “I’m absolutely done with the shaming ... For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport.”

Oprah Winfrey interviews a 15-year-old girl and her mother on her TV special “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution”.Credit: Disney

Slightly overwrought, but yes, her up-and-down size made headlines. And Oprah went along with some as an ego trip. In 1988 she wheeled out a wagon filled with 30 kilograms of animal fat to represent her weight-loss. A decade later, she dropped nearly 10 kilograms at Anna Wintour’s behest to do the cover of US Vogue.

It’s hypocrisy writ large.

Remember when Oprah made a $350 million profit from her 2015 investment in Weight Watchers and promoted its philosophy of exercise and portion control? Later, she said she’d never take the “easy way out” and use weight-loss jabs.

Last December she revealed she’d lost 18 kilograms in around five months using an unnamed drug – but her change of heart wasn’t addressed in the new special. Nor were the morals of rich and powerful people potentially creating drug supply issues for diabetics whose problem is staying alive, not vanity.

What Oprah says and does is hugely influential yet her strike rate with endorsements is sketchy. She gave us Dr Oz and Dr Phil, and was a big fan of The Secret, a marketing exercise that promised dreams would come true if we wished hard enough. I’m not sure she’s my go-to for self-help advice.

There’s just something depressing about a woman with 70 years of experience having nothing better to do than focus on weight (and profit from it). How has someone in her position missed the social change of the past 20 years, where younger women embrace their shape and are appalled at how past diet eras impacted psyches more than bodies?

If Oprah is still insecure about her looks at this stage and age, she needs more fun, more challenges and maybe therapy, not weight-loss drugs.

I prescribe to you, Oprah, a strict diet of Miriam Margolyes videos. Check her out, having the best time all the time, not chewing up precious years and energy worrying about weight. Literally living large.

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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