Oprah Winfrey is opening up about her massive weight-loss journey in a new interview. She’s also shockingly revealing that at one point, she was drinking 17 tequila shots in one night.
Oprah Sounds Off
“I feel more alive and more vibrant than I’ve ever been,” Oprah, 71, told People Magazine. “I feel like I have more to give to everybody. I’m just more open to all.”
“I was a big fan of tequila,” she continued. “I literally had 17 shots one night, I haven’t had a drink in years. The fact that I no longer even have a desire for it is pretty amazing.”
Oprah noted that at that point in her life, she “could outdrink everyone at the table.”
“I’m not constantly punishing myself,” she said of her new mindset. “I hardly recognize the woman I’ve become. But she’s a happy woman.”
Oprah has admitted that she began taking GLP-1 weight loss medication over two years ago. She did this after realizing that her lifelong struggle with her weight was due to obesity. This was a word that she previously “avoided.”
Oprah Doubles Down
Oprah’s epiphany came in 2023, when she hosted a special featuring experts on obesity. Filming this special helped her realize that “overeating doesn’t cause obesity. Obesity causes overeating,” calling that moment “the most mind-blowing, freeing thing I’ve experienced as an adult.”
“If you have obesity in your gene pool, I want people to know it’s not your fault,” Oprah stated. “I want people to stop blaming yourself for genes and an environment you can’t control. I want people to have the information, whatever you choose to do with it, whether you get the medications, or whether you want to keep dieting.”
Since she started using GLP-1 medication, Oprah feels like “everything is just calmer and stronger” by helping her “manage the messages that are being sent to your brain about overeating.”
Now that she’s not constantly focused on food, Oprah feels that she’s been given “a quiet strength that comes with everything I do.”
Oprah’s Previous Comments
Oprah previously opened up about her struggles with her weight last year in her special An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution.
In this special, Oprah admitted that she once starved herself on a liquid diet “in an effort to combat the shame” for nearly five months in 1988 “and then wheeled out that wagon of fat [on her show] that the internet will never let me forget and after losing 67 pounds on a liquid diet, next day, y’all, the very next day, I started to gain it back.”
Oprah later added that it’s “wrong to be shaming people” with obesity if you don’t struggle with it, because it’s hard to truly understand what the person is dealing with.
“All these years, I thought all of the people who never had to diet were just using their willpower and they were for some reason stronger than me, and now I realize y’all weren’t even thinking about the food. It’s not that you had the willpower,” she explained. “You weren’t thinking about it. You weren’t obsessing about it. That is the big thing I learned.”
Please pray for Oprah as she continues her weight loss battle.