Aged 70, TV host shouldn’t be worried about her weight

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 Revolutionand 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.

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 So on one judgemental and outdated hand, weight loss drugs feel like cheating.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.”

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.