Whoopi Goldberg opens up about her weight loss on the Tuesday, March 19, 2024 episode of ‘The View’.Photo:ABC
ABC
Whoopi Goldbergis standing with her formerColor PurplecostarOprah Winfrey.
While discussing the former talk show host’s televisedABC specialabout the conversation surrounding the use of popular drugs likeOzempicandMounjarofor weight loss, the EGOT winner told the audience on Tuesday’s episode ofThe Viewthat she too had taken the medication.
She made the decision after filmingTill, the 2022 biographical drama about Mamie Till-Bradley, an educator who pursued justice after the murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett in August 1955.
“I will tell you, I weighed almost 300 lbs. when I madeTill,” said Goldberg, who acted and produced the motion picture.
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“I had taken all those steroids, I was on all this stuff,” Goldberg said Tuesday. “And one of the things that’s helped me dropped the weight was the Mounjaro. That’s what I used.”
The comedian went on to admit that she didn’t realize how much weight she had gained until she looked at herself in the mirror one day. “I just always felt like me,” she said. “And then I saw me and I thought, ‘Oh! That’s a lot of me!’ "
Whoopi Goldberg attends the premiere of ‘Till’ during the 60th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on Oct. 1, 2022 in New York City.Jamie McCarthy/Getty
Jamie McCarthy/Getty
Winfrey, 70, revealed to PEOPLE in December that she was usinga prescription weight-loss medicationas part of her health and wellness regimen, alongside regular exercise and other lifestyle tweaks. She did not share what medication she takes.
OnAn Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, the media giant spoke with a handful of medical experts on obesity, which theAmerican Medical Associationdesignated as a disease in 2013. She also discussed her own up and down journey with her weight, and the shame she felt when she was publicly ridiculed for her gains and losses.
“For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport,” Winfrey said, recalling hurtful headlines she had read about herself over the decades, and her own decisions to starve herself in order to drop the pounds.
Oprah Winfrey hosts a sit-down conversation around the radical impact of prescription weight loss medications in the primetime event, ‘An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution’.Disney/Eric McCandless
Disney/Eric McCandless
The turning point for Winfrey’s approach to using pharmaceutical aids came in July 2022 when she had an “aha moment” during a taped panel conversation with weight loss experts and clinicians. (CalledThe State of Weight, the chat was part ofOprah Daily’sLife You Wantseries).
“I realized I’d been blaming myself all these years for being overweight, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control,” she said on Monday’s show. “Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it’s about the brain.”
“When I tell you how many times I have blamed myself,” Winfrey continued during a particularly emotional conversation. “Because you think you’re smart enough to have figured this out, and then you hear, all along, it’s you fighting your brain.”
Whoopi Goldberg attends FGI Night of Stars 39th Annual Gala at The Plaza on October 17, 2023 in New York City.Dia Dipasupil/Getty
Dia Dipasupil/Getty
Goldberg related to that, and suggest onThe ViewTuesday that viewers be a little bit bit kinder to each other, and to themselves.
“Maybe the key is to stop judging everybody. Maybe that’s the key,” she said.
“My weight has come and gone and up and down, but it’s never been an issue for me because I don’t listen to what other people say about me so it has never been a problem. But I think it’s very hard for people to just know what a normal weight would be,” she added, noting that others don’t often know how to talk to someone when they’ve been through a weight gain. “Everyone has something to say but no one said, ‘How you doing?’ Because it involves so many other things.”
“I think it is a matter of how we treat ourselves,” Goldberg noted.
The Viewairs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC.An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolutionis now streaming on Hulu.
source: people.com
