Oprah Winfrey reveals why she left her 10-year post as a WeightWatchers board member last month. Her resignation was motivated by her work on an upcoming TV special on the rise of prescription weight-loss drugs, she said during a Thursday appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution” aired on Monday the 18th on ABC and streamed the next day on Hulu. During the broadcast, filmed in front of a live studio audience, the 70-year-old media mogul will sit down with medical experts and patients to discuss prescription weight-loss drugs, including Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy. In the Los Angeles Times, Oprah Winfrey says to Kimmel, “I decided that because this special was really important to me and I wanted to be able to talk about whatever I want to talk about, and WeightWatchers is now in the business of being a weight health company that also administers drug medications for weight, I did not want to have the appearance of any conflict of interest,” Winfrey told Kimmel. Winfrey adds that she donated her shares to the National Museum of African American History and Culture she also adds “so nobody can say, ‘Oh, she’s doing that special, she’s making money.’” Winfrey also disclosed to People that she maintained a healthy weight by using an unspecified weight-loss drug in tandem with lifestyle changes. She also says in the Los Angeles Times “The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift,” she says, she continues to say “I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing.” Winfrey says that she’d been tied to the idea that to keep a healthy weight was a matter of sheer willpower.
