If we’re going to talk shame and blame, let’s talk about Oprah.
More specifically, let’s talk about the one-hour infomercial she just did for Ozempic, Wegovy and Big Pharma, pushing controversial weight-loss drugs — super-expensive ones at that — on the general public, including children, implying that they’re safe for all.
‘Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution’, which aired Monday night on ABC and is now streaming on Hulu, was billed as ‘An Oprah Special’.
Rightly so.
This was more about the central conflict of Oprah’s life, her weight-loss struggles, rather than what these drugs mean for public health, or our understanding of obesity, and whether the potential side effects — you know, minor complications like pancreatitis or cancer — are worth the risk.
The only thing that remains oversized about Oprah is her ego. Alas, there’s no drug in the world to remedy that.
If we’re going to talk shame and blame, let’s talk about Oprah. More specifically, let’s talk about the one-hour infomercial she just did for Ozempic, Wegovy and Big Pharma, pushing controversial weight-loss drugs on the general public, including children.
This was more about the central conflict of Oprah’s life, her weight-loss struggles, rather than what these drugs mean for public health, or our understanding of obesity, and whether the potential side effects — you know, minor complications like pancreatitis or cancer — are worth the risk.
‘I took on the shame that the world gave to me,’ Oprah said of her former figure.
Well, she also took on ten percent of Weight Watchers stock in 2015, becoming the face of a company that advocated portion control and exercise, making $400 million in the process.
And after publicly insisting, as recently as last July, that she would never use a weight-loss jab because that would be ‘the easy way out’, Oprah was forced to admit that yes, she had been using a drug — which one, she has never said — after dropping forty pounds in mere months.
She lied. She’s a total hypocrite who did not apologize in her ‘special’ for lying. She acted as if her subsequent departure from Weight Watchers was a mark of integrity and high-handedly told us she donated her remaining stock.
So what if the share price plunged in her wake?
One wonders if Oprah is considering buying stock in Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giants that produce these drugs and which she platformed on this broadcast.
Because to hear her tell it, there is zero reason not to avail yourself, whether you can afford the $1,000 out-of-pocket monthly cost or not. Or even if, like her youngest guest, you’re an overweight teenage girl, with overweight parents, who wants to be cheerleader and get asked to prom.
Shame on you, Oprah.
As for whether it’s morally acceptable for the wealthy and powerful to access a drug while pushing the poor and diabetic to the back of the line — apparently, there was no time to address that.
Here’s another uncomfortable, complicated truth that Oprah never acknowledged: If you’re rich, you’ll live longer.
But for the poor who live in food deserts, who have access mainly to processed food that is designed to addict the eater and leave one never feeling full – sugary stuff that results in diabetes, strokes, heart disease and cancer — well, I guess we’ll just blame those people for being fat and lazy and unable to afford Ozempic.
Nor was there any discussion of the psychology of food.
No acknowledgement that survivors of childhood sexual abuse, as Oprah is, often use major weight gain as a way of avoiding male attention, or for comfort.
Certainly, there was no acknowledgement that eating disorders exist on both ends of the spectrum.
No, Oprah told us assuredly: Thin people never think about food.
Is she kidding?
‘I took on the shame that the world gave to me,’ Oprah said of her former figure. Well, she also took on ten percent of Weight Watchers stock in 2015, becoming the face of a company that advocated portion control and exercise, making $400 million in the process.
And after publicly insisting, as recently as last July, that she would never use a weight-loss jab because that would be ‘the easy way out’, Oprah was forced to admit that yes, she had been using a drug – which one, she has never said – after dropping forty pounds in mere months.
One wonders if Oprah is considering buying stock in Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giants that produce these drugs and which she platformed on this broadcast.
First, the tears. Standing onstage in a silky powder-blue suit, our newly slim televangelist did what she does best: Making it sound as though she, long in her vacuum-sealed billionaire bubble, is one of us.
‘There is now a sense of hope, and you no longer blame yourself,’ she said, voice breaking. She wore those owlish eyeglasses, meant to evoke wisdom, and spent much of the special standing, the better to show off her weight loss.
Never forget: This is the same woman who ardently pushed ‘The Secret’, a marketing scheme masquerading as self-help, that promised we can all get everything we want if we just wish hard enough.
Who raved about the author James Frey and then had him back on her show to brutalize him — shame him! — for billing his book as memoir rather than fiction.
Who gave actress Jenny McCarthy a platform to spread her unscientific belief, stated as fact, that vaccines cause childhood autism.
Oprah should never be considered an expert in anything, let alone medicine.
This special should never have aired with the imprimatur of a major American broadcast network. It should have been posted on her Instagram account or on Oprah.com as the independent, cynical, self-serving shill it was.
‘I’m absolutely done with the shaming,’ she says. ‘For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport’.
And yet, no mention that she participated in very publicly making herself a laughingstock — whether it was wheeling out 67 bags of animal fat to represent how much she first lost in 1988, or succumbing to Anna Wintour’s ‘gentle suggestion’, ten years later, that she drop twenty pounds to make the cover of Vogue, which Oprah promptly did.
But no, the onus is on all of us. It’s our fault Oprah felt bad about herself or couldn’t lose the weight without medication.
Newly emboldened, a much-thinner Oprah preached to an in-studio audience of attractive, middle-aged, healthy-looking women — I only counted two men in the crowd — about the miracles of Ozempic and the like.
The two medical experts who appeared here, she shamelessly told us, were also consultants to the drug companies making these jabs.
Meanwhile, ABC’s in-house physician, Dr. Jennifer Ashton, swatted away concerns about nasty side effects such as uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting.
One audience member told Oprah she quit after throwing up blood. But hey — that’s just one unfortunate person’s journey. Maybe she should read ‘The Secret’ and try again.
Reasonable people can agree: For those struggling with morbid obesity, or with type 2 diabetes, the risks of not losing weight are likely worse than any potential complications from Ozempic.
But for the rest of the population? We’re at a very strange moment in which almost every formerly overweight celebrity seems to be on some form of it – whether they’ll admit it, or claim it’s down to ‘walking’ more or quitting booze.
‘I’m absolutely done with the shaming,’ she says. ‘For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport’. And yet, no mention that she participated in very publicly making herself a laughingstock – including when she wheeled out 67 bags of animal fat to represent how much she first lost in 1988.
In Los Angeles, even tiny hors d’oeuvres are no longer served at parties. The pretense that anyone eats food in Hollywood has been thoroughly dropped.
Extreme thinness is valorized as never before — the ultimate class signifier.
And the lack of cravings that come with these drugs — the lack of desire not just for food but in many cases alcohol, shopping, sex — is considered a net-plus rather than an alarming sacrifice, one that goes to the very nature of being human.
What is the point of life if one ceases to want anything? If cravings become extinct? What happens when the brain stops communicating with the gut, as it does on these drugs — when we lose our ‘gut instinct’?
And what of those forced to go off these drugs, who gain back all the weight and then some? What happens then?
Ozempic is no magic bullet, and Oprah is no honest broker.
To those who would follow her: Caveat emptor.
