Oprah Winfrey finally reveals how longtime partner Stedman Graham reacted to her mammoth Ozempic weight loss

Oprah Winfrey is opening up about the unwavering support she has received from partner Stedman Graham as she reflects on decades of living with obesity.

While discussing the profound changes she’s experienced after using a GLP-1 medication, the media mogul, 71, told People her longtime love has been a constant presence throughout their nearly 40-year relationship, regardless of her weight.

‘He has absolutely been nothing but supportive through all of it,’ Winfrey explained. ‘When he met me, I was 200 pounds. And it’s never made one iota of a difference.’

Despite Graham’s steady support, Winfrey admitted there were moments early in their relationship when her own insecurities surfaced. 

She recalled attending a 1988 boxing match between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks, when the announcer revealed Tyson’s weight as 218 pounds.

Winfrey said, in that moment, a painful thought crossed her mind. 

‘Here’s this handsome guy sitting with somebody who weighs as much as the heavyweight champion of the world,’ she remembered thinking.

‘In that moment, I felt sorry for Stedman,’ Winfrey wrote in her new book, Enough: Your Health, Your Weight and What It’s Like to Be Free, which she co-wrote with obesity specialist Ania M. Jastreboff.

Looking back, Winfrey emphasized that the shame was never something Graham placed on her.

Winfrey also reflected on another deeply vulnerable moment from 1992, when she attended the Daytime Emmy Awards weighing 237 pounds. 

In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, she said she struggled to find something to wear.

Although she had a custom outfit made, Winfrey confessed she secretly hoped she wouldn’t win that night to avoid being seen ‘from behind.’

‘I was confident that we should win Best Talk Show and Best Talk Show Host, but I just didn’t want to be in that overweight body,’ she told People.

Since she has started using a GLP-1 medication two and a half years ago, Winfrey says she’s ‘seen all’ her ‘relationships improve.’

‘I just feel like I have more to give to everybody,’ she explained.

In 2020, Winfrey wrote about their decades-long ‘spiritual partnership’ in her ‘What I Know For Sure’ column for O, The Oprah Magazine. 

As she looked back on their relationship, the star admitted that when she first met him, she thought he was a ‘player’ and ‘too handsome’ to be interested in her.

Winfrey also explained that Stedman was ‘always with the same girlfriend’ whenever she saw him around, so she ‘didn’t pay much attention’ to him. 

But that all changed when they were both visiting a mutual friend who was ill in 1986.

‘We left together, and I asked if he wanted to get a beer,’ she recalled. ‘(Yes, I drank a lot of beer then and wore cowboy boots every day.) He said he didn’t drink. (Still doesn’t—not one sip of nothin’ alcoholic since I’ve known him.) 

‘I thought he was nice enough, but I wasn’t that impressed,’ she continued. ‘He was polite, yes, and kind. The sort of guy who sits with an ailing friend. Tall and handsome, for sure. But actually too handsome, I thought, to be interested in me.

‘I figured he must be a player. So did all my producers. They warned me not to get involved with that Stedman guy.’

Winfrey said she was cautious about even pursuing a friendship with Stedman, but she had a change of heart after she learned he had broken up with his girlfriend and was asking about her dating status.

The two have been together ever since, and their relationship even survived a broken engagement – one that neither of them regrets.

‘For years, there were hundreds of tabloid stories, weekly, on whether we would marry. In 1993, the moment after I said yes to his proposal, I had doubts,’ she wrote.

‘I realized I didn’t actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked. I wanted to know he felt I was worthy of being his missus, but I didn’t want the sacrifices, the compromises, the day-in-day-out commitment required to make a marriage work. My life with the show was my priority, and we both knew it.

‘He and I agree that had we tied the marital knot, we would not still be together,’ she continued. ‘Our relationship works because he created an identity beyond being “Oprah’s man” (he teaches Identity Leadership around the world and has written multiple books on the subject).

‘And because we share all the values that matter (integrity being number one). And because we relish seeing the other fulfill and manifest their destiny and purpose.’