After Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sunny Hostin have also spoken out about using weight loss drugs. Goldberg said that she made the decision after gaining almost 300 pounds during the filming of the 2022 film Till, a movie about the murder of Emmett Till.
“I weighed almost 300 pounds when I was made Till,” Goldberg said during the Hot Topics segment of today’s The View on ABC.
Goldberg suffered from serious back pain in 2021, and as a part of her recovery she was treated with steroids, which led to her gaining weight.
“I had taken all those steroids and was on all this stuff,” she said, adding “and one of the things that helps me drop the weight is Mounjaro.”
Mounjaro is a prescription weight loss medication similar to Ozempic.
Later, she said she hadn’t noticed her weight gain: “I just always felt like me, and then I saw me and I was like, Oh, that’s a lot of me.”
Joining in, Hostin said that she had dropped 40 pounds after being prescribed Mounjaro.
“During Covid I gained 40 pounds,” the co-host said. “All I did was eat. I love to cook and I found out I love to eat. And I was horrified by the fact that I would have to come out on air. So I took Mounjaro.”
Hostin said the public reaction to her weight loss was surprisingly unpleasant. “I got all these nasty emails saying you’re too skinny and why did you do this and you’re taking the drug away from diabetics. So there is shame when you’ve gained weight and I had never experienced that kind of shame before. And what I loved about what she [Oprah] said is obesity is a disease…”
To which co-host Joy Behar interjected, “Wait a minute. How is it a disease when you were just eating everything?”
Hostin explained, “I didn’t have the disease, I wasn’t clinically obese.”
“I was,” Goldberg said.
The discussion was a response to Winfrey’s An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, which debuted on ABC March 18 and the following day on Hulu.
In February, Winfrey disclosed her departure from the WeightWatchers board of directors following a 9-year tenure. She also revealed her decision to donate her stock in the company, aiming to sidestep any potential conflict of interest arising from her utilization of weight-loss medications.
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