Oprah on taking Ozempic: ‘Weight loss drug is not taking easy way out’

In a discussion with Oprah, Dr Ania called obesity a disease. She also advised that we should treat obesity like other medical conditions.

Ozempic, Wegovy and other GLP-1 drugs have been part of many discussions ever since people, including many celebrities, started consuming them for weight loss. These medications can help manage Type 2 diabetes and obesity. In a new video shared on her YouTube channel, TV host and actor Oprah Winfrey talked about these medications, taking the GLP-1 drug, why obesity should be treated as a disease and more.

Dr Ania Jastreboff, an endocrinologist and associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine, joined the conversation with Oprah. Dr Ania has been studying GLP-1 medications for more than 20 years.

Is taking weight loss medications the easy way out?

Dr Ania said, “It's not. Think about it. Think about when we treat someone who has high blood pressure. When they come to see us, we say, ‘Low salt diet is very helpful and here are some medications that can treat the disease biology’. We need to do the same for obesity. We need to say, ‘Yes, healthy diet and exercise are critical for optimizing health and treating the biology of obesity. Here’s a medicine or medicines or surgery that will help’.”

Obesity is a disease

So, if we have such a regulated biology, why do people get obese? Per Dr Ania, it is because of our obesogenic environment - an environment with ultra-processed food, lack of sleep, lack of physical activity, and stress. All these factors basically push up how much energy or fat our body wants to store. “Our body is doing what it should be doing, but too much in this environment,” she added.

What determines obesity vs being overweight?

Right now, there aren't any great definitions. So, we used to use definitions of BMI (Body Mass Index). But BMI is really a screening tool; it's not something that was ever designed to be a diagnostic tool. So, technically, overweight was defined as a BMI of greater than 25 and obesity as a BMI of greater than 30…the indications for medication were based on these initially. Now, that's also evolving and changing as well.

Why are some people prone to obesity and not others?

Per Dr Ania, we evolved in this way over centuries and millennia that we didn't want to starve. “We eat a lot more than we actually need. So, our body actually figured out how to burn extra. But after a while, with this obesogenic environment, it actually says, ‘No, store it; maybe I need it for later.’ So, when we try to lose it, our body fights back, and says no.”

When Oprah asked the endocrinologist, whether it happens with her body or people who are obese because of some hormones, she said, “It may be or your brand - because obesity is a neuro metabolic disease or neuroendocrine hormones inform the brain. So, maybe in your body, your body is like ‘Maybe I’m really good at holding on to this energy. I'm really good at holding on to some extra fat just in case I need it later. Somebody else's body may say 'I don't need that'. That is where our body is happy and that is because of the environment we live in.”

Oprah also talked about her ‘AHA moment’ when she first took the weight loss drug. She said, “One of the things that I realised the very first time I took a GLP-1 was that all these years I thought that thin people - those people just had more willpower. They ate better foods. They were able to stick to it longer. They never had a potato chip. And then I realised the very first time I took the GLP-1 that, ‘Oh, they’re not even thinking about it. They are only eating when they're hungry, and they're stopping when they're full.’”