Oprah Winfrey reveals 'shame' over weight

Oprah Winfrey has revealed the "shame" she felt over her weight and how she's finally realised "it's not her fault".

The talk show host has spoken about how she's finally changed her perspective on her weight loss journey - and the moment she realised her body issues were out of her control.

"I was like whoa it's not even my fault - all these years, all those diets, all those times I tried, I came back and I tried again and I lost it," she said on Jamie Kern Lima's podcast. "I'm climbing up the mountain I'm suffering, I'm starving. That was the moment and that was 2023."

She added, "I've done hundreds of shows about weight loss and had I can't even tell you how many conversations about it but still carry my own shame. I had a big revelation (in 2023) when (I had) one doctor after another doctor saying obesity is a disease - and I was like, 'I didn't get that memo.'"

The 70-year-old admitted that learning to reframe her weight gain as a disease, not a loss of willpower, changed everything.

"What I understood...that I had not understood for the past 48 years of battling my weight, is that there's something in the brain that allows people - like myself - to metabolise fat differently than other people," she explained. "No matter what I do I'm always going to go back to the set point that my brain thinks it needs to hold the weight."

The media mogul has recently admitted she's been taking weight loss medication, but has never talked specifically about Ozempic.

"I was judgmental (about people using weight loss drugs) because I have been so judged," she said. "The bottom line is we don't know what that what the medications do in the long term - but we do know what obesity does in the long term."

She added, "If I had to not use it I wouldn't, but I feel a sense of liberation about it. I feel a sense of relief in knowing that feeling that I felt when I was sitting there, (eight) pounds heavier than I was a month before knowing that I don't know what I'm going to do because I cannot hike any higher, I cannot run any faster."