February 29, 2024 - 8:30pm
Oprah Winfrey’s hasty departure from the WeightWatchers board of directors — now rebranded as WWInternational — has thrown a spotlight on the broader issue of how weight loss is marketed and the substances celebrities endorse or use to maintain their physique. Winfrey’s admission of using weight-loss drugs like Ozempic as a maintenance tool, after decades of enriching herself by promoting fitness through hard work and lifestyle changes, is rather hypocritical.
In the realm of fitness and health endorsements, this comes as no surprise — celebrities and influencers use what works best, which isn’t necessarily what they’re selling. Albeit on a far grander scale, it echoes the controversy surrounding Brian “Liver King” Johnson, an influencer who rose to fame through his promotion of an “ancestral fitness” lifestyle, which was later revealed to be bolstered by a substantial steroid regimen.
Johnson was just one of many influencers who, behind the scenes, rely on performance-enhancing drugs while publicly espousing natural methods and hard work as the keys to physical success. The Liver King’s case was particularly egregious, given the stark contrast between the rugged, primitive lifestyle he marketed and the modern, pharmaceutical means he employed to achieve his physique.
Oprah’s case, though different in and scope and context, parallels the Liver King’s in a crucial aspect: the gap between the public persona and the private realities of health management. For years, Oprah has been synonymous with WeightWatchers, sharing her weight loss journey and struggles, becoming a beacon of hope for many seeking to lose weight through diet and exercise.
If even Oprah, with all her billions of dollars and extremely marketable public narratives of struggle and success, resorts to medical intervention for weight management, what message does that send to her followers?
Both Oprah’s and the Liver King’s stories serve as cautionary tales about the complexities of public endorsements and the realities of health management. They highlight a pervasive issue in the wellness industry: the reliance on quick fixes, whether through undisclosed drug use or misleading narratives that oversimplify the journey to health and fitness. Oprah settled on a quick fix after years of extolling the merits of the struggle, which involved considerable weight gain and loss throughout her highly public life: “I use [weight-loss drugs] as I need it,” she recently told People.
Her decision to step down from WeightWatchers and her choice to donate her shares to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, while commendable, do not fully address the underlying issue of trust and responsibility. As someone who has been an influential figure in the wellness industry, her actions have far-reaching implications for her followers and the broader public perception of weight loss methods. The pivot she made was so abrupt and so definitive, it calls into question all the work she spent a lifetime doing (and selling). If any of that work was worth it — as some, like UnHerd’s Kat Rosenfield and myself, still believe — why abandon the struggle so quickly?
Oprah’s use of weight-loss drugs underscores the need for greater transparency and honesty in public endorsements — even if that transparency is unlikely and celebrities and the wealthy will always err on the side of what’s is easiest and most efficient. However, even with Oprah out of the picture, there’s still a need for realistic conversations about health, fitness, diet, and a carefully-limited pharmaceutical role in achieving personal wellness goals. Until that can be achieved, there will be many more like her.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
MoustacheClubUS
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeNo doubt they will soon make a business case for acquiring a sea front villa in Miami for creative purposes.
They’re not the NRA!
How perspicacious of you to spot that. I am in awe.
Or maybe she’s just sick of yo-yo weight and wants a result that will stick. At least she’s not trying to pretend her weight loss is due to WW.
Is it true that remaining mildly to moderately obese is better than yo-yo weight loss and gain (which often makes people more obese than when they started yo-yo-ing)? I wish I were still 175 or 200 pounds! I currently fluctuate between 260 and 270 pounds — my heaviest weight was 324 pounds in 2015. (My height is 5’5″ — 1.65 m.)
Katheryn, you urgently need to lose weight on the basis of those figures.
It is irresponsible to advise someone to lose weight when you don’t know their medical history. You should be encouraging her to have a discussion with her doctor as the first step.
Hilarious.
People like you are part of the problem.
Yes, you are right. Thanks for being blunt.
Where is the hypocracy ? Ozembic ( or whatever the f**k its called ) is just out and she has awknowledged she uses it and stoped promoting weight watchers which didnt really work. Its hilarious sje is treated as an icon for weight loss anyway. Jesus, could they not find someone thon to promote their bs milkshakes.
Anyway, ancestral diet is the way to go. A bit of intermittant fasting , plenty of mest, fish, eggs and cut out processed food..its actualy pretty simple.
What, just like the one Liver King followed? I suppose you advise that we also take masses of steroids too, no? And I suppose you can’t see the hypocrisy in that either.
Um, Liver King didn’t follow an ancestral diet, something you acknowledge in your post. The primal diet isn’t extreme. It’s basically a Whole Foods diet that omits grains and sugars. The insanity!
Again, sounds like a low carb diet.
Really sounds like a low carb diet.
Is the ‘ancestral diet’ mostly booze, as UnHerd Readers’ typing suggests?
Brilliant Russell, that gave me a good laugh this morning. And yes, low carb/keto/ancestral are all basically the same thing
hypocrisy
hypocrisy
It’s not simple. As someone with a 50+ year history of trying and mostly failing to control my weight, I have tried almost every diet going and just ended up back where I started, sometimes putting even more weight on than I had at the outset. Ancestral diet is just as rubbish as any other diet and people who try it will fall off the wagon .Slimming drugs like Ozempic are just the same – people come off the drug and put the weight back on. Oprah with her repeated weight losses followed by putting weight back on is typical of most dieters.
Now I have to lose weight for health reasons, but I’m doing it the slow sensible way by having treats now and again and making minor amendments to my eating habits. It has to be a permanent regime that I can live with for the rest of my life, not some ridiculous fad du jour.
If losing weight was easy, nobody would be fat. The fact that people do stupid things like looking up to celebrities and trying to copy them is testament to their desperation.
Low carb does work for both weight and health. It is not a fad and addresses metabolic disease.
What really astounds and confounds me is how anyone, anywhere, with a brain and basic human instincts pays the slightest bit of attention to any celebrity, of any kind, anywhere.
By definition ‘celebrities’ – all of them – are self-important, narcissistic, artful tribal parasites who prioritize their own self-actualising wants and whims over the common weal, usually at great civic cost. It’s pretty much a job description: I am a ‘celebrity’…celebrate moi, filthy ordinary massed nobodies. The banal fact that the mass media has given them a self-controlled personal vanity publishing and advertising platform for the best part of a century doesn’t change the fact that a celebrity is the very last human you should ever either expect to be, or look towards as, a role model.
Oprah Winfrey is a celebrity. That makes her a needy, arrogant, ego-fueled, ruthlessly self-serving exceptionalist sociopath. One of the great prospects of the social media/digital age is, I think, that the idea of ‘celebrity’ is quickly becoming so de-legitimised – mostly by dilution – that even towering global examples like Oprah will very quickly come to look like pathetic little wizards frantically cranking the handles of the Fame Machinery behind a fallen curtain.
One can hope, anyway.
I don’t think it’s fair to disparage all celebrities like that. I’m sure many of them are really nice, decent human beings.
Having said that, I agree that doing anything because it is endorsed by a celebrity is pretty silly.
Nope. ‘Fraid I’m an absolutist on this, Jim. ‘Celebrity’ is a choice necessitating sustained calculation, strategy and agency. It is a repulsive set of behavioral metrics by which to live one’s life: relentless self-promotion; the disproportionate and trivial wasting of tribal public space and tribal civic energy; the destructive appropriation, fetishisation and (usually) monetisation of universal human essences and accumulated wisdoms that are more fragile than we assume; the narcissistic exploitation of the endless good faith and goodwill of others (we mass of ‘nobodies’); the bullying imposition of a near-universally unwanted public ‘legitimisation’ and illusory ‘triumph’ of the very worst motivations and characteristics of humanity. Like arrogant tinpot dictators and false gods, celebrities and Celebrity is un-needed and un-wanted, by the vast majority of us…but these tedious attention-seekers ram themselves brutally into our lives anyway, by way of the celebrity-p***s-pump that is the insatiable mass meeja.
Nah, f**k ‘em all, Jim, they’re sociopathic f**kwits to the last shrieking panto/mass meeja/AI contrived faked human among them. And especially the ‘nice, decent’ ones. Because they should – and do – know better…but still make celebrity’s cynical transactional life choices, even as they wearily pretend to hate making them, and what they get for making them.
Celebrity is a very different beast to the fame that comes unavoidably with material achievement, civic position or fate. (Simply ‘being famous’ qualifies as none of those.) Fame is something that happens to you. Celebrity is something you want, and chase, trashing your own and usually others’ human best qualities in that chase. The former is to be endured when unavoidable and actively resisted and dissipated as fiercely and effectively and quickly as possible. The latter is to be mocked and disdained with a ruthless, uncompromising and universal contempt, with no exemptions or exceptions (for being ‘nice, decent’, etc). Until no-one alive wants to be a celebrity anymore, and Celebrity, along with its odious and parasitical logistical support industries, becomes an extinct human phenomenon, like smallpox, bear-baiting and the right of tribal chiefs to deflower all the tribe’s virgins.
Every time I see another vacuous celebrity item on Unherd and I think “sod this, this is not what I’m paying good money for” I read a comment like yours and it brightens my whole day, couldn’t agree more. Well said that man!
One comes for the dissenting bylined few. One stays for the quietly collegiate many. Solidarity, Spartacus. The civic sanity and human decency of the determinedly unfamous will eventually prevail again…
Ozempic for the body and anti-depressants for the mind …. that should take care of all the rubbish we shove into both. Or is there a better way?
I’m told suicide is a quick and effective fix but one mustn’t say that out loud in these fragile times, so I won’t. I do get impatient with the relentlessly narcissistic, though. Twenty-odd years as a disability carer has taught me that the relationship between any given individual’s degree of surrender to paralysing self-pity and the magnitude of the actual hurdles – physical, psychological, emotional – that life and fate has presented them with…tends to be inverse.
Celebrities very publicly rub our noses in that cognitive dissonance. They can all kindly go f**k themselves. The Christopher Reeves and Michael J Foxes et al among them will always have my full empathy, sympathy, tribal solidarity, love and support.
But not because of their fame.
The problem with ‘celebrities’ is not so much the person themselves, but the fawning way so many respond to them. the fact that TV shows have ‘celebrity’ participants to gain audience shows how powerful the attraction of someone well-known is.
Presumably there is a good , instinctive, evolutionary reason for this trait – something to do with leadership and wantingt e seen as ‘in the leader’s team’?
Mass media then converts this natural positive into the marketing/manipulation tool we see today.
Yes, I tend towards the old tribal trope about the need to avoid cameras, ‘cos they’ll steal your soul, etc etc. Celebrity is really just an industrialised, capitalised mass media instrumentalisation of narcissism. Just about the most paralysing, self-destructive human flaw/pitfall there is.
It never ceases to amaze me how thoroughly we have normalised and internalised the fundamentally sociopathic, and even brutally inhuman, functional premises and unexamined assertions of the mass media, over the last century or so. It seems to me that nothing about the often-grim plight of Humanity can’t be made immeasurably worse by adding to it a 24-7 commentary, from the most mediocre, attention-seeking, self-important space-hoggers among us. Who are these egotistical professional w*nkers, daily on our televisions and screens and newspaper pages and in our ears? It’s just a human ‘given’ now that they’re legitimate and important and, indeed, vital to our tribe (because they tell us just that, 24-7). But it’s an absurdity. A ridiculous contrivance, a mere accident of the over-amplifying technology of mass media, which turns one banal human being into…well, what? A meme? An ad, for themselves? A live performer at Wembley who you can only see on the screen behind you, anyway. ‘Celebrity’ is the most ridiculously useless invention we’ve conjured up. If it were harmless entertainment, fine. But it’s deeply destructive, because both its anti-human currency and its facilitating mass media mechanisms affect – infect – us all.
We think it doesn’t, but it’s seeped so profoundly into our way of human being that we’re blind to it. You could showcase a million examples, but just one will suffice: our tribe’s entirely unremarkable and expected behavioral responses, to a member of it who has just lost a deeply loved person from their life, now generally include sticking a posse of cameras in their face, and demanding some ‘how do you feelzzzzzzzzzzz?‘ emotional-porn free content to monetise. It’s mildly incredible to me that more people who work in the mass media, particularly in the tacky prurient/tragedy/celebrity-harvesting end, aren’t physically attacked. What many do is, I think literally, inhuman.
As I hypothesized, I do think there is a good prospect that celebrity – Warhol’s fame – will just…die a natural death in the social media age. We humans are indeed all becoming famous now, Andy, which means of course that none of us ever will be, ever again.
Just in the nick of time, I think.
Too true, and there is a wearying chicken-and-egg aspect to it. It’s (as you imply) embedded in the sheer epistemic banality of the very idea of a ‘mass media’. We’ve so normalised and internalised the narrative dominance of television, radio and mass circulation press as the ‘story-tellers’ of Humanity that we’ve forgotten how absurdly contrived, unrepresentative and distorting those information mechanics are. The only reason and the only way Nobody Egotist A becomes a ‘celebrity’ is by…well, them wanting to be one – an anti-civic red flag right there, one which should disqualify them from any public profile or influence whatsoever – and then, Somebody Cynical B pointing a camera at them or writing a story about them, over-amplifying Nobody Egotist A into Celebrity C, via…banal mass marketing.
It’s pure technological and advertising con. Social media is rapidly exposing it, by way of amateur imitation-and-dilution, as the epistemic street grift it always was. ‘Mass media’…what a load of bullsh*t. A fat unshaved techie with a fag in his mouth, scratching his crotch while pointing a box of squiggly electronics with a lens one-handed at some needy botoxed dullard reading someone else’s words from a cue card. Some vapid little
wannabe novelist‘lifestyle journalist’ squeezing out 2000 derivative and parasitical click-bait cliches about her ‘wannabenovelist’‘lifestyle journalist’mate’s debut thin slab of derivative and parasitical click-bait cliches, all to try to desperately pump up the ST Magazine’s deflating advertising $ ask. Someone who once appeared in Eastenders rehashing unfunny fourth-hand anecdotes about Ian McKellan for Graham Norton to make mug-the-camera whoopsie over, in a fragmenting free-to-air dead zone?That’s all ‘celebrity’ is: the banality of over-amplifying technology wedded to frantic commercial dead-horse-floggery, by way of wilfully self-debasing individual self-advancement and self-promotion. What sane human being is going to pay the slightest heed to anyone who takes part in that contemptible pantomime? Who the f**k are these people, these tribal ‘story tellers’, choosing to shovel this garbage at us? What the f**k are their ‘story-telling’ qualifications? Boil it down, and they are all negative ones, diminishing ones, tacky ones…fang-bared ambition, hypocritical prurience, amoral, transactional shamelessness, nasty cunning, the aesthetic sensibility and taste of the gutter, the toilet, the bully pit, the blood sport battlefield.
A ‘good, instinctive, evolutionary reason’ for celebrity, for our appetite for it? A human purpose? If I had to bodge one up, it might be something like ‘as a cautionary tale’ – kind of a Cleesian corporate video (‘How To Be A Sh*t Human Being’) on a species scale.
But I think it’s more likely we’re all just overwhelmed, tired and epically gaslit by the mass media machines into numbed acquiescence. Again, my one hope is that the democratisation of celebrity will also, of course, mean its extinction. When we’re all famous, all the time, no-one can be, ever, or ever again.
apols for redundant replies. the unHerd algo is doing mysterious and unpredictable disappearing/reappearing tricks
Unless semaglutide-based medications prove to have disastrous secondary effects, I suspect Weightwatchers and the rest of the dieting industry is finished. The National Museum of African American History and Culture better sell them shares post-haste!
The diet industry won’t be going away anytime soon as people who take slimming drugs can’t stay on them forever, and when they do come off the drug they put the weight back on. So they’ll be looking for the next touted miracle cure for obesity.
I thought the fat Oprah seemed more authentic.
Surely the definition of a celebrity is someone who is owned and manipulated by the media and public?