Oprah Winfrey is leaving Weight Watchers after nearly a decade — and after admitting in recent months that she'd used weight loss medications.
As the company announced in a press release, Winfrey will not be seeking re-election on the Weight Watchers' board of directors, which she joined in 2015, and will be donating her stake in the company to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC.
According to CBS, the 70-year-old TV legend owned at the time of the announcement about 1.4 percent of the company's stake, valued at around $4 million per the company's current stock prices, which plummeted significantly following news of her exit.
Though Winfrey and Weight Watchers said in the company's statement that her donation to the NMAAHC is meant to "eliminate any perceived conflict of interest around her taking weight loss medications," it's unquestionably telling that her departure comes just a few months after admitting to People magazine that she'd taken weight loss drugs.
In that December interview, the multi-hyphenate media mogul didn't specify which medications she'd taken. Just a few months prior, however, she admitted during a panel discussion published by her titular magazine that she'd considered taking the GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs Ozempic or Wegovy to help manage her weight.
During that discussion, titled "The State of Weight," Winfrey said that she'd thought about using the injectables, which mimic the feeling of fullness to help lower blood sugar and promote weight loss, after having knee surgery.
"Even when I first started hearing about the weight loss drugs, at the same time I was going through knee surgery, and I felt, 'I've got to do this on my own,'" she said last September. "Because if I take the drug, that's the easy way out."
But, as Winfrey told People, her feelings changed.
"I had an awareness of [weight-loss] medications, but felt I had to prove I had the willpower to do it," she told the magazine. "I now no longer feel that way."
For decades now, Winfrey has battled harmful headlines and comments about her weight even as it fluctuated — and her decision to take weight loss drugs seems to have been in defiance of the hater inside her head, too.
"Obesity is a disease," she said in Decemeber. "It’s not about willpower — it's about the brain."
After finally coming to that conclusion, Winfrey says she "released" her shame surrounding weight loss drugs.
"The fact that there's a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for," she told People at the end of last year. "I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people, and particularly myself."
It's a rousing statement, to say the least — though as Weight Watchers' stock continues to fall amid the news, there may be folks at the company who disagree.
More on weight loss drugs: New Study Contradicts Patients Regaining Weight If They Stop Taking Ozempic
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