Whoopi Goldberg is standing with her former Color Purple costar Oprah Winfrey.
While discussing the former talk show host's televised ABC special about the conversation surrounding the use of popular drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro for weight loss, the EGOT winner told the audience on Tuesday's episode of The View that she too had taken the medication.
She made the decision after filming Till, the 2022 biographical drama about Mamie Till-Bradley, an educator who pursued justice after the murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett in August 1955.
Whoever desires the harvest of the Hereafter, We will increase their harvest. And whoever desires ˹only˺ the harvest of this world, We will give them some of it, but they will have no share in the Hereafter.
(The Quran - Chapter Ash-Shuraa : 20)
"I will tell you, I weighed almost 300 lbs. when I made Till," said Goldberg, who acted and produced the motion picture.
OPRAH SPECIAL EXPLORES WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS: After Oprah Winfrey opened up about changing the conversation around obesity and shared her own struggles in the spotlight, #TheView co-hosts discuss. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/GUVfMPdW0T
— The View (@TheView) March 19, 2024
At the time, Goldberg was also recovering from a near-fatal health scare that landed her in the hospital for nearly a month. She was diagnosed with pneumonia in both lungs and also had sepsis, a potentially deadly condition caused by the body’s response to an infection that can lead to tissue damage and organ failure.
"I had taken all those steroids, I was on all this stuff," Goldberg said Tuesday. "And one of the things that’s helped me dropped the weight was the Mounjaro. That’s what I used."
The comedian went on to admit that she didn't realize how much weight she had gained until she looked at herself in the mirror one day. "I just always felt like me," she said. "And then I saw me and I thought, ‘Oh! That’s a lot of me!’ "
Winfrey, 70, revealed in December that she was using a prescription weight-loss medication as part of her health and wellness regimen, alongside regular exercise and other lifestyle tweaks. She did not share what medication she takes.
On An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, the media giant spoke with a handful of medical experts on obesity, which the American Medical Association designated as a disease in 2013. She also discussed her own up and down journey with her weight, and the shame she felt when she was publicly ridiculed for her gains and losses.
"For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport," Winfrey said, recalling hurtful headlines she had read about herself over the decades, and her own decisions to starve herself in order to drop the pounds.
The turning point for Winfrey’s approach to using pharmaceutical aids came in July 2022 when she had an "aha moment" during a taped panel conversation with weight loss experts and clinicians. (Called The State of Weight, the chat was part of Oprah Daily’s Life You Want series).
"I realized I’d been blaming myself all these years for being overweight, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control," she said on Monday's show. "Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it's about the brain."
"When I tell you how many times I have blamed myself," Winfrey continued during a particularly emotional conversation. "Because you think you're smart enough to have figured this out, and then you hear, all along, it's you fighting your brain."
Goldberg related to that, and suggest on The View Tuesday that viewers be a little bit bit kinder to each other, and to themselves.
"Maybe the key is to stop judging everybody. Maybe that’s the key," she said.
"My weight has come and gone and up and down, but it’s never been an issue for me because I don’t listen to what other people say about me so it has never been a problem. But I think it’s very hard for people to just know what a normal weight would be," she added, noting that others don't often know how to talk to someone when they've been through a weight gain. "Everyone has something to say but no one said, ‘How you doing?’ Because it involves so many other things."
"I think it is a matter of how we treat ourselves," Goldberg noted.
The View airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC. An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution is now streaming on Hulu.
