For many years, Oprah was assumed to be the literal embodiment of the Weight Watchers credo of self-reliance that included willpower, calorie-counting, and exercise. For people who clung to it faithfully and still failed to lose weight, this mindset left them no choice but to feel inadequate, guilty, and just generally bad about themselves.
At the end of 2023, the news came that jolted Earth from its axis. Oprah was taking The Drugs. One way or another, many people felt betrayed, and understandably so. They had bought into the official do-it-yourself line, and felt they had been used somehow.
Some were mad at Oprah for holding a leadership position for almost a decade. Others were angry about her resignation. It was a classic “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” scenario, and being trapped as the villain in that situation could force a person into stress-related eating in a minute.
Journalist Vanessa Romo noted that Oprah promised to be “a vocal advocate in advancing this conversation” — an equivocal statement if ever there was one. Maybe, at that moment, certainty about exactly what to emphasize did not exist in her own mind. More likely, it was a nagging feeling that she had not quite worked out the most honest and effective way to say it.
The result was one of the least eloquent quotations ever credited to Ms. Winfrey:
Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.
Public opinion, AKA “the court of”
Drugs, both legal and illegal, and whatever their intended purpose, are one area of life where people’s deeply held convictions tend to polarize, politicize, stigmatize, and emotionalize. As always, on such a hot topic, public opinion was all over the map, on a runaway bus driven by strong impulses, including opposite feelings within the same person. Oprah’s fanbase, taken as a single entity, was ambivalent (to say the least) about her embrace of the GLP-1 school of healing.
The strain exerted upon any prominent figure whose every word is scrutinized without mercy must be enormous. If Oprah ended her associations with Weight Watchers, that meant somebody had to be wrong, and one trait of “the public” is that it loves to form an opinion based on very slim evidence. But after nearly a decade as a board member, end it she did.
Then, another bomb dropped. As reported by Vanessa Romo,
[…] WeightWatchers unveiled the rollout of WeightWatchers Clinic, which gives members access to doctors who can prescribe weight loss medications… The services were made possible after WW’s acquisition of a telehealth company called Sequence last spring.
Weight Watchers CEO Sima Sistani told the press that the organization’s path had never worked for some aspiring weight-losers, because they were up against “a chronic relapsing condition, with biology and genetics and environmental underpinnings.” Consequently, it was determined that the time had come “to reintroduce ourselves […] to acknowledge the part that we had in the past.”
Parting ways
Nobody wanted to create a perception that something fishy was going on, or that enmity existed between the giant W’s, namely Winfrey and Weight Watchers — but there must be no appearance of inappropriate friendship, either.
The separation happened partly because Oprah was planning a significant TV special about prescription weight-loss meds. Weight Watchers had entered the pharmaceutical business by purchasing a telehealth company and would receive financial benefit from GLP-1 sales. For that and other reasons, it was no longer appropriate for her to be the public face of Weight Watchers; she needed to detach.
Just to make matters even more transparent, Oprah announced that she would donate her share of Weight Watchers income to charity, and the nine remaining members of the board stood behind her because the generous gesture would sweep away suspicions of a conflict of interest.
It took the public a while to digest that much change, but there was more to come. In March, Oprah told TV host Jimmy Kimmel and his audience and the rest of the world that she would now be able to “talk about whatever I want.”
Which, of course, she knew would not stem any of the criticism from the critically-inclined. But it would confirm her own sense of integrity and upright behavior, which, after all, is the most important thing.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “After nearly a decade, Oprah Winfrey is set to depart the board of WeightWatchers,” Wamu.org, 03/01/24
Source: “Oprah Winfrey resigned from WeightWatchers board to ‘talk about whatever I want’ in new special”, FoxBusiness.com, 03/17/24
Image by Lawrence Jackson/Public Domain
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