‘Today’: Oprah Winfrey Reveals Health Challenges From Weight Loss Drugs

Sheinelle Jones‘ second day as the fourth of Today‘s new cohost featured a very special guest.

Oprah Winfrey stopped by the NBC morning show to promote her new book, Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like To Be Free, which she cowrote with endocrinologist and associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine Dr. Ania M. Jastreboff. While reflecting on her weight-loss journey, Winfrey shared some surprising side effects she’s experienced while taking a GLP-1 medication.

Jastreboff stated that the most common symptoms for people taking weight-loss medication include nausea, diarrhea, and constipation.

“I never had nausea or diarrhea, but I did have the third one,” Winfrey stated. “I finally figured out, for me, what the right combination of magnesium and water is. I have to drink a lot of water. I have to have a gallon of water a day.”

According to Winfrey, she has to finish drinking her gallon of water before 4 p.m., or else she will be up all night. While drinking lots of water makes Winfrey’s kidneys “very happy,” Jastreboff said there are other ways to “lessen nausea” while on weight-loss medication.

“The most important way is working with your healthcare provider and going up very, very slowly. So, start slow, go slow. If you’re feeling nauseated, then don’t increase the dose,” she explained. “And there’s other things — not eating past the point of fullness, making sure you’re monitoring which foods could make you worse. All of these different things can lower the side effects.”

Winfrey revealed that she gained 20 pounds last year after going off of her medication to test if she would retain her weight loss without the drug. “If you’re on blood pressure medication, you get your blood pressure to the level that your doctor says is healthy for you, you come off the medication, your blood pressure is gonna go up,” she stated. “The same thing is true for this. I know it ’cause I proved it.”

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Earlier in the episode, Winfrey said she has a newfound sense of freedom since starting a GLP-1 prescription. “The new freedom is understanding that all those years that I suffered and was on the tabloids every week and made fun of and was the butt of everybody’s jokes, and I thought it was because of my lack of willpower,” she told Jones and Jenna Bush Hager. “[I thought] ‘What is wrong with me that I can be successful in so many ways and I can’t conquer this thing?’ Now I know that it has nothing to do with willpower. It has everything to do with your biology.”

Winfrey said she hopes her and Jastreboff’s new book will help change the conversation about obesity and weight loss. “Back in the day, when I first started The Oprah [Winfrey] Show, in ’86, ’87, we did our first show on alcoholism. And people in the audience were like, ‘Oh, just put the bottle down,'” she recalled. “People did not recognize — refused to recognize — that alcoholism is a disease. And so, now we’re saying the same thing about obesity.”

Winfrey continued, “It’s a disease. It’s a chronic disease. You have to manage it. And even when you think you’ve gotten to your goal weight, it’s not the answer because what the medications do is manage the set point in your body.”

Today With Jenna & Sheinelle, Weekdays, 10 a.m./9c, NBC