Whoopi Goldberg, 68, is being open and candid about her own struggles with weight in the wake of Oprah’s recent special, Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution, which aired on ABC on March 18. While speaking on The View, where Goldberg is a co-host, she shared that during her time filming the movie Till in 2021, her weight climbed to 300 pounds.
“I had taken all those steroids, I was on all this stuff and one of the things that has helped me drop the weight is the Mounjaro… That’s what I use,” the star said. Mounjaro is a relatively new injectable diabetes drug that also triggers weight loss.
The EGOT winner’s co-host, Sunny Hostin, 55, went on to admit that she gained 40 pounds during the COVID pandemic. To help drop the weight, she also used Mounjaro.
“All I did was eat… I love to cook and I found out I love to eat and I was horrified by the fact I would have to come out on here. I was,” Hostin admitted. “I also took Mounjaro and I got all these nasty emails and things. [They said] ‘You’re too skinny and… you’re taking it away from diabetics.'”
She continued, “So there is shame when you’ve gained weight. I had never experienced that kind of shame before and what I loved about what [Oprah] said is obesity is a disease, right?”
Hostin added that when people are diabetic or have cardiac disease they aren’t shamed for taking these drugs, however, when people are obese, they get a great deal of criticism for turning to them.
“I found my cholesterol went up to 200 when I gained the extra weight and I used Mounjaro and my cholesterol is 140 now. I feel better, I look better and that’s what it is about,” Hostin concluded.
Goldberg chimed in and asked folks to stop judging people over their physical appearance.
“Maybe that’s the key. Because, listen, when I realized how much I had put on, because… I always felt like me. And then I saw me and I thought, “Oh, that’s a lot of me,”‘ she said.
But she hasn’t made the decision to utilize weight-loss medication because other people might think she’s put on too much weight. If you recall, in 2022, the Sister Act star called out writer Kyndall Cunningham, who accused her of wearing a fat suit in the movie Till in a review published by The Daily Beast because of her weight gain.
“My weight has come and gone 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 said.