We have picked up on the search volume for the GLP-1 semaglutide injection itself, which was designed to treat type-2 diabetics, having jumped a staggering 170% in the U.S. alone in the first half of the year in 2023. This would mean there are an estimated 1.2 million searches per month alone for the wonder drug Ozempic. This doesn’t really seem that surprising when you consider the level of celebrity chatter about the drug and the complete transformation in the physical appearance of these celebrities that have outright admitted to taking the drug.
Oprah Winfrey has been pretty candid about her experience, despite not naming the drug at first. She has said that it has totally been a paradigm shift for her on how she thinks about food. ‘For all these years, I thought that thin people just had more willpower. That they ate better, that they could stick to a diet longer, all that. Then she talks about how she has taken her first dose of a GLP-1 and quickly noticed that maybe thin people aren’t thinking about food all that much at all. Maybe when they’re hungry, they eat, and when they’re full, they stop.’
Rebel Wilson and Sharon Osbourne are probably two of the females who are spoken about most often in relation to Ozempic, but they are certainly far from alone. Whoopi Goldberg and singer Meghan Trainor both ended up trying Mounjaro, which works in much the same manner and also has an appetite suppressant. On the other hand, it is certainly not something that one ought to take lightly either. Anyone that is considering using weight loss medication is encouraged to start a conversation with their medical professional, as medical professionals make sure that GLP-1 inhibitors have long-run repercussions that need to be considered.
Torri Spelling
This, according to Tori Spelling on the podcast MisSPELLING, happened after she had her fifth child, Beau, in 2017. She said that after that, she began using injections to lose some weight. However, the part that I think surprised her a little is when she said that for most of her life, she had been maintaining 120 pounds without much work, but this last pregnancy caused it to balloon to 160 pounds.
“This is the first time that pregnancy weight just hasn’t budged,” she said. She added that she is still exercising and trying different things, intermittent fasting included, and really nothing is happening. “At one point, my doctor just said it might just be an age thing,” she recalled. “I turned 49 around then, and I was just kind of going through menopause at that time. That’s when they put me on the hormone medication. It sort of changed the whole dynamic for me at that time,” she added.
A little later, she was put on a different drug, the Mounjaro. She reported she’s not on it at the moment, though she did lose a few pounds when she was using the drug, and she stopped the injections around January of 2024. Before Ozempic, she had experimented with another drug, Ozempic, though she said it didn’t work the way she wanted it to. Which correlates to the data given by Drugs.com, saying almost 14% of the individuals trying Ozempic actually don’t lose any weight using the drug. Which actually does fit the use of Ozempic, given the data, and it may not actually work the same for everybody.
Whoopi Goldberg
Even though Whoopi usually is pretty forthcoming about her views on aging, she confessed on an episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show that she began taking weight loss injections around 2022 after watching a movie called “Till,” a film that featured her reflection, but she “just didn’t like how I looked.” This follows a story that she told about a woman who believed she was wearing a “fat suit,” a scenario that appears almost laughable but apparently was meaningful to her. At this point, she weighed around 300 pounds.
But soon, things moved pretty quickly. Talking to Kelly Clarkson, she spoke about taking “that wonderful shot,” which would help people who just need a little bit of a boost, and it had been really good for Kelly. She sure wasn’t dancing around it. She went on to say that she had lost so much weight that she had, in effect, shed the body fat of two people. Which, really, is a rather weird thing to say, but it gets the point across.
She elaborated further on The View in 2024. “The reason I lost the weight is because I took Mounjaro. It’s an injection that I had to take weekly,” she said. She further clarified that she has been using this injection because she has previously taken other medications that made her gain weight. “One of the reasons that has helped me lose the weight is Monjaro,” she said.
Sunny Hostin
Whoopi Goldberg’s co-host on the show, Sunny Hostin, has had a similar experience with Mounjaro. She revealed that she was able to lose about 40 pounds during the lockdown, and, to be honest, it doesn’t really surprise me, but being in front of the cameras made it seem like a heck of a lot more. She had no problem saying that she knew she had to appear on the show looking the way she looked, which was uncomfortable for her. “I was appalled at the fact that I was going to have to come out on air,” she said during a broadcast of The View in 2024. But she chose to try out the Mounjaro, and it worked for her in several ways, including helping her lose weight and lowering her cholesterol, something that wasn’t necessarily on her to-do list.
But there’s also a bit of research to support this. In a study in 2023, they discovered that taking the higher dose, such as the 15 milligram dose of the drug Mounjaro, resulted in a lowered cholesterol level of nearly 6%. Hostin related this to her own situation. She explained that prior to taking the drug, she would have a cholesterol level of 200, and now she’s down to a healthy 140. “I take Mounjaro. My cholesterol levels are now 140,” she said.
She explained it further on her podcast, The View: Behind The Table. She stated there that “I don’t feel like I should be embarrassed or guilty about taking this medication. I actually think it should be accessible to everybody.” She has continued by explaining that Monjaro wasn’t the first drug she tried. She actually tried Ozempic first, but it didn’t work out so well. She described the side effects as including constipation and it didn’t significantly help with her weight loss anyway. And it just so happens that vomiting and diarrhea may be Ozempic side effects as well.
Rebel Wilson
As Rebel told The Times in a 2024 interview, she saw the Ozempic as something she needed to keep the weight off, not something she needed to kick off the process. She was very clear about this. Rebel’s kickstart into losing weight was actually inspired by a doctor, who told her to lose some weight before beginning IVF, in which case she knew exactly what she needed to do. Rebel also argued in favor of injections in light of her own appetite for sweets, where she said she had a “basically bottomless stomach.”
She has talked about it in a personal capacity as well, especially during an interview with People magazine. She said that at that time, she had a physically unhealthy relationship with food and exercise. Consuming an entire carton of ice-cream at night and hating it, but still managing to drag herself out of bed the next morning to walk an hour and a half at the gym every day. Enough is enough.
Over the years, her thinking has changed. She has begun to eat more thoughtfully and exercise more. She doesn’t eat out for every meal and doesn’t put everything she eats and every activity she does as punishment for herself. She has also explained that people generally look for or assume the existence of some kind of magic formula, or an exercise routine that will cure everything. But for her, the answers to her problems have nothing to do with that. It’s about developing healthier ways to handle emotions.
Sharon Osbourne
Sharon Osbourne is not one of those women who danced around the issue of Ozempic. After dropping 30 lbs on the medication back in 2023, she just outrightly defended the treatment. When asked by E! News, she stated that it shouldn’t be something that someone is embarrassed about, something that one did wrong just because they relied on medication to shed a few pounds.
She has also been quite open about her reasons for thinking she needed to change her weight to begin with. She explained her complicated relationship with food and how that has factored into things. Eventually, she stopped the use of the drug, but she did so for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that it wasn’t working. She said she dropped below 100 pounds, which wasn’t what she wanted to accomplish either. At her heaviest weight, she had been the equivalent of 230 pounds, but then she dropped below 100 pounds. She’s trying to get to what she considers a healthy weight of about 105.
In the early part of 2024, she opened once more about what happened to her once she stopped the injections, and this portion seemed more complex. In her visit to Loose Women, she revealed that the effects did not end once she stopped having the injections. Her weight is still off. Far too easily. She also added that it seems like she could no longer manage to gain weight even when she wanted to, and she is actually hoping to gain weight back.
