Oprah takes on toxic diet culture during her last appearance with WeightWatchers

As she steps down from WeightWatchers board and sells her shares, the company’s chief dieter examines the culture she helped to create.

Oprah Winfrey wants people to love their bodies. She wants people to know that sometimes dieting doesn’t work, but also sometimes it does. She wants viewers who logged into her three-hour, live-streamed event on Thursday night with WeightWatchers—a company that, until this month, she owned 15% of—to know that she was lied to. She wants them to understand that, for years, she sold them that lie: that willpower is all you need to lose weight. But she also wants it known that it wasn’t really her fault.