
31 Stars Who Look Different After Taking Ozempic And Other Weight-Loss Drugs – The List
The following article mentions eating disorders.
In an industry like showbiz, where looks are a key part of the job profile for better or worse, dramatic physical transformations hardly come as a shock. But with the entry of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro into the picture — and the pull they seem to have in some celebrity circles — the landscape of weight alterations has changed drastically. From comedians to reality stars, sports icons to musicians and A-list actors, many celebrated names have embraced the weight loss revolution that has been brought on by drugs typically meant to be administered to diabetes patients — with stunning results to show for it.
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A whole league of high-profile names — including the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Oprah Winfrey, Rebel Wilson, Billie Jean King, Fat Joe, and Harvey Fierstein — have used weight-loss drugs. For many, taking drugs like Ozempic has been about more than just getting thinner; it has also proved useful for personal and emotional growth.
While opinion remains divided over the validity of diverting drugs meant for treating acute diseases to people wanting to shed some kilos, medical prescriptions for Ozempic and its counterparts seem to be flying off the shelves. Here are 31 stars who look different after taking Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs.
Rebel Wilson
For years, Rebel Wilson charmed fans as Fat Amy, her “Pitch Perfect” character that defined her public image and career as a plus-size star in Hollywood. In 2020, which she famously dubbed her “year of health,” she embarked on a journey to turn things around in her life. The actor’s “year of health” involved a number of changes, including losing around 80 pounds. “It wasn’t a goal to get to a certain weight. It was just being the healthiest version of myself,” she told People, revealing that her desire for motherhood was the foundation upon which her weight loss efforts were built.
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While Wilson’s weight loss came about as a result of multiple changes in her lifestyle, diet, and fitness routines, the “Bridesmaids” star also shared that she used Ozempic. “Someone like me could have a bottomless appetite for sweets, so I think those drugs can be good,” she told The Times. Wilson, who has been open about her fraught relationship with food, only used the weight-loss drug for a short period.
Jim Gaffigan
Jim Gaffigan’s physical transformation has been hard to ignore — especially since the comedian has not shied away from talking about it. Thanks to Mounjaro, a type 2 diabetes drug that cuts down on appetite, Gaffigan lost 50 pounds after his weight reached 270 pounds. “I would eat when I was hungry and I would eat when I was happy and eat when I was sad, and I would just eat. It was my reward,” he told Us Weekly, using his weight loss milestone to shed light on the stigma attached to food addiction. “There are people that just have no ‘off’ button to eat, right?” he said.
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In 2023, after getting a nudge from his doctor, Gaffigan decided to give weight loss medications a try. However, he wasn’t totally on board with this move at first. Uncertain about the side effects brought on by Mounjaro, Gaffigan was apparently not fully convinced about the effectiveness of the medicine until he actually began seeing results. “I’m just grateful because it’s such a better life,” he told People.
Gaffigan even addressed the controversy surrounding using Mounjaro for weight loss in a 2024 comedy special titled “The Skinny.” After acknowledging that some people think it’s “cheating” to take such drugs for weight loss, he quipped, “I’m not playing Major League Baseball. I’m just a fat guy trying to not die.”
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Kelly Clarkson
Superstar singer and talk show host Kelly Clarkson resisted using weight loss medication for years. However, as she told Whoopi Goldberg on an episode of “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” her doctor eventually convinced her to give it a try. “I ended up having to do that, too, because my bloodwork got so bad,” Clarkson said. After being diagnosed as pre-diabetic, the “American Idol” alum — who has also lived with thyroid and autoimmune issues since 2006 and was 203 pounds at her heaviest – finally caved in and started taking an unnamed drug. “Everybody thinks it’s Ozempic. It’s not,” she added, clarifying that it was another medication that helped regulate her blood sugar.
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Clarkson’s weight-loss journey has been a long road. In 2018, for example, she lost 37 pounds after cutting lectins from her diet. “I know the industry loves the weight gone, but for me it wasn’t (about) the weight,” she told Hoda Kotb on “Today” at the time. “For me, it was ‘I’m not on my medicine any more.'” In 2024, she told People that sticking to a protein-heavy diet and walking regularly also helped her lose weight.
Elon Musk
When a social media user asked Elon Musk on X, formerly known as Twitter, what his secret to looking “awesome, fit, ripped & healthy” was, the tech tycoon had just three words to say: “Fasting and Wegovy.” Not one to mince his words — no matter how outrageous they often seem to many — Musk is one of the few high-profile people to have unabashedly admitted to the use of Wegovy, which boasts a stamp of legitimacy from the Food and Drug Administration as a weight management medicine that counterparts Ozempic and Mounjaro currently do not. Musk has, however, been a vocal proponent of all these weight-loss drugs doing rounds in celebrity circles.
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During the 2024 holiday season, Musk posted a photo of himself dressed up as Santa Claus on X and wrote, “Ozempic Santa.” He then went on to clarify that his drug of choice for weight loss was actually Mounjaro, “but that doesn’t have the same ring to it.” While there is no dearth of issues for the Tesla owner — who is also now politically active as a senior advisor to President Donald Trump — to address on social media, his weight became a point of prominent discussion in 2022, after a shirtless picture of him holidaying in Mykonos went viral and invited trolling. “I got to work out and be in better shape,” Musk said on the “Full Send Podcast” at the time.
Kathy Bates
Kathy Bates’ dramatic 100-pound weight loss rendered her nearly unrecognizable, leading social media users to speculate over the means she used to shed kilos. The most obvious conclusion people drew pointed toward Ozempic. And though the “Misery” star did admit to the use of the popular weight-loss drug, she did come forward to clarify that it was not the only formula she used to get healthier. “I have to impress upon people out there that this was hard work for me, especially during the pandemic,” she told People, detailing the changes she made to her lifestyle and eating habits to transform her look. “It’s very hard to say you’ve had enough.”
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It was a diabetes diagnosis that drove Bates to make some changes. “[Diabetes] runs in my family, and I’d seen what my father had gone through. He had had a leg amputation. One of my sisters is dealing with it very seriously, and it terrified me. It scared me straight,” she said. “I just pushed the plate away.” She spent about a decade working on losing weight, with Ozempic only coming into the picture to help her lose the last 20 pounds. Bates — whose health has been ridden with serious conditions like lymphedema, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer in the past — gushed about how she was beginning to feel comfortable in her own skin after losing weight. “I can stand up all day long and walk and move and breathe and do so many things that I couldn’t before,” she said.
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Oprah Winfrey
When Oprah Winfrey signs off on something, it is bound to grab widespread attention. The legendary talk show host is one of the most famous names to have openly talked about using drugs for weight loss, ultimately offering a major platform for conversations about the trend. “The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for,” she told People, while recalling the years of body-shaming she was subjected to. Winfrey has been discrete about the kind of medication she used in her weight loss journey, revealing only that she relied on it “as a tool to manage not yo-yoing.”
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Winfrey has also been candid about the stigma surrounding using certain medications for weight loss. In a 2024 ABC special called “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,” she spoke to medical professionals about obesity and the medications available today to regulate it, putting the condition down as a disease that required appropriate management. As the TV icon said in the special, “The number one thing I hope people come away with is knowing that [obesity] is a disease, and it’s in the brain.”
Harvey Fierstein
With a little help from a diabetes medication called Zepbound, Harvey Fierstein managed to shed 120 pounds. Zepbound, like Mounjaro, is a brand of tirzepatide.
The “Mrs. Doubtfire” actor has struggled with his weight for decades. At his heaviest, he weighed over 300 pounds. “I’ve been skinny before, that’s the sad part. I’ve been skinny, I’ve been fat, I’ve been skinny, I’ve been fat,” he told Page Six. After gaining weight during the pandemic, Fierstein turned to Zepbound. According to the star, the drug has helped him manage his appetite — and it doesn’t feel overly restrictive. “What’s different is what the drug actually does for you which is I don’t feel like I’m dieting … I know what it is to be full like a normal person,” he said, reflecting on his experience of living with extra weight for years. “People don’t understand that being fat is not a choice. It’s something that you’re body is out of whack and this puts your body in whack.”
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Sharon Osbourne
Sharon Osbourne has been brutally honest, as she always is, about her use of Ozempic — the good, the bad, the ugly. “It’s not a dirty little secret when you’ve taken something to help you lose weight, which is perfectly fine,” she told E! News in 2023, saying that the type 2 diabetes medication helped her drop 30 pounds. Sharon, who has spent decades in the spotlight as the wife of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne, shared she’s struggled with body image and an eating disorder — conditions that likely shaped her non-judgmental view toward weight-loss drugs. “Whatever you choose is up to you,” she stated.
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At the same time, Sharon hasn’t shied away from dishing on the downsides of Ozempic, telling the Daily Mail, “You can lose so much weight and it’s easy to become addicted to that, which is very dangerous.” The TV personality lost a significant amount of weight, and it even became difficult for her to gain any weight back. She eventually ended up losing 42 pounds on the drug.
The weight loss even changed the look of her face — so much so, that Sharon’s husband even said she looked like a certain first lady. “Ozzy’s having a go at me because he says I look like Mrs. Reagan. He calls me Nancy Reagan all the time! So it’s just time to stop,” she said on “Piers Morgan Uncensored.” She quit using Ozempic in 2023.
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Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg brought her trademark shrewdness to the weight-loss drugs conversation taking over Hollywood, by making a proud declaration of her outing with these medications. The use of Mounjaro came about as a result of health concerns for the EGOT winner, who has hardly been one to pay heed to critical public chatter about her weight. “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,” she said on an episode of her talk show “The View” in 2024.
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But after she almost got to 300 pounds while filming the 2022 movie “Till,” Goldberg felt she had to make a change. She told Page Six that the weight-loss drug helped kick off her health journey and make her “metabolism move,” following the residual effects of certain other treatments, like back surgery, that she had undergone and which had required the use of steroids. “That was the only way they could jumpstart my system … I was like, ‘Oh, please, God, make this work,'” she said. By the end of the year, Goldberg was proudly showing off her transformed physique on her show.
Charles Barkley
Charles Barkley is another proud user of Mounjaro, the type 2 diabetes drug he turned to after his doctor raised the alarm on health concerns stemming from his weight. “My doctor told me, she says, there’s a lot of fat young people. Ain’t a lot of fat old people, they’re all dead,” he said during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” in 2023. Combining his medication with a routine of regular workouts, the NBA legend managed to downsize from 352 pounds to 290 pounds in just a few months’ time. “I’m starting to feel like a human being, not a fat a** anymore,” he said, while humorously acknowledging that he was oblivious to the mechanisms of how the drug actually worked to cut down his weight.
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Barkley, who has been open about using Mounjaro, also got candid about his use of weight-loss drugs with one of the most famous poster faces of the trend: Oprah Winfrey. On an episode of his CNN show “King Charles,” Barkley reflected on the variety of weight loss methods available for people to rely on — drugs being one of them. “There’s no shoe size that fits all,” he said, recalling his own journey of turning to Mounjaro after certain medical procedures like hip replacement surgery caused him weight fluctuations of up to 100 pounds.
Tracy Morgan
Tracy Morgan knows how to get a laugh out of people, and one of his longtime signature tricks has been exposing his stomach. For years across red carpets and talk shows, the comedian has gladly lifted his shirt to show the world his frame that, of late, has slimmed down significantly. Ozempic has played a key role in the evident changes in Morgan’s appearance — and he has been nothing but loud and proud about his use of the weight-loss drug. “It cuts my appetite in half. Now I only eat half a bag of Doritos,” he told E! News in 2024, further detailing that he took the diabetes medicine once a week.
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Morgan, however, also caused a little bit of a flurry with certain remarks he made in jest about Ozempic on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” saying that he had managed to “out-eat” the medication and ended up gaining 40 pounds. His comment gained widespread attention, though the humor of it was lost in his straight-faced delivery of it. In fact, Morgan had to later come forward and clarify, “Ozempic did great by me and I was glad to use it.”
Tori Spelling
Tori Spelling of “Beverly Hills, 90210” fame turned to medication for weight loss after giving birth to her fifth child in 2017. The actor, who shares all of her children with her ex-husband Dean McDermott, revealed on an episode of her podcast “misSPELLING” that she was unable to lose her baby weight after the couple’s youngest, Beau Dean McDermott, came along. It was seemingly a novel experience for Spelling, who has been open about being naturally thin for most of her life. After Beau was born, she was 160 pounds, which was 40 pounds heavier than she’d ever been. “I couldn’t lose the weight and the doctor was like, ‘Well, it’s an age thing,'” she said. Spelling was 44 when her youngest son was born.
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When nothing helped Spelling shed the pregnancy weight off — she made changes to her food and workout routines — she turned to the weight-loss drugs that came to take Hollywood by storm. She was initially put on a regimen of Ozempic, but when that failed to show adequate results for her, she switched drugs. “I did Mounjaro and everyone admits it now. It’s a different time so I don’t feel shamed saying that,” she said. The reality star was also given hormonal prescriptions along with the diabetes medicine. After reaching her desired weight, Spelling stopped using Ozempic in early 2024.
Jon Gosselin
Jon Gosselin’s journey of managing his weight has been long and demanding, but the “Jon & Kate Plus 8” star has attempted to remain dedicated to it. In early 2024, Gosselin began using semaglutide — a medication commonly associated with Ozempic — and reported a significant weight loss of 32 pounds within two months. The results he saw were so promising that Gosselin expressed regret for not starting the treatment earlier, telling Page Six, “You know what’s annoying? The regret of not starting it 10 years ago.” Gosselin also managed to switch up his dietary lifestyle in the process, saying that the drug helped cut out his alcohol consumption and regulate his appetite.
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Gosselin seemed to have been making good progress with his weight loss routine, dropping over 50 pounds over the year. Toward the end of 2024, however, he encountered a little bit of a setback when he ran out of semaglutide supply. “I couldn’t inject, I couldn’t do anything. So I was just hitting the gym real hard,” he told Fox News. His roving lifestyle as a DJ didn’t make things any easier, with Gosselin admitting to letting himself go by eating without much regulation. “The hardest thing with weight loss is maintaining that weight loss,” he said.
Claudia Oshry
Comedian Claudia Oshry is known for her unfiltered personality on social media. She brought the same bluntness to the viral conversation around weight-loss drugs with an open admission about her own experiences with them. “You thought they were going to make a weight-loss drug and I wasn’t going to take it?” Oshry, who is also known as Girl With No Job, said on an episode of her podcast “The Toast” in 2023 (via E! News). She went on to disclose that she initially had reservations about using a drug to curb her appetite. “In the beginning, my decision to not share was rooted in a little bit shame,” she said.
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The discussion took an emotional turn when Oshry broke down in tears while recalling her pre-Ozempic days: “Now I look back at pictures and see myself through this new lens and it makes me feel sad. I have very mixed emotions.” Though her physical transformation invited wide-ranging compliments on social media — and brought her down 70 pounds to the size she favored — Oshry was careful not to propagate the use of the diabetes medication for weight loss to her millions-strong followers. Months after talking about getting on Ozempic, Oshry told Page Six that she had quit the drug and was in a good space. “I didn’t even know how different my life could be,” she said.
Bonnie Chapman
Bonnie Chapman, daughter of Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman, is another public figure who has had a positive experience using tirzepatide, an anti-diabetic medicine belonging to a class of drugs similar to Ozempic. Detailing her weight loss journey in a 2024 Instagram reel, she shared that living with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) impacted her ability to lose weight on her own. With some help from weight-loss drugs and the health platform Morph Wellness, she changed her physique.
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“Tirzepatide also taught me how to make healthy weight decisions and healthy goals about what food I’m putting into my body,” she continued. “I am able to look at myself in the mirror and feel so proud of where I’ve gotten.” Chapman, who lost close to 60 pounds in a matter of 10 months, was initially hesitant to give tirzepatide a try, owing to a bad experience she had with Ozempic. “My body did not like it,” Chapman told E! News in 2024, recalling how Ozempic made her feel nauseous and totally ruined her appetite. She found her magic bullet in tirzepatide, which helped her trim down to 126 pounds.
Billie Jean King
Tennis icon Billie Jean King is among the many high-profile names to have used weight loss injections to manage their health. During an appearance on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ “Wiser Than Me” podcast, King got candid about living with an eating disorder and exploring medication to “quiet the noise” in her head. “I’m a binge eater. Every morning I wake up, I tell myself I have an eating disorder,” the geriatric sports star said, talking about the mental battles she endured when it came to food. “With an eating disorder, I have two voices in my head sometimes that argue.”
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King’s complicated relationship with food began post the age of 50, years after she retired from her sport in 1983. As she elaborated in her book “All In: An Autobiography,” her dietary struggles were linked to the process of figuring out her sexuality. “When I overate the way I liked to, it pushed my emotions down to the bottom of my stomach. I did it to keep my emotions down, and to get numb,” she told The New Yorker. King eventually sought treatment for the disorder and while she seemed positively curious about the effect of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic — of which she admittedly took “a few injections” – she did voice some reservations about the fast pace at which they work.
Josh Gad
Broadway veteran and silver screen star Josh Gad is another high-profile celebrity to have opened up about the use of drugs to control his weight. “I’m on a GLP-1,” Gad said on “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard,” mentioning that it was the first time he was coming out in public with this detail. “It has suppressed, in a great way, that noise … when I wake up, I feel hunger pains — and so much of that is psychological, right? — and what this does is it takes away that signal,” he explained, going on to reflect on the consequences of his physical transformation being possibly unfavorable for his career. “I’ve always been the funny fat guy. Can I be the funny skinny guy?”
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Losing weight with GLP-1 medication — which is famous by the brand names Ozempic and Mounjaro — was hardly a smooth journey for the “Frozen” actor, who had to switch between drugs to figure out what worked best for him. He revealed that the drug he initially introduced to his health regimen helped him shed 40 pounds, but caused issues with his colon. “I was really bummed out because it was working incredibly for me,” he said. Gad also noted that his wife, actor Ida Darvish, was a little wary of him using drugs for weight loss, but ultimately was very much in his corner through the process.
Heather Gay
In 2023, “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Heather Gay shared that after she’d started using Ozempic, her weight wasn’t the only thing that changed. “You lose five pounds, people are nicer to you,” she told People. “I don’t know why. It’s just the way the world works and that makes me sad for women.” The Bravolebrity echoed this sentiment in a 2024 interview with ABC News. “I never realized how much my weight affected the way people treated me,” she said. “But I have loved all the versions of myself and I feel like body positivity wasn’t a lie for me. It changed my life.”
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Gay’s weight-loss journey was a topic of conversation on Season 5 of “RHOSLC,” during which her enthusiasm about using Ozempic was well-documented. “It’s been a long, overdue glow-up. Thank god for modern medicine, that’s all I can say,” she said on an episode in 2024, noting that she lost 25 pounds. She, however, did not seem to resent any version of her body — before or after the use of Ozempic — emphasizing that her journey was more about self-acceptance rather than chasing a specific size. “I’ve apologized for my body my entire life … and I’d rather just have body neutrality. I love myself heavy. I love myself now.”
Shanna Moakler
Former Miss USA and reality star Shanna Moakler began using Mounjaro after her life was turned upside-down. In 2023, both of her parents died within a few months of one another, and the grief was overwhelming. “I was in a very, very dark place. I stopped dieting. I stopped exercising. I just ate like sh**,” Moakler told People in 2024. “I was like, ‘I’m going to f***ing eat the pain away.” On top of all of that, there was extra interest in her personal life because of her ex-husband Travis Barker and his new wife Kourtney Kardashian. As she told the outlet, “paparazzi were at my front door from the Kardashian media circus with Travis. It was on another level, and I didn’t know how to deal.”
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Moakler eventually began taking Mounjaro to lose the weight she gained following her parents’ deaths, and evidently, the transformation helped her feel more like herself. “I don’t think anyone has a clue about who I am,” she told People. Even though Moakler hasn’t divulged the specifics of her experiences with Mounjaro, the change in her physique is all too apparent on her social media, which is replete with selfies and videos of her fit frame.
Alabama Barker
Like her mother Shanna Moakler, Alabama Barker underwent a stunning transformation after giving weight loss medication a try. The social media influencer — whom Moakler shares with her ex-husband Travis Barker — has been open on her platforms about navigating body image issues and made a rather blunt but audacious declaration of why she chose to take the medication route. “I’m tired of being fat and photographing like a damn ogre,” she said in a get-ready-with-me video on TikTok. Barker followed in her mother’s footsteps by not revealing too many details of how many pounds she dropped — or even which drug she was taking to manage her weight.
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Given her status as a celebrity kid and her wide reach online, Barker is no stranger to the spotlight and the trolling that inevitably comes with it. Back in 2023, she came down heavily on critics of her weight, sharing on TikTok, “You guys also act like I’ve gained 1000 pounds. It’s like five to 10 pounds, which is so normal for a lot of girls. Weight fluctuates, and I don’t want any girls that are young watching this who are gaining weight to ever think there’s something wrong with it.” She also revealed that she was dealing with an autoimmune disease and thyroid issues that affected her body.
Sunny Hostin
Like her longtime cohost Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin has opened up about using Mounjaro to manage her weight. Her encounter with the prescription medication came following some extra weight — 40 pounds to be precise — she put on during the COVID-19 pandemic. “There is shame when you’ve gained weight,” she said during a 2024 episode of “The View” that covered the contentious issue of using diabetes medicine for weight loss. “I had never experienced that kind of shame before.”
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Hostin, who also doubles as a lawyer, went on to talk about how she seemingly experienced a roadblock in her relationship with food — “I love to cook, and I found out, I love to eat” – when she realized that she would have to show up on television with all the weight she gained during the pandemic. She turned to Mounjaro for help — and help it did. Not just with effectively managing her weight, but also by bringing other aspects of her health under control. Hostin revealed that her weight gain triggered fluctuations in her cholesterol, causing it to shoot up to 200. With medication, it was able to climb down 60 points. “I feel better, I think I look better, and that’s what this is about for people,” Hostin reflected.
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Fat Joe
Fat Joe’s physical transformation counted among the most drastic weight loss transformations in 2024. And yes, Ozempic played a key role along his weight-loss journey. The medication was not the be-all and end-all for Joe, who has been diabetic since he was barely a teenager — long before the drug became popular as a weight management tool in showbiz. During an interview with Us Weekly, the “All The Way Up” singer mentioned that while he took Ozempic for his diabetic condition, it had also helped regulate his food portions.
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“Ozempic says you may only have two pieces of your favorite stuff,” Joe said, detailing the dietary changes that slimmed down his frame and turned his life healthier. “We just try to eat everything with the least carbs as possible … That’s the smartest way to eat.”
In 2000, Fat Joe’s friend, rapper Big Pun, died at the age of 28. Big Pun was nearly 700 pounds when he passed, and Fat Joe had a sobering reality check at the funeral. “I’m looking at his little daughter. She was the same age as my daughter. I said, ‘You gotta lose weight; otherwise you outta here,'” he told Men’s Health. He spent the next two decades trying to lose weight, and ultimately a combination of diet, exercise, and Ozempic did the trick. By 2024, he’d shed 200 pounds.
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Dolores Catania
When it comes to using medication for weight loss, Dolores Catania has been an open book. In 2023, “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” star confirmed to The U.S. Sun that she’d used Mounjaro and Ozempic to lose weight. She also made certain lifestyle changes. “I work out regularly. There is no easy fix for weight loss and I have to watch what I eat,” she said.
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The following year, Catania dished to Page Six that she wanted to start taking it again because she’d gained weight on a recent vacation. “I better get back on it — quick!” She also told the outlet that she didn’t see harm in taking it. “I’ve done the research, spoke to so many doctors and I haven’t had one doctor personally say to me, ‘It’s bad for you,'” she said.
In fact, Catania’s doctor spoke out about using such drugs for weight loss, not long after Catania’s admission about using Ozempic prompted some backlash on social media. “Entering menopause (at) a healthy weight is very preventative for long-term complications from aging and weight and menopause,” Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen told Today. “Many middle-aged woman, they benefit from this medication because it’s out of their control … It’s our own misconception that we have of how somebody should look and what it means.”
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Lauren Manzo
Lauren Manzo’s drive toward a healthier lifestyle has been as much about personal growth as it has been about physical transformation. The former “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” kid, who has always been open about her struggles with body image, managed to lose 100 pounds in recent years — thanks to a regimen of exercise, mindful food choices, and some shots of Mounjaro. She has been emphatic about the medication being just one tool in her arsenal for weight loss, revealing on Page Six’s “Virtual Reali-Tea” podcast that she turned to the diabetes drug only after she couldn’t lose any more weight on a dairy and gluten-free diet.
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“Since February, I lost 30 pounds from Mounjaro,” she said during the episode, which was recorded in May 2023. “I really do believe that obesity and things like that — they are a major issue with people — it is causing mental health issues for me.” Manzo has documented her stunning physical transformation all too well on social media, even taking the time out to respond to people’s reactions to her slim figure down from 280 pounds. “The same people that were commenting stuff like, ‘She looks like a skeleton. She looks terrible,’ are the same people that were commenting that I looked like a whale when I was 200 lbs,” she said in a TikTok video. “I can’t win. And that’s okay because truthfully, I am happy.”
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Michael Rubin
Taking diabetes medications for weight loss isn’t just a Hollywood thing; big-name businesspeople have also embraced using these products to change their appearance. Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of the sports company Fanatics, is one of them. In July 2023, he shared a shirtless snap on Instagram and thanked his personal trainer and Mounjaro for transforming his physique. “My first shirtless pic since about 15 so I may be old as sh** but it ain’t that bad!” he wrote. Football star Odell Beckham Jr. and entrepreneur Adam Weitsman were just some of the public figures who took to the comments to hype Rubin up. Oh, and his longtime girlfriend, model Camille Fishel, also chimed in, writing, “Too hot to handle mr. If only you’d let me post that ‘before’ pic I have.”
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Rubin clearly is a fan of Mounjaro — so much so, he even dressed up as a Mounjaro injectable for Halloween. In October 2023, he took to Instagram to show off his costume. “You are what you eat,” he quipped in the caption.
Golnesa Gharachedaghi
Golnesa “GG” Gharachedaghi, best known for her role on Bravo’s “Shahs of Sunset,” has been more than transparent about her weight loss journey with Ozempic. The transformation, in fact, is out there for the world to see; Gharachedaghi regularly posts about her physique on social media. “I don’t see a reason to hide being on a weight loss (medication) or a cosmetic procedure,” she told Entertainment Tonight in 2023. It’s a refreshingly honest take on the Ozempic trend that apparently has dominated the entertainment industry but, given its contentious nature, is largely kept under wraps.
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“Obviously, I didn’t look like this two months ago … I would be a liar to say I quit drinking alcohol and you know all of a sudden started working out like some people like to say,” the television star went on to add. Gharachedaghi has been candid about her weight loss trials with semaglutide — the active ingredient in Ozempic — on Instagram, taking her 868,000 followers through it in great detail. In a video in 2023, she talked about dropping about 30 pounds with the drug — “a little more weight than I was anticipating to lose” — and eventually cutting back and using it just for maintenance. Gharachedaghi’s experience with the drug has seemingly been so positive that she went so far as to “encourage it to anybody who’s having a hard time losing weight and wants the easy route.”
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Sheryl Underwood
In 2022, comedian and “The Talk” co-host Sheryl Underwood underwent a major transformation. She shed 90 pounds after embarking on a health journey that involved dietary changes, lifestyle changes, and the popular weight-loss drug Wegovy. According to Underwood, she was inspired by her coworkers to make these moves. “I’m watching my colleagues concentrate on their health and wellness, so I had to join in and work on myself,” she told Entertainment Tonight.
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Underwood was also motivated by the state of her own health. “My lab work: diabetic, pre-diabetic, hypertension, all the things that you hear, especially with women,” she told People in 2022. She also noted that she even considered gastric bypass surgery at one point. But before she could go ahead with the stomach reduction procedure, she was introduced to Wegovy by a doctor. “Wegovy targets areas in the brain that regulate hunger and food intake, thus decreasing the amount of food necessary to feel satiated,” Underwood’s doctor explained to the outlet.
In a 2023 chat with The Messenger (via Parade), Underwood noted that she wanted to be frank about her own weight loss journey because other public figures haven’t been so forthcoming. “I think I did my job because a lot of people were not being truthful about it. … I just kept seeing all these people that — one week you look this way, and the next week you look this way—so I felt I had to,” she said.
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Boy George
Culture Club frontman Boy George has never been one to mince words, so it should come as no surprise that he’s been incredibly real about his weight loss journey. One of his most major weight drops came in 2013, when he showed off a super lean physique that shocked the world. “Having had a period of quite public self-destruction, I realised that that wasn’t working. It wasn’t a good look,” he told Metro at the time, reflecting on his hard partying lifestyle and how switching up his diet saved him.
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The singer has had a long journey with his weight, revealing in his memoir “Karma: My Autobiography” that he underwent a tummy tuck procedure. In a rather graphic recollection of his surgery, he described it as “the most painful thing I’ve ever done because I went on tour straight after with Cyndi Lauper with the blood bag attached” (via People). In recent years, George has turned to weight-loss drugs. “I have struggled with my weight most of my life and being under public and media scrutiny doesn’t help,” he wrote. “Well, I’m on Mounjaro. Isn’t everyone? Trust me anyone who was fat last year and is now skinny is on the wonder drug.”
Rosie O’Donnell
Rosie O’Donnell has been more than open about her journey with weight-loss drugs — so much so that she took to TikTok to update her followers about her medication routines. “Two months ago, my doctor put me on Mounjaro … and Repatha. One I do every other week and one I do once a week,” she said in a video in 2023. O’Donnell, who has type 2 diabetes, also made changes to her lifestyle, such as cutting way back on her soda consumption. She shaved 10 pounds off her weight in a matter of weeks. This is not the first time O’Donnell has made an effort to change her physique.
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Back in 2013, the Emmy-winning comedian saw a sharp drop in her weight — going from 240 pounds to 176 — following a vertical gastric sleeve surgery, a medical procedure that minimizes the size of one’s stomach, thereby affecting the amount of food intake. O’Donnell’s drive to lose weight at the time was also precipitated by a heart attack she had at 50, with doctors alerting her to the danger she was in, given her. “Believe it or not, that surgery changed my life … But your relationship with food ends,” she told People, noting that losing weight has had a lot of benefits. “It’s not easy to be obese in America and have everyone feel free to ridicule you,” she said.
Margaret Josephs
Margaret Josephs has kept it incredibly real about her weight loss journey, publicly detailing her health regimen — which includes peptide injections. After struggling with perimenopausal weight gain that wouldn’t budge despite a healthy lifestyle, “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” star turned to a program that had a GLP-1 in the mix. It worked wonders for Josephs, who opened up to People about downsizing to 126 pounds — a number she had not seen on the weighing scale since her marriage in 1994. “It’s been life-changing. And it’s not about being fat or skinny; it’s about every aspect of my wellness coming together,” she said.
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Josephs has been incredibly open about using drugs to help manage her weight. She’s also shared that she hit a lot of roadblocks with every other health routine she tried out. “I’d be working out, eating healthy, running around all the time and nothing … I just wasn’t feeling my best self. I was feeling tired and sluggish,” she recalled. Peptides gave her, as she put it, “a new pep.” Along with waxing eloquent about the effect weight-loss drugs had not just on her physique but her entire well-being, Josephs has also been vocal about the responsibility she has toward fans. “We have to be honest with the people that watch the show because we know what we signed up for … No one wakes up like this,” she said on the talk show “Sherry.”
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Emily Simpson
For Emily Simpson, Ozempic was no magic drug but just a stepping stone on her overall health journey. She was medically advised to take the popular medication after she gained weight while shooting Season 17 of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” in 2022. “I really neglected myself those four months that we were filming,” she told Us Weekly. “I ate too much, drank too much, didn’t go to the gym, didn’t work out and I felt really down, really depressed, really dark when we finished filming.” By the end of that year, Simpson had begun her Ozempic regimen.
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Simpson shared on “Jeff Lewis Live” that her stint with the diabetes medicine only lasted a month – just enough to make some big changes to certain areas of her life. “It made me more conscientious of what I was eating and so that was a really great kick start for me,” Simpson said, revealing that she lost up to nearly seven pounds on the drug. Her experience with it wasn’t all smooth sailing, with the effects of the drug playing havoc with her energy levels. Even though Simpson’s stint with the weight loss medication was brief — with other procedures like liposuction and breast reduction also shaping her frame — there was endless speculation (and shaming) on social media over her alleged use of Ozempic to drop over 30 pounds.
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If you need help with an eating disorder, or know someone who does, help is available. Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA’s Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).