“And then when Ozempic came along, I was able to lose the last 15 to 20 pounds and keep it off.”
Ozempic is a brand name for semaglutide and is approved in the United States to treat adults with type 2 diabetes. The same active ingredient is used in Wegovy, a medication approved for chronic weight management.
Bates has been open about using Ozempic, but her objection is to the suggestion that medication accounts for the entire 100-lb. loss. The arithmetic, in this case, is less ambiguous than the commentary.
A diabetes diagnosis changed how she approached food
Bates previously told PEOPLE that she began losing weight after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes around 2017. She said the diagnosis “scared me straight” and forced her to confront the emotional reasons behind her eating habits.
“I ate because I was afraid, and I ate because it was a FU to my self-esteem,” she said in October 2024.
One of her first changes came from advice offered by her niece: pay attention to the body’s signal that it has had enough.
“When we’re full, we experience an involuntary sigh,” Bates explained. “I just pushed the plate away.”
She also changed a diet she described as heavy on “burgers and Cokes and pizza” and stopped eating after 8 p.m.
Those adjustments were gradual rather than presented as a dramatic overnight overhaul. By Bates’s account, Ozempic entered the process only after she had already lost most of the weight through those longer-term changes.
A dress fitting brought the scale of the change home
The physical transformation has also required an emotional adjustment. Bates told Variety that she was overwhelmed when a new stylist recently handed her a dress she assumed would be too small.
“I looked at it on the hanger, and I thought, ‘That’s not gonna fit.’ I put it on, and it fit, and I just melted down,” she said. “I just started crying and crying.”
The moment prompted questions that went beyond clothing sizes.
“I’m still figuring out what it’s like to be without all of that weight,” Bates said. “What was it for? What was I hiding myself from? What are the emotions that are pouring out because I don’t have that armor? It just really surprised me, really shocked me.”
Her description suggests that losing weight did not automatically resolve the feelings attached to it. Instead, it removed what she had come to regard as a form of protection, leaving her to examine why she needed that “armor” in the first place.
The transformation helped her take on Matlock
Bates has said the timing of her weight loss “coincided beautifully” with her starring role in Matlock, the television drama in which she plays lawyer Madeline Matlock.
“Physically, I’m capable of doing this show,” she told PEOPLE in 2024. “I don’t have to sit down. I can stand up all day long and walk and move and breathe and do so many things that I couldn’t before.”
After completing the show’s first season, Bates said maintaining that progress away from the constant movement of a television set would be her next challenge. She had a treadmill at home and was considering Pilates, although she had little interest in hiring a personal trainer.
“I don’t want anybody over my shoulder,” she said. “It’s just very important to me to keep this going. I don’t want to slip.”
That remains the practical question behind the public argument over how she lost the weight: not whether medication played a role—Bates readily says it did—but how she sustains changes that began years before the prescription. For her, the harder work was never confined to the final 20 lbs.
