Oprah Winfrey the American talk show host is used to having celebrities bare all on her couch. Recently, following a dramatic weight loss, she has opened up about her struggles with the shame of being labelled fat.
Oprah Winfrey famous for her straight to the point interviews with celebrities has also carried the stigma of being labelled ‘overweight’ by the media. The Oprah Winfrey Show was on our television screens, providing 25 years of Hollywood access. Even though Oprah’s show has lead to historical celebrity moments, the media, unfortunately, have chosen to focus on the figure of the star. Oprah, looking equally fabulous following recent weight loss, has been candid about her struggles with weight her thoughts on Ozempic. In a recent interview with the star, she’s opened up again about her treatment by the media and what she felt she couldn’t do due to her weight.
‘I was too fat to go’
Jamie Kern Lima is the host of her self-titled show, The Jamie Kern Lima Show, available on YouTube. In the June 25 episode, she was joined by Oprah on the couch to “reveal all” on “weight, shame and worthiness!”
Oprah talks about her family and the recognition of metabolism and the ability to metabolize in different capacities. She references alcohol and the fact some people change after a couple of sips of wine, yet others can drink a lot. When it comes to alcohol, she understands the body has great diversity when it comes to metabolism.
She links this to the body’s ability to metabolize fat. She is referring to the ‘set point weight’ – a theorized weight the body ‘returns’ to after following weight loss. Though WebMD says research is inconclusive on this idea, Oprah talks about her personal experience with it.
She discusses following an Optifast (shake based) diet where she “hadn’t eaten solid food for 5 months”. Yet immediately following this period, moving back on to solid food, Oprah discloses, “three days later I was five pounds heavier and a week later I was ten pounds heavier.”
This really impacted the host’s self-esteem. She continues her story, “a week before Christmas don Johnson, the don Johnson of Miami vice, was having a Christmas party and had invited me and some members of my show and I wouldn’t go because I thought I was too fat to go.”
“I had gone from one forty-five on the day of the show, and I was one fifty-seven in the course of like a week and a half or two,” she continues.
‘Making fun of my weight was a national sport for 25 years!’
Oprah continues to discuss her “biggest shame”, referring to a prominent figure at the time called Mr Blackwell. Blackwell would create lists of who was in and out, or who was well-dressed and who was not.
In 1987, Oprah found herself at the bottom of Mr Blackwell’s list. The image featured, she describes, “[I was] wearing what I had thought was a beautiful black dress, makes me wanna cry, a beautiful black dress, obviously I had to have the dress made, and I was, you know, so proud of myself because I had won the Bob Hope award. And they took the pictures from that [event] and it [the headline] was ‘dumpy frumpy and downright lumpy’ and it was on the cover of all the magazines.”
She sadly continues, “I ingested that, swallowed it like it was a pill designed just for my body, and I took in all the shame and I accepted that this thing that people have labelled me with, being fat, being overweight, being unable to control my willpower, not having any willpower, that’s my shame.”
Winfrey describes how for 25 years the media continually released exploitation stories about her weight. At the same time, she was routinely mocked by popular comedians and comedy shows. She discusses the hurt stemming from how OK it was for people to publicly mock her, stating, “making fun of my weight was a national sport for 25 years.”
However, our star is looking just as fabulous as ever in our eyes. Recently turning 70 Oprah concludes that she is “refusing to carry it [the shame] into the next decade”. We salute your body positivity, Oprah!
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