Oprah and me

My complicated history with the media juggernaut, her body, and my own.

Oprah with her wagon of fat in a 1988 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

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This post discusses weight and an eating disorder. Open it in your browser for easier footnote reading.

On the cover of a 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, the Oprah Winfrey of that year stands aside a thinner 2005-era Oprah, looking glum.

“How did I let this happen again?” the larger Oprah asks. The cover line proclaims that inside is a “must-read for anyone who’s ever fallen off the wagon.”

I’m sure I read it cover to cover. I read every issue I could get my hands on.

A couple years later I stepped on a scale days after my boyfriend dumped me just as we were planning to move in together, for reasons he refused to explain. Friends had their theories — “He got someone else pregnant!” “He’s having a psychotic break!” — but deep down I knew why. I’d quickly gained a not-insignificant amount of weight from the binge eating disorder that had pulled me under again, he didn’t like that, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. To be fair, neither did I.

When I saw the number on the scale, not all that far off from one I’d been before as my weight fluctuated for years, I thought of that cover. I imagined the specter of a disappointed Oprah, who demanded to know: How could you let this happen again?

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I did my third-grade biography project on Oprah. I watched her talk show every day. I discussed tidbits from O with my aunt, who found it hilarious that Oprah only ever put herself on the cover¹. I followed Oprah’s Book Club and was spellbound by James Frey’s memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” the 2005 pick that turned out to be falsified — her searing 2006 interview with James about his lies was my Roman Empire. Oprah boosted my interests in reading and real people’s stories and asking questions, all reasons why I became a journalist and book writer myself.

(For what it’s worth, my connection to Oprah is not unique. The enormity of her media empire and audience notwithstanding, that she’s a target of mild obsession among women is a comedic beat that’s appeared in TV shows like “30 Rock” and “Broad City.”)

I was a teenager fangirling over a middle-aged daytime talk show host also because I connected to Oprah’s difficulties with her weight. In 1988, the year I was born, she appeared on TV with a wagon full of 67 pounds of animal fat representing her weight loss. She’s since called that a mistake, but continued to place her weight issues at the center of her brand, which American women found relatable. Most of them weren’t in middle school, but by 13 I weighed 60 pounds more than my own mother. My tiny classmates didn’t get what that was like. Oprah would have.

Now, Oprah has told People that she uses a weight loss medication, and folks have feelings. While Virginia Sole-Smith writes, “there is only rapturous admiration for Oprah’s personal journey towards thinness,” that’s not true — she’s being called a “disgusting hypocrite” and a “phony” by internet commenters and TV talking heads alike. There is seldom only one type of reaction to someone’s significant body change, because people’s reactions are really about themselves and their own unique body baggage.

When Adele lost 100 pounds, people were “bummed” or “betrayed” because they upheld her as an icon of body acceptance because she existed as a plus-size woman who didn’t talk about trying to lose weight, even though she never defined herself as such an icon. When Oprah interviewed Adele about this, Adele said:

“It’s not my job to validate how people feel about their bodies. My body has been objectified my entire career — I’m too big, I’m too small, I’m hot or I’m not. I feel bad if anyone feels horrible about themselves but that’s not my job.”

Oprah, meanwhile, could never have been such an icon, because she was always trying to lose weight. Why then are people upset that she is using yet another tool to do that? Jennifer Weiner writes for the New York Times that this Oprah news proves “diet culture spares no one.” Perhaps people are grappling with the notion that even if you’re Oprah, even if you have all the money and power in the world, it still won’t be enough if you’re fatter than you want to be. But money and power do not necessarily heal a person’s most painful psychic wounds — wherever you go, there you are and all that — and if those wounds concern their public-facing body, fame only deepens them. Nothing about Oprah’s decision surprises me.²

Jennifer’s piece, though, seems to suggest that Oprah could have chosen self love or body acceptance instead of weight loss³, because those things were having a “moment” that is apparently now over⁴, so it’s sad that she didn’t. Jennifer paints the picture of a “moment when, for a blink, people tried to push back against diet culture,” in which “some of us tried to tell our daughters … that our bodies are not a problem to be solved.” But what people don’t like to acknowledge is that sometimes our bodies are a problem for us. That doesn’t make us terrible horrible people who hate ourselves, it’s just a byproduct of how complicated bodies are. Jennifer would know. She had weight loss surgery in 2006. She told “TIME” in 2016:

I was so uncomfortable being that heavy, I wanted to be the size that I’d been most of my adult life before I went through postpartum depression and was basically eating everything that wasn’t nailed down. If I’d been stronger, in a better place in my marriage, I could have said, “I’m going to weigh 300 lb. for the rest of my life and learn to be O.K. with it.” But I wasn’t.

No one should despair over or condemn Jennifer’s choice just as no one should despair over or condemn Oprah’s. Jennifer’s body was a problem for her when she was “so uncomfortable being that heavy.” Oprah’s body was a problem for her when it kept her from being active how she wanted, as she explained to People. Mine was a problem for me when I was pre-diabetic, pre-hypertensive, and had high cholesterol before I was 21. None of us, including Oprah⁵, has been spared the desire to lose weight because being fat was incredibly difficult for us. We all chose to lower the difficulty setting on that element of our lives. I don’t know about them, but that doesn’t leave me feeling like a victim of diet culture. It leaves me feeling like I finally have a degree of bodily peace.

Despite that, I don’t deny that Oprah’s body and weight-related messages had ill effects on me. Almost every body and weight-related message I encountered for roughly the first two and a half decades of my life did. The How did I let this happen again? cover is a stark example of the most damaging product of our body culture: shame. I knew back when I got dumped that I had gained weight because of my eating disorder and needed help, but since I’d internalized the Oprah-cosigned message that weight gain is a hand-wringing affair, I felt even worse.

Oprah built an empire on the health advice of shady characters whose claims have been debunked. She’s comfortable talking about using a weight loss drug because she has a financial stake in Weight Watchers, which will start prescribing them. This whole thing involves rich people getting richer, so I get why people hate it. I find it appalling that Oprah is telling People she eats her last meal at 4 p.m., because readers are going to latch onto that as a necessary weight loss hack, and it’s not. I can appreciate that Oprah is being honest about weight loss medication⁶ and still wish she would say a little less. But I know how it goes when your body changes. You can’t shut up about it after a lifetime of being told it was the most interesting thing about you.

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I’ve thought about how to describe the Body Type audience. I think it’s people who are preoccupied with their bodies. You’re probably not here unless you think a lot about your weight, size, body image, exercise and eating habits, and how the culture affects it all.⁷ You’re like me. Some of us will always be thinking about our bodies more than other people because we’re fat, or we used to be, or we have or had an eating disorder, or because too many people said too much shit about our bodies when we were young and we haven’t quite gotten over it.

I’m like that, and I think Oprah is like that. I know little for certain about Oprah despite writing what was surely a groundbreaking biography of her in third grade, but I have some suspicions.

If you wonder why Oprah is bothering to use weight loss medication when she could merrily live out the rest of her life as a 237-pound woman⁸ — she’d have an easier time of it than the rest of us, what with bespoke clothes, private planes, and a coterie of assistants who could ensure she never sees a mean internet comment or article — part of it is plain old fatphobia, sure. We all have that.

But I think it’s more about desperation to conquer and finish something that’s forever eluded her. You don’t get to be Oprah without being a finisher. She’s made everything else happen for herself, but not this. Why? Is it because sustained weight loss is impossible, even for someone with access to every resource in the world? If you’re asking me, a non-billionaire who lost about the same amount that was in Oprah’s fat wagon 10 years ago and hasn’t gained it back, that’s not it. I think it’s that some people just have a harder time of it no matter what, because bodies are infuriating, mysterious vessels we’ve barely begun to understand. That’s why everyone should keep their weight and body judgements to themselves. We really know so little.

So maybe when something came along that made finishing the job easier, Oprah had to grab for it. She had to try one more time to get the better of her greatest struggle, one that’s worn her down for nearly 40 televised years, and be fucking done with it.

Is that admirable? I don’t know. I do know that it’s human. As someone interested in humans and their stories, because I watched a show after school every day that taught me such things are valuable even if they’re messy or flawed or ignoble, I have to say that I understand.

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1. A true power move. She did cede the cover to Breonna Taylor in 2020.

2. Remember: No celebrity can be a body image icon.

3. Some people think these things are mutually exclusive. They are not, necessarily.

4. The whole “body acceptance is over because Ozempic!” hysteria has been brewing for a year-plus. This “Life After Food” article says, “Ours was supposed to be the feel-good era of Lizzo and Ashely Graham and Adele. Then Adele lost all that weight.” The idea that when a singular person loses weight, body acceptance is canceled as a concept is so asinine it boggles the mind. Casey Johnston had a great response: “Body positivity or neutrality isn’t and never was a destination, as it’s sure as hell not a set of goalposts some guy on the Internet gets to move wherever needed in order to taunt people who don’t live up to today’s definition of behavioral purity. It’s a practice everyone is entitled to, to which many people have unequal access, thanks again, in part, to articles like this.”

5. I find it odd when people call any woman who isn’t, I don’t know, above a size 16-18 “thin,” as Jennifer does in her NYT piece: “Ms. Winfrey is thin again” / “Ms. Winfrey, the world’s most famous dieter, thin at last.” Oprah tells “People” she weighs 167 pounds, and she’s 5’7”. Is that what “thin” is? Where does “thin” begin? Who decides which labels to use for women’s bodies?

6. Because I don’t believe the use of weight loss medication is cause for shaming, I don’t think it’s “cheating,” and I say that as someone who lost weight “naturally” because everything in my life (therapy, proximity to gyms and grocery stores, time, money, a partner who taught me how to work out, employment at a gym, etc.) made it relatively easy for me to lose weight and keep it off. That’s not the case for a lot of people.

7. My friend Ronald has a fantastic podcast called Weight For It, for “all folks who think about their weight all the time.” If you like Body Type, you’ll like it.

8. What she says was her highest weight.