Throughout her career as a talk show host, Oprah Winfrey has dug into stories of all types of subject matter. Recently, she has opened up about her own struggles, particularly concerning a time when her weight was the subject of countless body shaming jokes by others in the industry.
70-year-old Winfrey opened up about her relationship with weight and body shaming while speaking on the first episode of The Jamie Kern Lima podcast. She detailed the extreme measures she took to lose weight, the number’s rapid increase, and the times she was made to feel “too fat” to attend high-profile holiday parties.
Oprah Winfrey opens up about her relationship with weight loss and gain
During a particularly famous November 1988 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the host brought out a wagon full of fat to visualize how much weight she had lost. However, this was part of a rollercoaster of weight loss and gain, a trajectory matched by turbulent physical and emotional health all the while.
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“I didn’t have a morsel of food for five solid months in losing that weight on [the all-liquid diet] Optifast,” Winfrey revealed of her diet. “Three days later, I was 5 lbs. heavier, and a week later I was 10 lbs. Heavier.”
Over the years, Winfrey has attributed her weight gain, in part, to emotional distress she suffered throughout her life, primarily but not limited to troubled relationships. However, those looking to body shame only exacerbated her pain, including fellow entertainers.
She was made to feel uncomfortable about her appearance
When Keenan Ivory Wayans introduced audiences to In Living Color, viewers were met with a revolutionary, new kind of humor and representation in the world of comedy. However, Winfrey ultimately felt attacked by some of its content.
“In Living Color had done a skit where the woman was doing something,” she recalled, “and she just kept eating and getting fatter and fatter and fatter and the comedy bit was that eventually she just exploded.” Then, Winfrey added, “The whole audience fell out [laughing] and the woman was me.” Kim Wayans played this version of Winfrey, at the host’s expense.
Then, there was the holiday party.
“The week before Christmas, I remember Don Johnson — the Don Johnson, of Miami Vice — was having a party and had invited me and some members of my show to come, and I wouldn’t go because I thought I was too fat to go,” admitted Winfrey. “I’d gone from 145 [lbs.] on the day of the show,” she recalled, “I think I was 157 [lbs.] in the course of, like, a week and a half or two. And the shame started again.”
Winfrey turned 70 this January, and with the new decade, the talk show host is adamant that her sense of shame—normalized by trends that made her the butt of countless jokes—would not join her in this decade. “I’m done with it,” declared Winfrey.”