Oprah Winfrey candidly discussed hurtful comments made about her weight and how it became a focal point throughout her career.
People reported that Oprah Winfrey, 70, candidly discussed her emotional struggles with weight gain during the inaugural episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast on Tuesday.
While body image has been a concern for both men and women, the media personality revealed that her weight had sometimes prevented her from attending events, including one popular celebrity’s 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,” she told Lima, who is a best-selling author and entrepreneur of IT Cosmetics.
“I‘d gone from 145 [lbs.] on the day of the show,” she recounted, “I think I was 157 [lbs.] in the course of, like, a week and a half or two. And the shame started again.”
According to Complex, Winfrey also talked about how it made her feel to see the late critic Richard Blackwell, describing her as “bumpy, frumpy and downright lumpy” on the cover of TV Guide.
“I ingested that, I swallowed it like it was a pill designed just for my body and I took in all the shame,” Winfrey said. “And I accepted that this thing that people have labeled me with — being fat, being overweight, being unable to control my willpower, not having any willpower — that’s my shame. That’s it. They’re right, they’re right.”
The former talk show host said her weight has been mocked in several television shows and media platforms, including the ’90s sketch comedy show In Living Color, where Winfrey reflected on the skit being about her.
“One of the most hurtful things was In Living Color had done a skit where the woman was doing something, and she just kept eating and getting fatter and fatter and fatter and the comedy bit was that eventually she just exploded,” Winfrey said, referring to the skit, in which Kim Wayans portrayed Oprah on her television show. “The whole audience fell out [laughing]. And the woman was me.”
She continued, “And that was just accepted! That was just a thing that was accepted. So I have borne this weight thing and carried it to the point where I just feel like, I’ve just recently turned 70 and I’m not carrying it into the next decade. I’m done with it.”