There's an episode of Oprah Winfrey's talk show from nineteen eighty eight that I always think about because it touches on so many things I've also struggled with. It's her highest rated episode of all time, and in it, a svelt Oprah in tight Calvin Klein Genes dramatically reveals to her audience that she has just lost sixty seven pounds and tells them how she did it.
What I did was I fasted without cheating for solid six weeks.
And to demonstrate how much weight that is, Oprah will wheel out a visual eight, a classic child's red wagon that holds a giant, clear plastic bag filled with fat sixty seven pounds of animal fat. To be precise, I'm Susie Bannacharam.
And I'm Jessica Bennett.
This is in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped.
Us we just can't stop thinking about.
Today, we're talking about Oprah's little red wagon of fat, but we're also talking about the literal weight we all carry and the pressure women feel to be perfect.
So, okay, Susie, there must be you know, thousands of potential Oprah moments we could unpack here Why the little red wagon of fat.
So.
I don't know if you know this about me, but I've always been a huge Oprah fan. I loved her show and I watched it whenever I could growing up. And while I didn't watch this particular moment because it happened in nineteen eighty eight and I would have been pretty young, I've seen it so many times because it was just this like, very famous episode and it's shown
in all of her retrospectives. And I think the reason I wanted to talk about it is there something she said at the time when she revealed that she'd lost this weight. And what she said was, this is the most difficult thing I've done in my life. It is my greatest accomplishment.
Wow, her greatest accomplishment.
Yeah, I mean that's obviously not the case, right, I mean, she's accomplished so much since, and she had accomplished so much even at that point. So it's a complicated statement and definitely one she's walked back since. But it resonates for me because I think for a lot of women, myself included, this sense that you're measured by your physical weight is really pervasive, like something you kind of struggle
with your whole life. And we'll get into that, but I'm curious just before we start, like, were you an Oprah fan?
Well, honestly, I think I'm more familiar with today's Oprah, like media mogul, first black woman, billionaire, trailblazer in so many ways, and of course someone who can always score the first sit down. But you know, I wasn't an accolte. I didn't grow up watching her. I wasn't the type of person that would, you know, rush home every day after school and turn on Oprah.
But Susie, were you that kind of Oprah fan?
Yeah? I mean I think it was just like a sort of an appointment. Oprah was on at four pm every day, and especially when I was in school, Like you know, you come home, you turn on the TV, you do your homework, whatever. But that's something that feels kind of ever aprisive. When I eventually would have a DVR, I would DVR the show. And I remember once having like a guy friend over and being like, do you dvr Oprah? And like being really embarrassed really about it.
Yeah, I mean, because you know, it's like this in high school, No, this was like in my twenty years.
Yeah, all right, and I was like really defensive. I was like, I have to watch it for work, and he was like, what do you mean, Like you're a news journalist, and I was like, yeah, I mean but I work at ABC, and like it has to I have to know what's happening on Oprah. And by the way, we did cover Oprah a lot on World News Tonight, where I worked at that time, Like, okay, it was in fact true that it was useful for me to watch Oprah because things would happen on Oprah and we
would cover them. Right, she covered serious topics and sometimes she would have guests that knew that Lelland can get gotten.
Yes, and I think worth mentioning. Celebrities didn't have a direct line to their fans back then. Like if you wanted to do an interview or code a thing, or get something out or try to recover from whatever shitty thing you'd done that you were groveling over, yeah, you would have to go sit on Oprah's couch.
And that was considered like a great booking, right if you were a celebrity, you wanted to be able to go to Oprah. That was as much a boon to you as it was to her, which I don't think there's really a comparison to.
That now, No, absolutely not.
I mean I still always think about the Tom Cruise jumping on her couch moment, even though that was much later.
Oh yeah, that's such an infamous moment.
Right, So all these celebrities would go sit on her couch and that was a big component of this. But there was also something for the audience about community in watching that show, isn't that right? Like people would gather you were part of a I don't know, would you call it a family?
Yes, you were like part of this Oprah family. She really like drew you in. Eventually there was like the famous book club. The idea was you were like reading a book with her. You were experiencing bra shopping with her, like her episode about being properly fitted for bras was a really big success for her. Right. She was basically just telling you how to live, as she would put it,
your best life. And there were lots of different ways she was teaching you to do that, Like you could read this book The Secret that was really popular at the time, or the Law of Attraction, and you could manifest things in your life, and you know, specifically, you can manifest money, which I think was very appealing to people.
Still pretty appealing, Yeah, and.
I think it's like something you see a lot on TikTok. Now it's part of the vernacular.
But you know, we should also state the obvious, which is that it wasn't just manifesting not her to wear.
She was.
She was a trailblazer in so many ways. You know, Obra was the first black female host of a national talk show, and when she became that, she completely wrote the mold for what a quote unquote traditional TV host looked like, which was still usually white and mostly male.
Yeah. I mean. Oprah tells this story and interviews about how when she was first offered this talk show, she reportedly said to the man who was offering her the job,
but you know, I'm black and I'm fat. And so she's so aware not just of the racism, which let's be honest, that could be a whole other show, but she's also aware that thinness is a really essential part of being seen as a public figure at this time, and so she feels the need to say that even as she being offered this huge opportunity.
Okay, but she takes the job obviously. Yeah, she takes the job and it's a huge success. Right, Her local talk show gets national syndication and she becomes a household name. But really, from the moment she starts to get this national coverage, she gets so much attention around her weight.
So her weight essentially becomes part of this story.
Yeah, it's always part of her story. And there's a great example of this in nineteen eighty six she does an interview with Mike Wallace. So it's right after she's gone national and Mike Wallace is on Sixty Minutes, which at the time is just this huge show. Twenty three million people tune in every Sunday night to watch it. I remember we would get together as a family and watch it on and this is how that interview unfolded.
When she was twenty two, she moved to Baltimore and became an anchor woman on a local TV news show. This was sixty pounds ago. She were sixty pounds lighted sixty pounds ago.
I think of my life in terms of my thighs. Wow, this is just one example of how Oprah's always sort of had to be very public about her weight. It's almost impossible to tell how much the conversation was driven by media coverage and how much she just decided to share it to preempt kind of all this criticism she knew was coming. And I think it's also partially why she's so successful. She's really vulnerable and relatable, but that comes with a cost.
So I want to get back into the moment itself, the little wagon a feat moment.
Do you have any memory of it? Like, is this something that jogs a memory for you?
It's funny because I don't know this exact moment, but I do have this very like eighties image in my mind of Oprah standing looking very svelt in like a black turtleneck and these kind of like chic mom jeans, like high waisted kind of mom jeans. So I must have seen that image in magazines or in retrospective Yeah.
I mean, I think it's just one of those images that really follows her around for the rest of her life. And this episode is still to this day the highest rated one, and I'm going to walk you through it just because it's fascinating on so many levels.
Okay, I'm ready.
So this episode airs in November, and there's already been a lot of build up because when she returned for her show that season in September, she is noticeably thinner. She has already lost like thirty or forty pounds, so everyone kind of been asking how did she lose the weight? How did she lose a weight? And so she keeps sort of assuring the audience that she's going to tell
them how she does it. And so like the AP sends a reporter then like to the show, to the show, like it's become a national story, and because it's already a national story, and Oprah, because she's a genius, is like, I will not tell you until sweeps, which is when what sweeps sweeps is when Nielsen does its annual kind of assessment of ratings. So you're advertising dollars are connected watches the show and sweeps, and she is a smart woman, so she's like, I will tell you when it is
most cost effective for me. So the show starts and Oprah is wearing like a red coat that is the last time I was in the Calvin Klein size tingeens until too Yeah, and she's like to da, and she dramatically like flings off this coat, reveal her like new spelt wait felt, Look this black turtleneck and she's wearing these Calvin Klein beans that she hasn't been able to fit into for years. She's saved.
They're her jeans. They're herjeanes that she's like saved.
They're her like thinging okay, and she was like I will fit into these again, and now she can fit into them. And she's tucked her jeans into these like kind of like cool high field. Yes, yes, yes, So it becomes this very iconic image of her. Okay. So this is kind of this wild moment in the study. The audience goes wild. They've been given pom poms. They're like shaking pom poms like they're like yay, like it's so exciting, and they've given they've given pom poms.
And then the wagon is behind her.
So that's the This is the first segment of the show. She comes out, she reveals, and then she's like commercial again, okay, and she's not gonna like give you everything up front.
And so it's great to have your TV knowledge in the background of this, because like, I don't think about this, you wait till after the commercial.
Right, like you're just constantly trying to keep people reasons to continue to tune in or stay tuned in. Yep, she gives you the reveal at the top, which becomes a very common talk show trope, right this like body reveal, Judy has lost a total of twelve pounds. Judy, let's see the new you today. Junior can probably say he lost the most weight of anyone on today's show. Let's bring out the new Junior. Eventually, it actually becomes pretty common to do these kinds of reveals in a bathing suit.
And there's actually another really famous episode of Oprah with Christy Alli where she also does this big reveal.
Exactly one year ago, Kersy bowed to walk on our stage in a bikini once she reached her goal weight, and she did.
That was a very famous one, but there was a lot of very famous kind of examples of this. And so here she is, she's lost all this weight. There's a cut to a commercial break, and she knows that she's got to keep you entertained. So what is the idea she has had for the second segment of the show. It is that she comes out and she's wheeling this little red wagon full of fat.
Now, they didn't think it was a literal wagon.
No, it's like a literal red wagon, like a child's wagon. Her staff has gone to a local barbecue joint, and I'm going to tell you the name of the joint because I discovered it in my research. I had never Chicago before. In Chicago, it is called Moo and Oin. That's the name of the place where they get the fat.
Okay, so that's fine for the name of a barbecue joint.
It is in the context of it being like the weight I've lost. It's like literally, like in some weird way, referring to yourself as like a cow or a pig. I don't know why. It just really struck me as unfortunate. That's the name MoU and oink. So she wheels out this wagon with this clear plastic garbage bag filled with animal fat, and she's standing next to it addressing the audience.
I have lost as of this morning, sixty seven pounds since July seventh, sixty seven pounds.
I think this is the first time she gives you the actual number. Okay, you know, because she's again and she's try trying to keep you engaged, and she also ticks through her measurements and says, wow, you know, I've lost thirty inches from my bust, my waist, Emma hoops. And then she gives you the specific six seven on my bust, twelve on my waist, eleven on my head. She's like pointing and.
This, this is what's sixty seven pounds.
She's literally like, look at this. I used to carry this around and I can't even lift it up down because she lift it up and it's so disgusting. Is this growth or what I mean? She's really inviting the audience to examine and stare at her body in a way that I personally would never choose. And I think
is just a super interesting fact about this. Right, Celebrities in general, female celebrities, especially their bodies are under such a microscope, and in this case, she has kind of embraced that and is putting her own body under this microscope for the audience.
Okay, so what comes next?
So what comes next is a segment where Steadman, her boyfriend at the time, calls in to congratulate her. But Steedman himself is kind of an interesting character in this because he's her longtime partner. They are still together. They never got married, but later on she will say he
is the reason she embarked on this particular weight loss journey. Okay, it will be reported at some point that over dinner one night, she asked him, you know, if it ever bothered him that she was overweight, and that there's this long pause, and he says something along the lines of, well, it's an adjustment.
Oh god, this makes me so sad.
Yeah, and she sort of feels this as a gut punch. I think she says, at some point, my instinct was, I don't want to be somebody's personal growth journey, which is just a way of saying, like you've basically told me I'm not enough or I'm an adjustment, which is just a horrible thing to say to someone. And so shortly after that conversation, she embarks on this very intense
diet that leads us to this particular moment. Okay. So, and another thing that happens in this particular episode is that she reads from her journal entries, and I'm going to read you a little piece of this section of her journal that she reads what is the bigger issue here? Self esteem. I realize this fat is just a blocker. It is like having mud on my wings. It keeps me from flying. There's been a way of staying comfortable with other people. My fat puts them at ease, makes
them less threatened, makes me insecure. So I dream of walking into a room one day where this fat is not the issue, and that will happen this year, because the bigger issue for me is making myself the best that I can be.
It is very vulnerable.
It's very vulnerable.
I mean, I can you can imagine the audience, mostly women probably who have probably struggled in one way or another, because haven't we all really feeling like this resonates?
Yeah, I mean this obviously residents for me. I'm someone who struggled with my weight my whole life, and you know, I think a lot of women and a lot of men also can really relate to this feeling of if I just lost ten pounds, everything would be perfect. If I just lost five pounds, everything would be perfect. There's this sense that our weight is very defining for us, and it is always this nagging thing we are trying
to fix in ourselves. But I think also this vulnerability that Oprah demonstrates is why she becomes such a big success.
That's so interesting. I've never thought about it that way. I mean, I admire her ability to be so vulnerable, because I've always found it really hard to talk about this subject. I mean, I can talk about a lot of things, but I gained a lot of weight in my late twenties and early thirties, and I was diagnosed with PCOS, which is polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is now something you know, people have heard of, but it wasn't really well known when I was diagnosed, and even now
it's still pretty poorly understood by the medical establishment. So honestly, I didn't tell anyone at the time or even really talk about it with my friends, like much less announce it to the whole world. Like it's really a lot right to go out and reveal so much about yourself.
In some ways, that's so different from what we tend to see now, especially on social media, where like vulnerability or I don't know, foe, vulnerability is almost a currency in some ways. But it sounds like that was definitely not the case back then, and certainly not in the talk show landscape in the nineteen eighties, right, Like how common was that at the time.
It was pretty uncommon. I mean even Oprah's initial shows were pretty tabloidy, right. The talk show atmosphere in general was much more tabloidy. It was like Phil Donahue and Sally Jesse, Raphael and I mean not being father, You're not the father. That becomes like a trope a little
bit later on. But you know, she is kind of elevating the medium in a way, and she will slowly do that over time until there comes a point where the Oprah Show is actually seen as kind of like a premium product rather than what it initially is, which
is kind of like a tabloidy talk show. And one of the ways in which she does that is by being really vulnerable about these things in her life, like about sex abuse she experienced as a child, about her weight, Like she really pioneers a thing that now is so common because of reality shows and social media, which is that if you open up your own experiences, people feel
much more connected to you. And she leads on a dialogue that's just not very common at that time, right, you know, she's talking about sex abuse when that's still a very taboo subject. She's acknowledging these issues with her weight when I don't know how common it was to just say that you're fat and you're trying to lose weight. She will go on to talk about mental health issues, about race. She'll do these really difficult race shows where she will have on racists who will say terrible things
to her face, and she will like explore that. So this is kind of where you start to see that shift happening.
Oh okay, but this episode isn't intended to be particularly serious, right, it sounds like it was pretty festive. Does she end up getting into the details of how she actually lost the weight.
Yeah, she does talk about that. She essentially starves herself to lose this weight. She drinks protein powder shakes of roughly four hundred calories a day. Like, if you're trying to lose weight and you're a woman who's like she's like five six, I think the usual standard is that you're eating somewhere between twelve hundred and fourteen hundred calories. That's to lose weight. You're eating that she is medically supervised.
It's a medically supervised diet, okay, But I think it also just reveals the way that the medical establishment approached weight for a long time in this country was pretty barbaric, Like they would never give you this diet now, it's insane. But she not only kind of says, here's how I did it. She literally pulls up the protein shakes and the company that they, yeah, it wasn't sponsored. I mean, I think that's before people realize you could get sponsors
for stuff. Okay, but shows it and their sales go through the realm. I mean, like everything crashes for them. It's a big day.
And then later on she's not able to keep the weight off, Like how.
No, she can't keep the weight off. I mean she so she basically does this for four months. She says later on, I literally starved myself, like I did not eat anything. Basically, I didn't have a morsel of food. And then she will say at some point that this just basically shot her metabolism and that two weeks after she returned to eating food, she had already gained ten pounds.
I mean that's not a surprise, right.
No, I mean, like this kind of thing is unsustainable. You can't just dring shakes for the rest of your life. So you know, now they'll tell you that you have to do it in a different kind of way. But back in the eighties, there was just this idea that losing weight in any way, no matter how drastic, was always good.
Okay, So I feel like it's worth pausing for a moment to talk about what was going on in the world at this time.
Yes, I'd love to know more about it.
It's nineteen eighty eight.
Like, you know, there's no like Lizzo body Positivity, Big Girls Show, There's.
No I Love my Curvy wife guy.
Yeah, I mean, and thank god that guy.
Was totally We're not having like debates about whether fat or curvy, or plus size or overweight is the right and most inclusive terminology. Like this is the eighties, Like this is the era of Jane Fonda and Lea'sard's.
Jane Fonda's workouts are constantly improving the science of staying.
And slim fast, which had been pulled from the shelves in the nineteen seventies, is now back on the market.
Give us a week, we don't take off the weight.
Jenny Craig has launched, which was like another subscription.
I did Jenny Cregg.
We hope you lose weight and teach you what you need to know.
To keep it all Lean Cuisine, those disgusting TV dinners that were like on suburban American TV.
Why describing that to me as if I've never had leave Amy.
Our audience is younger than us.
It's not just the caloriesaid count, it's the taste. But I also want to tell you that in my most anarexic phase, my best friend from college, Claire, remembers and always talks about this moment when I was like really really having like disordered eating and which is not an expression I knew at the time, And she spent a weekend with me and I ate half a Lead Cuisine pizza and was like, oh, yeah, I'm so full. Wow.
And she was like, there's no way you're full from that like tiny piece of bread you just consumed.
Fascinating, Okay, which brings me to this is also five years after Karen Carpenter, who was one half of the folk duo The Carpenters, had died from you know, complications related to anarexia.
Basically a Carpenter died this morning, the victim of cardiac arrest.
The Grammy Award winning singer was only thirty two years old.
So we're sort of just waking up to this idea that diet culture is a thing.
I don't know even if it's that or if it's just that we're slowly beginning to realize that not all weight loss is just an objective good. Yes, right, I think up until this point of just like losing weight is an objective good, and that is really like part of housewife culture for a long time, right. But I think what happens in the eighties is that it becomes just a broader sort of national obsession where everyone's like learning to exercise.
And so there's a Senate report put out in the late nineteen seventies that basically says, like Americans needs to just stop eating so much fat.
I have such a connection to that because my mom was always trying to lose weight. So I just remember all of these diets. But I remember kind of the intensity of that in the eighties, how much we were constantly like being bombarded by these images of you need to lose weight, you need to lose weight, and like, here are the ways in which you could be doing that.
In that context, honestly, Oprah's diet doesn't seem that shocking.
Yeah, And the thing we know now is that Oprah will struggle with her weight and this will be an ongoing topic of discussion for her for the rest of her life.
Right.
That kind of leads us back to the point I mentioned at the top, right, which is the reason we're talking about this, which is that she says, and I'll quote, this is her greatest accomplishment.
I think it's worth pausing to just review some of Oprah's accomplishments because you know, at this point, she's starred.
In the color Purple, Yeah, which was nominated for an Oscar.
She was nominated for an Oscar, like she was actually for her particular role, and it was a Steven Spielberg movie. So even if she hadn't been nominated for an oscar, just being in a Steven Spielberg movie is a huge accomplishment, right, It's like something to be proud of. Also, she's just launched this talk show. Right, It's only been two years when this episode airs, and she's already getting sixteen million
people who regularly watch the show. I mean, that's a huge number even by those standards, like that would be an insane number today, but at that time even it was a wildly successful number. And on top of that, the New York Times reported that the year that she made this episode, she made twenty five million dollars. Wow. She will also go on to become the first black female billionaire two thousand and three. There's really not many people who can say they've accomplished as much as Oprah.
But let's pause here and do what Oprah would do, which is pick up after the break.
Okay, Susie, So I want to talk a bit more about your personal connection to this moment. You know, you mentioned earlier on in the show that you struggled with your weight and that was part of why you wanted to take this subject on.
Yeah, I mean, listen. I think weight was always a big topic in my house. It was always a big issue. I think because my mom struggled with her weight, and I sort of first became conscious of weight in relationship to her and the struggles she was having and how much she was constantly kind of trying to lose weight. And much like the Stedman story, I think some of that did come from my father and her sense that he might in some ways be displeased by her not
being as thin as she once was. And then slowly, over time I took in those messages and then eventually I turned them on myself. And what's fascinating is when I go back and look at pictures of her from this time, she was, by no objective measure fat, but she kind of was teaching me unintentionally because it was something she was struggling with herself that, like what she looked like was unacceptable, and so I remember being like, oh, she is fat, kind of accepting her version of what
she was. And in some ways, that's why I try never to talk about my issues with my weight like you and I have never really talked about this particular thing for me, because I think one thing I have very consciously done as an adult is try not to project this struggle outwards, because I don't want everyone to kind of be focused on my weight. And I feel like if I'm talking about it all the time, I'm inviting it's kind of like the opening, right, I'm inviting
everyone to have an opinion about my situation. And I think also I had gained a bunch of weight right before middle school, and then my dad actually died right before I was in middle school, and I remember my mom saying to me, he was really worried about your weight.
And I think that's when it really started to take hold for me, where I was like I started to always be on a diet, and then I went to boarding school, and I think there's like this period, this relative period where I'm fine, I don't remember kind of obsessing. I was pretty thin at boarding school. The focus at boarding school was like on why I wasn't blonde and blue eyed, So it was like I wasn't constantly obsessing
about my weight. But then slowly after college I started to gain weight again, and probably in my late twenties and early thirties, I really struggled. And I think in some ways that's why I picked this moment, because I was always aware of this moment, right, and I was always aware of how much Oprah's weight was part of
her kind of journey. But I think as I got older and I started to feel those same feelings that nothing I did would ever really be a success unless I also could take control of my weight, right, Like
I really felt a lot of shame about it. I really struggled with dating, which I had not really struggled with before, because I really saw it as like a personal failing in myself that I had started to gain this weight even though there were very clear medical anyzings, Like it's not rational, right, but I had this really intense sense that I was failing in this really big way and that that is why nothing else in my life was perfect.
It's so interesting the way you put that, because it both feels so closely aligned to what Oprah said about this being her quote greatest accomplishment, but also how this is something of a universal experience among women, right, Yeah, Like if it's not our weight, it is something else we feel holds us back from I don't know, maybe, as Oprah would put it, living our best life.
Yeah, nothing is ever quite enough. So it's like I'm hugely successful, but I never had kids. I'm hugely successful, but I'm fat. I'm hugely successful, but I never got married, or I'm divorced. There's always You're always looking for the thing in yourself that is the flaw that keeps you from being able to feel perfect, perfect and whole and successful.
And as the years have gone on, this moment has resonated for me more and more as I've seen it, as I've sort of had the context for it, right, I sort of go back and relook at this moment and re examine it and rewatch it, because it really starts to feel like a thing I can see myself having done in her position. Like there is a lot of ways in which we could look back and say Oprah contributed to diet culture, and she did, but she
was a victim of that culture, right. She made people feel less alone in that journey, but she also reinforced the idea journey that they needed that journey.
It sounds like she was trying to make this her story. People could come cover this event whenever, but it was going to be her event. She was going to kind of control this narrative. Definitely's profit on it.
Yeah, I mean I think that's definitely the case. But what it also does is instead of giving her ownership over the story, which may have been what her intention was, she actually completely loses control of the story.
And you said before that this episode was super successful, right.
Yeah, I mean eighteen million people watched this episode. It was the most watched episode ever in her twenty five year run.
Oh wow.
But then she is for months and months after this just absolutely hounded by paparazzi who want to take pictures of what she's eating, who want to comment on whether or not she's continuing to gain weight again. There is just this like huge ongoing conversation in the media with nutritionists and doctors and commentators talking about like was this a healthy way to lose weight? Can she keep the
weight off? What will happen? And so instead of actually taking control of the story, she's kind of given the story over in a way, and it spins wildly out of her control. And she does really resent that. I mean, she says later on how harmful it felt to her to have this conversation about her all the time, and all this coverage kind of prompts this real defensiveness in her right where she is saying things like I never was happy being fat, I'll never be fat again. Never.
She becomes really irritated when people are commenting on this stuff, and she says things like, asking me if I'll keep the weight off is like asking me, will you ever be in a relationship again where you allow yourself to be emotionally battered. I've been there and I don't intend to go back.
She talks about herself almost as if it was her former fat self and her present skinny self, like she has severed these two parts of herself.
Yeah, one hundred percent. It is just this real distinction she draws where she talks about that person with disdain, is like, I am now fixed. This is like an inflection point. I will never go back to being that person.
Which, if you think about it, so then when you do go back to being that person, because everybody fluctuates, yes, and you've completely publicly said that that person is disgusting, Yeah, Like what does that do to your right?
You've described this version of yourself as like a bad version of yourself, and then you do eventually go back to that version. And at the same time, you're dealing with your own sort of internal struggle with the fact that you clearly like hate this version of yourself so much that you wanted to like hold up a bag of like animal fat and be like this was me. But at the same time, you're also being inundated with headlines about look, you've gained weight again, Look what your
weight is, why are you gaining weight? What did you do wrong? And that messaging, which I mean I cannot imagine with my own weight issues having that layered on top. I mean that has to feel insane. And there's this fascinating quote in the BBC from this profile in twenty eleven that I found, where it literally says if Oprah is remembered for anything, it will be her body shape, which mirrored America's obsession with its own body shape, Like, how can that be what she will be remembered for?
She is quite literally one of the most successful women on the planet. You know what we've never talked about, though, is I don't actually think I know anything about your relationship to your weight or weight loss or body issues.
I mean, I.
Feel like to some extent growing up in eighties and nineties, like was it possible to come out of that with a healthy body?
Imass?
I certainly did not.
I had come up in this sort of nineties Seattle run right kind of heroin weak.
Yeah, yes, basically heroin chic.
And I remember specifically having this tag from a pair of Calvin Klin underwear, like I wasn't allowed to buy name brand stuff. I had saved my money to get. Do you remember those Calvin Clin underwear that had the band on the top and they would sort of show above your genes And Kate Moss was the model for them, And so she was on the tag and it was her in the underwear and her perfect wafee probably anorexic stomach.
And I kept that tag in my underwear drawer so I could look at it and compare how my stomach was compared to that.
You know, my parents would be horrified to get.
Like, had they found that, they would have had to have a serious conversation with me about weight. But and I was thinn so it wasn't a concern. We didn't really talk about it. But like, yeah, we all dabbled in starving ourselves.
Yeah, so I think it really was impossible to be a girl in this country. Or maybe it's still impossible.
That's the question.
So like, okay, now we talk about dieting as health and wellness, and now we're you know, we just want to be healthy and just when our intermittent fasting.
Is because it's actually like better for our brain yee.
It's like biohacking. Now, like that all the Silicon Valley dudes are dieting, but they don't call it dieting. They call it bio hacking. And that makes it more acceptable because it's less feminine, right, diets girls.
And we can celebrate that all body types are wearing crop tops now, and then if you actually look into the data, you find that, yeah, like rates of anorexia have not gotten.
Down, No, they've gone up actually.
So it's like we've packaged it.
Yeah, we've just repackaged it in a way to make it less embarrassing to talk about. Like, one of the things that drives me crazy is that we just replace the word diet with fasting, and fasting is acceptable, like, oh, I'm going on a liquid fast. It's like, no, that's not good for you. Drinking juice for four or five days or whatever is not actually good for you. And anyone who knows anything about like nutrition will say to
you that it's a terrible way to lose weight. But because we call them cleanses juice cleanses, no one can say to you, hey, is that a good idea? Because it's like, you're just trying to be healthier and who could argue with that. But it is this really complicated thing because on the one hand, we're like body positivity and on the other hand, Selena Gomez goes to an award show and then is inundated with comments about how she looks like she's gained weight. So I don't think
celebrities feel less scrutiny about this. I think we just pretend there's less scrutiny.
It's interesting too, So it's like, then, once you become a celebrity who is larger, the culture turns on you if you do is the way like.
Yeah, I mean sort of similar to what happened to Oprah. Right when she lost the weight, there was like a little bit of a backlash to it, and when she started to gain it back, people in the audience would be like, we love you fat. That is kind of this complicated thing at Dell lost a bunch of weight, and I feel like there was this real, sort of
like complicated relationship with it. But the most notable example of that is I think you know, Lizzo is vegan now and at some point she shared on her TikTok this shake she was having, and there was this enormous backlash like you're supposed to be a body positive you're promoting unhealthy eating, et cetera, et cetera. And that also feels unfair because Lizzo is allowed to make decisions about her body without being judged.
Well It's sort of like all diets have been framed as wellness, but then when a person is actually doing it for health, we criticize them for dieting one hundred percent. And now, of course we're in the age of ozempic. This is the diabetes term weightless drug. It's on magazine covers. Seemingly everyone is on it, and there's all this backlash to celebrities who are believed to be taking it.
So I think the Ozempa conversation is interesting because it just shows another way in which we want to control how women deal with their bodies. We want our celebrities to be thin, but not if they're not doing the hard work right getting thin, you have to earn thinness. Thinness is something to attain, to work hard at, and it's felt like it's cheating to take this diet drug.
There is this sense in America that you should be able to overcome your problems just with like sheer toughness, and so that's how we feel about mental health, and that's also how we feel about weight loss.
I think that's so right.
Yeah, And what's interesting is we've been working on this you know episode for a while and thinking about these issues. And then Oprah just recently released this special on her site Oprah Daily, and the specials called The Life You Want class The State of Weight, and it's about ozepic and Manjaro in these class of drugs, and she talks about this exact thing that we think about weight as a matter of willpower, but really it's a medical issue.
You know, one of the things I carry, you know, so much shame because I was publicly shamed about it. And even when I first started hearing about the weight loss drugs at the same time, I was going through knee surgery and I felt, I've got to do this.
On my own.
I've got to do this on my own, because if I take the drug, that's the easy way out.
It's so interesting to hear her say that because there have been so many rumors that she of late is on ozempic.
Does she address that directly in the special?
She doesn't address it directly, And I think she doesn't have to write it's like those are just rumors. She doesn't have to explain to the world how she is or isn't losing weight. I mean, that's very much the thing she's been fighting against, right But what's so interesting about the special to me is that it really focuses on how we're just now as a culture, really coming to understand that obesity is a disease, right, it's not
this behavioral thing. And you know, even though the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease like ten years ago, that really hasn't taken shape. So I get that. Yeah, yeah, And so they're on the special. There are these doctors like from Harvard and NYU lingon, and there's actually the CEO of weight Watchers, right because you know, even they now need to understand that it's not just a matter of keeping track of points.
That's so interesting because it wasn't Oprah at one point a spokesperson or an investor in some way.
Yeah. So I think she owns a stake in weight Watchers, and that's mentioned in the sort of conversation with the weight Watchers person. But you know, I think that is the issue, right, is that for years, if you did weight watchers, lost weight and then regain the weight, you thought that the problem was you, but in fact that these are actually your genetics at play or your brain. There's lots of scientific reasons why you may struggle with
weight loss and also with maintaining weight loss. And you know, even for Oprah, who has followed this for so long, she says that, you know, it's an idea that even she is now just starting to embrace.
One of the things that I've been so ashamed, shamed myself about, and was shamed in the tabloids every week about for twenty five years is not having the willpower.
It's just crazy to hear her say that, because it truly has followed her.
That's what we've been talking about here throughout her career.
Yeah, it really feels like this moment, this Red Wagon moment, is some thing that set a tone for the way people felt like they could talk about her and her weight, and it's something she looks back on with a lot of regret, right like, over the years, when she talks about this episode, this Red Wagon episode, she says it's hard to watch and when she watches it, she wants to say to herself, like, don't do it, even though it's a great TV moment, And that really gets to
the heart of this story. I think this is one of the most watched episodes in arguably the most popular talk show of all time, but it's definitely not something Oprah would now say was one of her greatest accomplishments, which makes sense right. It opened up a conversation about her that she was then plagued by, and I want to let her have the last word on how she thinks about it all. Now here's what she said in her recent special.
Whatever your choice is for your body and your weight health, it should be yours to own and not to be shamed about it. As a person who's been shamed for so many years, I'm just sick of it.
I'm just sick of it. I'm just sick of it.
And I hope this conversation begins the unshaming.
This is in retrospect. Thanks for listening. Is there a cultural moment you can't stop thinking about and want us to explore in a future episode. Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find us on Instagram at in retropod.
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett and at suzib NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist Fight Club and This Is Eighteen.
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media. Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Additional editing help from Mary Doo and Mike Coscarelli, Sound correction and mastering by Amanda Rose Smith. We are your hosts Susie Vannecarum.
And Jessica Bennett. We're also executive producers. For even more check out in retropod dot com. See you next week.