As Oprah Winfrey continues changing her relationship with her weight, she recalls once feeling “too fat” to attend a party and how she felt being mocked on ‘In Living Color,’ which involved a portrayal of her eating so much she explodes.
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While no longer having any shame in her game when it comes to her weight, the 70-year-old media mogul and television personality says she is done taking this thing about her weight into the next decade of her life. Joining ‘The Jamie Kern Lima Show,’ Oprah Winfrey spoke about the toxicity of diet culture, fatphobia, and how she has overcome being publicly and constantly made fun of for her weight.
Oprah Winfrey told host Jamie Kern Lima that sometimes some of the shame she endured over her weight was self-inflicted, like when she declined to attend a party hosted by ‘Miami Vice‘ actor Don Johnson. At that time, Winfrey’s weight had been fluctuating and she felt “too fat” to attend.
Winfrey admitted, “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. I’d gone from 145 [pounds] on the day of the show. I think I was 157 [pounds] in the course of, like, a week and a half or two. And the shame started again.”
In addition to recalling feeling “too fat” to attend a party, Oprah Winfrey also remembered the endless jokes made about her weight across television, like in an ‘In Living Color‘ sketch and when late critic Richard Blackwell made possibly one of the most offensive comments about her weight. On a TV Guide cover, she was titled, “bumpy, lumpy, and downright dumpy.”
Recalling Blackwell’s comment, Winfrey said, “I ingested that, I 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 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.”
Oprah Winfrey said that for “25 years” her weight was regularly targeted, further recalling the ‘In Living Color‘ skit that showed Kim Wayans portraying her overeating and exploding. Winfrey said, “‘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. The whole audience fell out [laughing] and the woman was me.”
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