My weight loss journey with Oprah – and losing the shame of wanting to be thin

I’m old enough to remember Oprah Winfrey wheeling out a red Radio Flyer wagon stacked with 67 pounds of fat to represent all the weight she’d lost in just four months. She twirled around in her size 10 Calvin Klein jeans, her face gaunt, soaking up the applause. I watched, fascinated by her dramatic transformation, wanting the same for myself. It was October 1988, and I was a junior in high school, consumed by a desire to be thin, even as I mainlined fries on late-night McDonald’s runs, speeding home with the windows rolled down so my parents wouldn’t detect the stench of stale grease in our family Volvo.  

It didn’t take long for Oprah’s body to start expanding again. I watched in horror as she grew bigger and bigger, my hopes of transforming into a skinny person dashed. If Oprah couldn’t stay thin, with her army of cooks and personal trainers, what hope did I have for myself, pretending to be satisfied by a single sawdust-y Fig Newton, a cookie that, along with cockroaches, could survive a nuclear winter?

I’ve watched Oprah expand and contract over the years, her trajectory eerily like my own. In recent years, Oprah’s weight seemed to stay consistent. She looked curvy and healthy and happy, like she’d reached a detente with her weight struggles and had attained that Zen-like state of self-acceptance so many in the body positive movement appear to have. 

Then I saw the recent videos of her on the red carpet at "The Color Purple" premiere and had to look twice. She was thinner. She looked great, but just thinking that felt like a betrayal to my feeble attempts to prize health over svelte. My first thought was Ozempic, but initially, she denied taking the drug. She’d said, in a recent panel she hosted on weight loss and obesity, that she didn’t want to take drugs, because that would be “the easy way out.” Then a few days ago, she publicly admitted to taking them. Initially, I was disappointed – my icon still pined for a smaller body no matter her age or her income? Here was a woman who seemingly had everything, still plagued by body image issues. Yet, I understood. That desire to be thin never vanishes, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves we’re OK in our bigger bodies. 

The reality is there’s no easy way out of the matrix of fatness and societal shame surrounding it. I would have done just about anything to be thin, and in fact, two years ago, I did. I underwent gastric sleeve surgery to lose weight. By then, I’d put on another 25 pounds during COVID, living alone, cooped up in my home, with nothing else to look forward to at the end of the day except Trader Joe’s fried egg rolls dripping with sticky sweet and sour sauce, followed by milk and Oreos. That tipped the scales to 300, almost 150 pounds more than I’d weighed in high school, when I believed I was fat.  

There’s no easy way out because there’s no miracle cure. Pills, surgery, SlimFast, starvation provide short-term dramatic effects that are easily reversed. Weight loss drugs aren’t meant to be taken indefinitely, and most people report weight gain once they stop taking them. The blissful hunger-free honeymoon period after weight loss surgery wears off, and after a year or two, you can eat as much as you used to. The hunger returns, and then, often, so does the weight. It is fighting a tidal wave of cravings and genetics, of physical and emotional needs, of a deep, animal desire for food, to maintain your weight, to stave off the pounds. No matter how well I’m doing, how successfully I’m controlling my weight, I will always live with an undercurrent of fear that one slice of chocolate cake will be my undoing, that it will be the lure that trips the switch in my brain to eat and eat and eat, to slide back into fatness. And honestly, I would rather die. 

For years, I tried to accept my large body. I followed body-positive influencers, I ditched my black t-shirt tent dress and invested in some colorful plus-sized clothes, but the desire to be thin never left me. I scrolled through vintage clothing sites, salivating over clothes that wouldn’t come close to fitting while I slathered bread with Brie. My entire life has been a pendulum swinging between my depressed, fat years and my striving to be thin and stay that way.  

I’ve followed Oprah’s journey as I’ve gone through my own. I bought the cookbook "In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes" right out of college, determined to lose the 50 pounds I’d gained after transferring schools and struggling to make friends. I tried her recipes, followed her workout regimens, soaked up the advice of every weight loss guru. 

In my late 20s, after finishing graduate school, I went through a terrible breakup and moved back to Alabama and lived with my parents. Jobless, directionless and sneaking chocolate chip cookies from the ceramic Cookie Monster jar, like I’d done throughout my childhood, though my brothers were no longer around to blame for the dwindling supply, I watched Oprah in the afternoons with my mother. We sat at opposite ends of the couch, and I shielded my face with my hand, silent-crying while watching Oprah give away cars and blenders and stereos to everyone in the audience. I cried because I felt like a failure. I cried, because while I sat there like a lump, accomplishing nothing, expanding back into plus sizes, there was Oprah, a large woman doing good deeds, making a mark on the world. I could be successful, regardless of my size, but I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to exist in the world as a fat person. 

By the time Oprah bought Weight Watchers and rebranded it as WW, focusing on the healthy lifestyle, pretending like it wasn’t entirely about watching our weight go up and down, I’d been on four or five WW journeys. We spent a lot of time in the meetings talking about donuts.  

That Christmas, 2015, I was the heaviest I’d ever been at 276 pounds, and I watched countless commercials of Oprah waxing on about the brilliance of WW, because you could eat bread. “I looooove bread,” she’d say emphatically, a little too naked with need for the fat person’s drug of choice: carbs. 

A year later, I started WW again and lost almost 75 pounds, just shy of getting into “Onederland,” the magical land under 200 pounds that everyone in WW dreams of with the same fervor as donuts. I gained all that weight back and then some after major surgery in 2018.

When I finally decided to undergo weight loss surgery, after considering it for years, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, my large frame dwarfed by the enormous waiting room chairs at the bariatric clinic, and one form listed out every possible weight loss method you could imagine, with a box next to it, to check if you’d tried it. There were the usual suspects: Atkins, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, followed by stranger things: the cabbage soup diet, juicing, jaw wiring. Jaw wiring? For real? It sounded so Draconian, like when I used to joke about padlocking my refrigerator to force myself to stop eating. But wasn’t having two-thirds of your stomach removed just as crazy? It didn’t matter. I would have tried anything at that point. I had entire closets full of clothes I’d never worn that I’d dreamed of fitting into for years, trying to make the best of my fat body, artfully draping it in the paltry options available to larger women. 

Over the next year and a half, I lost 150 pounds. I lost an entire person. My clothes started to fit: all the vintage dresses I’d collected over the years, like the 1940s swing dresses that swooshed as I walked. I swanned about. I could cross my legs with ease. I could hold downward dog for minutes at a time. I could hike for miles and miles without pain. I was exactly the person I’d always wanted to be. But it never quite feels like a victory I can settle into, for as anyone who’s ever struggled with their weight knows, you live in fear of gaining it back. Hunger is an enemy to be warded off every single day. For a year I was hungry, but I couldn’t eat much at a time, but in the last six months, I’ve been able to eat normal portions, and I am often hungry. I crave sugar. Like Oprah in her WW commercial, I love bread. I love cookies. I want them all the time. So, every day is a fight to distract myself from the cravings, to choose broccoli over baked goods. 

I’ve felt a lot of shame for my need to be thin – for not being above it all, for not being a feminist who says f**k the system that is rigged against us and eating what I want without apology. But there’s a stronger urge that’s impossible to resist – to be thin, to look a certain way, to be admired instead of invisible, or worse, to be noticed with pity and disdain. The larger I got, the more elephantine I felt, the harder I tried to hide. Now all I want is to be seen, to dress like a rainbow and wear beautiful clothes and to take up space because I take up so much less space. 

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I have a weird need for Oprah to be happy, because it feels like our happiness is intertwined. People like us will never relinquish the desire to be thin. That craving is singularly overpowered by our desire for food. I hate being beholden to what feels like vanity, but is that vanity coming from me, or is it simply a response to a world that requires thinness from me? I didn't create this system, I'm just trying to live within it. Like Oprah, I'm not going to be shamed for my desire to be thin. If I start gaining weight again, I will take a pill. I will endure nausea. I will do irrational things to stay thin, because I’ve never felt better.