Oprah Winfrey is now laying bare the truth about her new slim and trim figure in a new special about her weight loss. However, she has not always been as transparent and confident in her body. Along her journey, she has used a number of tricks to appear thinner when dietary fads simply were not getting the job done.
After years of yo-yo dieting, starving herself, and losing and regaining weight, the Oscar nominee believes she finally has the key to her obesity struggles: prescription weight-loss medicine. In December, she debuted a petite frame that rivaled that of her infamous 1988 self, when she infamously shed 67 pounds and pulled out a red wagon of fat on her eponymous talk show.
“I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing,” she told People, at the time she dished on the secret component behind her appearance. “The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for. I’m absolutely done with the shaming from other people and particularly myself.”
In a new town hall special, “An Oprah Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution,” the veteran journalist opened up about feeling ridiculed for 25 years due to her weight. She hopes the vulnerable conversation will help others rid themselves of feeling shame and stigma in their own battles with obesity.
U guys remember when Oprah pulled out a wagon of all the fat she lost? pic.twitter.com/cSd7oriaCO
— zyrinx (@WellUh7) February 2, 2024
“Because I, as I said at the beginning of this, took on the same for myself and carried it for myself,” she said in the program that aired on ABC on March 18. “And now that I know that I’m just holding my breath underwater, I have been able to release that shame, and it doesn’t matter what anybody says,” said the OWN Network founder.
But before she could own her body, the entertainer used a bevy of tricks to help her cope with not having the ideal body size. Read about them below.
Oprah Winfrey tears up over painful memories & other emotional moments from her weight loss TV special. pic.twitter.com/X65SCjJT9u
— Access Hollywood (@accesshollywood) March 19, 2024
Oprah refused to pose for photos that showed off her full body.
Winfrey kept people from doing before and after comparisons as her body shrunk to 160 pounds and ballooned again to 200 pounds by simply refusing to appear on the cover of her magazine, O, in poses that showcased her figure in its entirety.
“You’ll know how I’ve felt over the past year every time I had to shoot a cover for ‘O.’ If you’re a regular subscriber, you’ll notice you’ve not seen a head-to-toe shot all year. Why? Because I didn’t want to be seen,” she told the publication in 2009 after regaining 40 pounds. As a result, there are several headshots that appear on the magazine’s covers.
O editors were directed to camouflage Oprah’s figure.
Along with getting creative with their cover shoots, editors were also tasked with trimming down her silhouette, making her appear longer and leaner than she truly was. “This past year’s been really difficult because I didn’t feel like being a cover girl,” she said in 2009. “I wasn’t proud of my body and, therefore, didn’t want to show my body and didn’t really want to be seen.”
Skinny Oprah 🤔🤔 https://t.co/yl0Fq1FY4p
— AK. (@AisforAlieu) March 16, 2024
Oprah became a pro at holding in her stomach.
In 2009, the mogul also admitted in her magazine that she had perfected sucking in her stomach and walking backward in rooms “so no one sees that your butt keeps moving even when you stop.”
Oprah turned down opportunities that increased her visibility — especially next to smaller women.
Hosting her daytime talk show before a live studio audience and millions more viewing from home was not much of an issue, but intentionally standing next to people half her size was too much for Winfrey at one point in time. When she taped a special with Tina Turner and Cher at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas in 2008, she declined an invitation to sing “Proud Mary,” opting instead to sing from the wings of the stage.
“I think I hit bottom when I wanted to stay home even from a show as fun as the one we did with Tina Turner and Cher in Las Vegas. I was supposed to stand between them onstage, and I felt like a fat cow. I wanted to disappear,” she told O.
“I thought, ‘God, help me now. How can I put myself between them? Can I put half of my body behind Cher’s? Well, Cher’s body is half of my body, so that’s hard. How can I hide myself here on this stage and not have to be up here?'” said Oprah. “I felt awful. I wanted to just disappear.”
Along with asking God to help her, Winfrey also questions ways she could hide herself. “As I was interviewing both of them about their ages (at the time, Tina was 68 and loved being older; Cher was 61 and didn’t), I asked myself, ‘Who’s the real older woman here? I am.’ They both had more energy than I did. They didn’t just sparkle; they glittered.”
She avoided public shaming of her figure by steering clear of certain boutiques.
If a retailer was known for catering to smaller sizes, “The Color Purple” actress and producer made certain to avoid being a disappointed patron.
Crafty seamstresses kept her true size hidden.
The billionaire has previously disclosed that fittings for her cover shoots were often embarrassing, as shirts would be too tight and pants unable to button, or even worse, could not be pulled all the way up. Her trick, and maybe saving grace, was having her seamstress splice together two of the same garments to make a piece that fit her appropriately.
