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    • Why the public cares so much about Oprah Winfrey's body
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    Why the public cares so much about Oprah Winfrey's body

    Kathleen William Posted on

    Editor's note: Watch “TV on the Edge: Moments That Shaped Our Culture” Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. The four-part series runs until October 13th.



    CNN
    —

    Oprah Winfrey was the first black woman to see Whitney Trotter on television — and the first television character to lead conversations that influenced young black girls like her.

    But beyond those groundbreaking TV moments, interviews and breakthrough achievements, Trotter — now a registered dietitian — remembers that Winfrey was known for something else: the size and shape of her body.

    A moment in 1988 impressed so many people when Winfrey pulled a small red wagon with 67 pounds of animal fat behind her on her nationally televised show, which was the amount of weight she had lost at the time. People immediately watched to see when she would regain it, how she would lose it again, and — more recently — whether she would use a drug like GLP-1 to try to make her body smaller.

    While this public attention is specifically limited to celebrities, Winfrey faces the level of scrutiny many people face at every step of her body's changes, Dr. Alexis Conason, a psychologist and certified eating disorder specialist in New York City.

    Such scrutiny is the product of diet culture, the influences and messages that influence our diets, and is based on cultural pressure to achieve an ideal body type, experts say.

    “This feeling of wanting to put people down and especially reducing women to their looks and pointing out their flaws in order to take power away from them is, I think, a long-standing tactic in the media,” Conason said. “And I think that continues (to this day).”

    The criticism of Winfrey's body shows how diet culture is dominated by losers, even if you're one of the most influential people in the world, experts say.

    On her talk show in 1988, Winfrey brought a red cart full of 30 kilograms of animal fat - the same amount of weight she had lost at the time.

    Lose, win or keep – the test continues

    Many people have felt the pressure of diet culture to lose weight, but often the expectation is that control will wane once this happens. And often that's simply not the case.

    Whether they're maintaining, gaining or losing weight, many clients come to New York dietitian Kimmie Singh saying they feel like their bodies are being monitored, she said.

    “It's something that's so normalized – from the magazines, but also from conversations about people at the dinner table,” Singh said, “or about people congratulating the person who lost weight.”

    “Even if you reach the height that society deems ideal, you will be pressured by goals to achieve the correct body shape,” said Trotter, who is also a nurse practitioner and psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner in Austin, Texas is.

    The myths of weight and size

    There are two harmful ideas associated with this focus on other people's bodies: that weight is within a person's control and that the size of a body is associated with moral worth, Conason said.

    “There is a cultural narrative that being in a larger body is morally inferior,” she said. “There are all these associations with obesity or laziness, people who aren't that smart, people who aren't motivated, don't take care of themselves, aren't disciplined.”

    People feel more justified in discriminating and being cruel when they believe these associations are true — especially if they believe a person's height is within their control, Conason said.

    “It all comes back to the myth of personal responsibility around weight and body size, that if you work hard enough you can achieve this cultural ideal of thinness and be accepted,” she added.

    One such view of weight and acceptance is That's not true, said Dr. Chika Anekwe, an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

    While a portion of the population is biologically “resistant” to obesity, others may make major changes to their lifestyle and still be unable to maintain weight loss, Anekwe said. And with increasing changes in access to food, exercise and health care, people's weight is increasingly moving beyond their individual control, she added.

    A 2019 meta-analysis showed that more than 80% of weight loss is regained after five years.

    “If people could simply choose their body weight, size or shape,” Anekwe said, “we wouldn’t have such a booming diet culture industry.”

    Even when people appear to be losing weight, they may be losing the diet culture game.

    The popularization of GLP-1 drugs, originally prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes but now commonly used for weight loss, has popularized the idea that a smaller body is a matter of choice, Conason said. She pointed out that this also provides another opportunity for society to question the way people lose weight.

    “There's no other class of drugs that people want to violate HIPAA as much as they want to violate GLP-1 because they say, 'Oh, I need to know,'” Trotter said, referring to the federal law that restricts the publication of medical records information limited.

    In the hierarchy of what society considers the “most moral” ways to lose weight, medications rank at the bottom, said Bri Campos, a body image coach based in Paramus, New Jersey.

    “Unless you are one of the 5% of people who are in a calorie deficit for an extended period of time (more than five years), can increase your exercise and reduce your weight, your weight loss doesn't count,” she said.

    Such reactions happened with Lizzo, Kelly Clarkson and Winfrey – their bodies looked smaller and there was speculation about how they did it.

    “There is something like distrust of fat people in general,” Singh said. “People want to have a fat people moment where they say, 'Oh, we caught you with your hand in the cookie jar.'”

    People want to catch and shame others for not pursuing a lifestyle that denies them pleasure, Conason said. Some may also face criticism for using weight loss methods that society considers lazy, Singh said.

    Whether it's a fad diet, taking GLP-1, or weight-loss surgery, “it just goes to show that we can never be enough in the eyes of diet culture,” she added.

    Since most people don't receive social recognition for their existing bodies, can't maintain long-term weight loss through restrictive diets, or are criticized for using other methods to lose weight, what's the point of the diet culture game?

    One idea is that diet culture controls power.

    Many successful men are judged by their achievements rather than their looks, but the same isn't always true for the rest of the population, Conason said.

    Winfrey is one of the most influential people in the world and her body has still faced scrutiny – a reminder to powerful women that their size, clothing, hairstyle and adherence to beauty standards remain a priority, she added.

    Campos said she has women, transgender and non-binary people come to her for body image coaching. They work in science, technology and law or have degrees from top universities and still feel that their achievements are not as important as others' perceptions of their bodies, she said.

    “We know this because of Oprah, because of the Kardashians, because of all these people who continue to westernize Beauty that there is no peak to reach safety,” Campos added. “There will always be something different. If it's not your weight, it will age. There’s always something.”

    Eliminating diet culture's influence on your world is no easy task, but it can start with becoming more aware of the impact it has on you, Conason said.

    “The more we can understand what diet culture is, what weight stigma is, and how it shows up in our lives, the better we can observe it and question it, rather than just subconsciously taking it all in and absorbing it,” she said.

    It's also important to realize that other people's bodies should never be the subject of conversation — even if you think talking about their weight loss is a compliment, Conason added. And when you talk about celebrities and their weight, such observations don't get any better.

    Comments and criticisms you make about other people's bodies also influence the way you think about your own body, Conason said.

    “Oprah probably doesn't hear what I talk about with my friends or on social media or things like that, but like people in my life often do,” she said. “It harms the everyday people in our lives who may or may not be in larger bodies, who may or may not be taking a GLP-1, who may or may not be struggling with an eating disorder.”

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    Kathleen William
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