Oprah Winfrey Looks Back on 'Hurtful' Moments, Recalls Feeling 'Too Fat to Go' to Don Johnson's Christmas Party

The mogul looks back on how it was a “national sport” to mock her weight, and remembers a particular “comedy bit” that hurt her feelings

Oprah Winfrey is looking back on her relationship with her weight, sharing that at times it held her back — or led to “hurtful” moments in the media.

On the inaugural episode of The Jamie Kern Lima podcast, Winfrey shared that she began gaining weight almost immediately after she famously brought out a wagon full of fat — to illustrate how much weight she’d lost — on a November 1988 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

“I didn't have a morsel of food for five solid months in losing that weight on [the all-liquid diet] Optifast,” she told Lima, the author of the bestselling book Worthy and the founder of IT Cosmetics.

“Three days later, I was 5 lbs. heavier, and a week later I was 10 lbs. heavier,” Winfrey, who just celebrated her 70th birthday in January, said.

“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."

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“I'd gone from 145 [lbs.] on the day of the show,” she recalled, “I think I was 157 [lbs.] in the course of, like, a week and a half or two. And the shame started again.”

She also looked back at how “making fun of my weight was national sport for 25 years” — and recalled how Keenan Ivory Wayans’ ground-breaking sketch comedy show, In Living Color, was behind “one of the most hurtful things.”

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“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,” she recalled of the skit, where Kim Wayans played Winfrey on the set of her talk show.

“The whole audience fell out [laughing] and the woman was me.”

“That was just accepted— that was just a thing that was accepted —so I have borne this weight thing and carried it to the point where I just feel like, I just recently turned 70 and I'm not carrying it into the next decade,” Winfrey told Lima.

“I'm done with it,” she said, later adding “I was judgmental because I have been so judged. I actually don't know anybody who's been more publicly judged about their weight than myself and I have carried and borne the shame of other people.”

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