Oprah Winfrey admitted she once didn’t attend Don Johnson’s Christmas party because she thought she was “too fat.” During Tuesday’s episode of the “Jamie Kern Lima” podcast , the media mogul got candid about her biggest dieting mistakes, including when she lost 67 pounds from a liquid diet in 1988 and quickly regained it. “I didn’t have a morsel of food for five solid months in losing that weight on Optifast,” she said, referring to the weight management product that replaces food with shakes.
Winfrey, 70, reflected on when she debuted how much weight she lost by wheeling in a wagon filled with fat on an episode of the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in November 1988. “Three days later, I was 5 pounds heavier, and a week later I was 10 pounds heavier,” she recalled. By December of that year, the TV personality was so ashamed of her rapid weight gain that she started to dodge invites to A-list events.
“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,” Winfrey said. She continued, “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.” Amid the “Color Purple” star’s decades-long weight loss journey, she’s encountered “hurtful” messages about her body image, incl.
