If Oprah Winfrey can’t win when it comes to weight loss, nobody can

By Madeline Holcombe, CNN

(CNN) — Oprah Winfrey was the first Black woman Whitney Trotter saw on TV –– and the first television figure having conversations that affected young Black girls like her.

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

One moment in 1988 made a mark on so many people when Winfrey went on her nationally syndicated show pulling a little red wagon with 67 pounds of animal fat, the equivalent to the amount of weight she had lost at the time. Immediately people were watching to see when she gained it back, how she would lose it again, and — more recently — if she would use a medication such as GLP-1 to try to make her body smaller.

While such public attention is specific to celebrities, the scrutiny Winfrey faced at every step of her body’s changes is something many people encounter, said 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 affect how we eat, based on cultural pressure to attain an ideal body type, experts say.

“That sense of wanting to tear people down, and especially reducing women to their appearance and pointing out their flaws as a way of like taking away power, I think have been a really long-standing tactic used in the media,” Conason said. “And I think it continues (to this day).”

Criticism of Winfrey’s body shows just how much of a losing game diet culture is, even if you are one of the most influential people in the world, experts say.

Lose, gain or maintain ­­–– the scrutiny continues

Many people have felt diet culture’s pressure to lose weight, but often the expectation is that the scrutiny will lift once that happens. And often, it just isn’t the case.

Whether maintaining, gaining or losing weight, many clients come to New York City dietitian Kimmie Singh saying that they feel like their body is under surveillance, she said.

“It’s something that’s so normalized — from the magazines but then also from talking about people at the dinner table,” Singh said, “or people congratulating the person that has lost weight.”

Even if you reach the body size that society deems ideal, the goalposts move to pressure you to achieve the right body shape, said Trotter, who is also a doctor of nursing practice and psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner in Austin, Texas.

The myths of weight and size

Attached to this focus on other people’s bodies are two harmful ideas: that weight is within a person’s control and that the size of a body is connected with moral value, Conason said.

“There’s a cultural narrative that it is morally inferior to be in a larger body,” she said. “There’s all those associations with fatness of laziness, people not being as smart, people not being motivated, not caring about themselves, not being disciplined.”

People feel more justified in discriminating and being cruel if they believe those associations are true — particularly if they think a person’s body size is in their control, Conason said.

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

Such a view about weight and acceptance is not true, said Dr. Chika Anekwe, obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

While a segment of the population is biologically “resistant” to obesity, others can make major changes to their lifestyles and still not be able to maintain weight loss, Anekwe said. And with increasing changes in access to food, exercise and health care, people’s weight is becoming more out of 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 just choose their body weight, size or shape,” Anekwe said, “we wouldn’t have such a booming diet culture industry.”

‘Moral’ ways to lose weight

Even when people are perceived to be losing weight, they may still be losing the diet culture game.

The popularization of GLP-1 medications, which were originally prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes but now are often used for weight loss, has popularized the idea that a smaller body is a matter of choice, Conason said. She noted that it also adds another way society can scrutinize how people lose weight.

“There’s no other class of drugs where people want to violate HIPAA as much as they do the GLP-1, because it’s like, ‘Oh, I gotta know,’” Trotter said, referring to the federal law restricting the release of medical information.

In the hierarchy of what society perceives as the most “moral” ways to lose weight, medication ranks toward the bottom, said Bri Campos, a body image coach based in Paramus, New Jersey.

“Unless you are of the 5% of people who can go into a caloric deficit for a long period of time (more than five years), increase your movement and keep weight off, your weight loss doesn’t count,” she said.

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

“There’s so much like mistrust towards fat people in general,” Singh said. “People want a gotcha moment with fat people to say, ‘Oh, like, we caught you with your hand in the cookie jar.’”

People want to catch and shame others for not following a lifestyle that denies them pleasure, Conason said. Some can also face criticism about using weight-loss methods that society deems lazy, Singh said.

Whether it’s going on some fad diet, taking a GLP-1 or getting weight loss surgery, “it just speaks to how we can never be enough in the eyes of diet culture,” she added.

The point may be to make people feel smaller

Since most people can’t get societal approval for their existing bodies, can’t maintain long-term weight loss by restrictive dieting or face criticism for using other methods of losing weight –– what is the point of the diet culture game then?

One idea is that diet culture keeps a check on power.

Many successful men are judged by their accomplishments rather than their appearance, but the same does not always go for the rest of the population, Conason said.

Winfrey is one of the most influential people in the world and still has had her body scrutinized — a reminder to powerful women that their body size, clothing, hairstyle and adherence to beauty standards will stay a priority, she added.

Campos said she has women, transgender and nonbinary people who come to her for coaching on their body image. They are in the fields of science, technology and law or who have graduated from top universities and still feel their accomplishments don’t matter as much as how others perceive their bodies, she said.

“We know this because of Oprah, because of the Kardashians, because of all these people who are continuing to pursue Westernized beauty, that there is no top where you get to safety,” Campos added. “There will always be something else. If it’s not your weight, it is going to be aging. There’s always something.”

Stop talking about other people’s bodies

Undoing the influence of diet culture from your world is no small feat, but it can start with becoming more aware of how it affects you, Conason said.

“The more that we can understand what diet culture is, what weight stigma is, how it shows up in our lives, the more we’re able to kind of observe it and question it, rather than just kind of unconsciously taking it all in and absorbing it,” she said.

It is also important to recognize that other people’s bodies should never be a subject of conversation –– even if you think talking about their weight loss is a compliment, Conason added. And talking about celebrities and their weight doesn’t make such observations any better.

Comments and criticisms you make about other people’s bodies also influence the way you feel 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 do a lot of times over,” she said. “It’s hurting the everyday people in our lives who might be in a larger body, 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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