Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [127]
“At first I figured, ‘Oh, great. I get to be somebody’s personal growth experience.’ But then I started to realize that, my God, he’s been feeling that all this time [two years] and it took him this long to ever tell me about it.”
On July 7, 1988, shortly after that conversation, Oprah started a protein-sparing fast, drinking a medical concoction of powder and water five times a day, plus sixty-four ounces of noncaloric liquids, and taking vitamin pills, but eating absolutely no solid food. Six weeks into the strenuous diet, she and Stedman were on vacation in Hawaii and Oprah started eating. “I felt terrible because I’d been so controlled up to that point. So Stedman said, ‘Why don’t you just decide you’re going to eat on vacation and not make yourself crazy? When you go home, you can start the diet again.’
“ ‘How about if I had just one cheeseburger and got it out of my system?’
“ ‘Are you crazy?’ ”
Oprah became maniacal about that one cheeseburger. She waited for Stedman to go to his golf lesson and opened all the windows in the hotel room. Then she called room service and ordered the cheeseburger—with bacon and avocado. Minutes later she raced to the phone and called Gayle King to tell her what she had done. Gayle understood the binge because her husband, William Bumpus, had been on the same fasting diet and lost seventy-five pounds in twelve weeks. Oprah went back on her fast and jogged every day with Stedman. By the time she returned to Chicago in the fall she had dropped forty pounds.
The transformation of her five-six frame was startling. Her audiences could not believe their eyes. She promised she would reveal her secret as soon as she lost more weight. Viewers tuned in every day just to see what she looked like. By October she had dropped another fifteen pounds. Still, she would not say how she was shrinking every week. Finally she announced that she would share her secret during November sweeps, on a show titled “Diet Dreams Come True.”
The buildup to this show seemed to galvanize the country. Everyone wanted to know how Oprah, who once said she didn’t keep a handgun because she would shoot off her thighs, had finally managed to lose weight without joining the NRA. The Associated Press dispatched a photographer to Chicago, and newspaper editors around the country sent reporters to cover the “Diet Dreams” show. While acknowledging that Oprah’s amazing weight loss had grabbed the nation’s attention, the Knight Ridder correspondent groused that it was only “the most important social development since Michael Jackson’s last nose job.” Embarrassed to be covering Oprah’s diet revelation, he added, “Did she find the cure for cancer? Did she eliminate the specter of AIDS? Did she reduce the national deficit?”
The day of the much-ballyhooed show, November 15, 1988, Oprah sashayed onto her soundstage in a big bright red coat. “This is a very, very personal show,” she said. Then, like an exuberant stripper, she ripped off the red coat to reveal half of her former self. “As of this morning I have lost sixty-seven pounds,” she said, justifiably proud of her new figure, which was tucked into a pair of size-ten Calvin Klein jeans that had been hanging in her closet since 1981. She twirled around the stage to show off her new body in a cinched belt with a silver buckle, a tight black turtleneck, and spike-heeled boots. The audience cheered her wildly, waving the little yellow pom-poms they had been given for just that purpose.
Oprah held up a package of Optifast powder, which she said she mixed with water in an Optifast cup and drank five times a day. This gave her four hundred calories of nutrition without solid food on a fast that supposedly spared the body’s loss of protein. Before she had ended her first segment, Optifast operators were bombarded. A company spokesman reported one million attempts to get through to the toll-free number after Oprah mentioned the brand name seven times. “I’m sure a lot of people think I own stock in Optifast,” she said.