Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [130]
A year later she wrote one of her saddest journal entries:
I cried in my office with Debra [DiMaio].… I cried for my poor miserable self having gotten to this state. Scale said 203 this morning. Controlled—just controlled by it … By the end of the day … feeling diminished, less of a person, guilty, ugly … I really am fat again.
During the November sweeps of 1990, Oprah acknowledged the nightmare of her “Diet Dreams” with a show titled “The Pain of Regain”: she had gained back all of the sixty-seven pounds, plus more. She would not say how much she weighed, but she later confided it was more than Mike Tyson, boxing’s heavyweight champion. “I will never diet again,” she said. “I certainly will never fast again.”
From her fan mail, Oprah knew her audiences adored her, so she was surprised when most said they preferred the original fat Oprah to the new “lite” version. They said when she was heavy she was more approachable; she laughed easily and hugged everyone. The thin Oprah seemed pinched and strained, as if the effort to diet had sapped her of her cheerfulness. Viewers let her know that they were much more comfortable with hefty Oprah than sylph Oprah, who, they felt, acted a little smug and a trifle self-satisfied. Her bulk had reassured people that looks were superficial, only skin-deep. Now they realized that she never really believed that. Years later she admitted as much. “I do know what it’s like to live inside of a body that’s twice your size.… I know that anybody who’s there would want it to be different. Even people who say they’ve made peace with it. You reach a point where you fight it, fight it, fight it, and then you say you don’t want to fight it anymore.…
“I can tell you this, even being a famous person, that people treat you so differently when you’re fat than when you’re thin. It is discrimination that nobody ever talks about.”
As much as Oprah disliked her heavy self, she, too, seemed more at ease with her corpulence than she did without it. “I always felt safer and more protected when I was heavy,” she said, “although I didn’t really know what I was trying to protect, any more than I knew what I was afraid of.” It seemed that the same limitless ambition that had rocketed her to the top of her career had set her appestat: while gaining weight worked to her professional advantage, making her what Essence described as “the quintessential mammy figure,” her huge size made her absolutely miserable as a person. Ebony suggested that her “touchy-feely” manner toward her predominantly white audiences “is reminiscent of the stereotypical Southern Mammy.” People described her as “the powerful mommy figure,” which she did not accept. “A woman told me recently, ‘I used to think you were more compassionate when you were fat because you were like a mother to me. And now you’re this sex thing,’ ” recalled Oprah. “I said, ‘Is it something I said, something I did? Because I never felt like I was your mother.’ ”
Some black comedians were mean-spirited, particularly Keenan and Damon Wayans on In Living Color, the comedy show they developed for the Fox Network. In one spoof titled “Oprah on Eating,” the comedians’ sister Kim Wayans imitated Oprah doing an interview: she began eating ferociously until she blew up like a balloon and exploded potato chips all over her audience. Abiola Sinclair pronounced the skit “vicious” in the New York Amsterdam News: “Sensible and genuine Black people never were overly concerned about Oprah’s weight. What was of more concern to many of us was her feeling the need to wear funny colored [green] contact lenses,