The Dead Weight

Dear Oprah,

Hey there, sweetheart, what’s going on? I hope you’re enjoying this holiday season. I picked up a recent issue of O magazine (I’m not sure which month it was but I’m pretty sure you were on the cover) and it has some great advice on where to get the best cashmere socks and a very compelling interview with Blair Underwood. I don’t know how you do it, girlfriend!

Listen, I hear you’ve been having trouble with your weight recently – you’ve slipped back into some old habits and packed on a few of the pounds. Sounds like you could use a visit from hunky home-improvement guru Ty Pennington to renovate your big fat rear-end! Right, girlfriend? What? Oh, I’m sorry, I was just kidding around. I apologize.

You’ve been struggling with your weight for over 30 years and I know you think the answer has to be difficult or mandated by some expert you’ve brought on your show. But you yourself are living proof that even with the best advice available and your own personal chef, it’s still very easy to gain the weight back. One big problem that you need to get over is your belief in magic; your belief in books like The Secret, or putting pictures on your Vision Board, or “sending your desires out into the universe” and all that shit. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. If that stuff did exist, we wouldn’t be talking about your fat ass again because you would have willed it into the ether already. The universe doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t give people yachts and it doesn’t give them pediatric AIDS. The universe is indifferent. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t have the capacity to care.

But I do, and I’ve got a bit of a heads-up for you. Remember in the 80’s when you went on that liquid diet and then you carted out that wagon with the fat in it? You looked real skinny but you ended up gaining the weight back super-quick, so that kind of sucked. And then, in more recent years, you went on a “sensible” diet where you did a lot of power-walking with Bob Greene and ate poached chicken breasts and wild-rice and things like that. And, although it took longer, you ended up gaining that weight back too. Well, here’s something Dr. Oz isn’t going to tell you: eating “healthy” to lose weight is just as flawed a long term strategy as going on a liquid diet to lose weight is, because neither strategy has anything to do with your relationship with the foods you naturally crave and enjoy. You never learn to eat them in moderation, you only learn to avoid them. Oh sure, you told all of us that after cutting out the sugar and the grease you learned to love the taste of carrots or whatever, that’s what everyone says, but in the long run look what has happened. Or, as Dr. Phil says, “How’s that working for you?”

So I’ve got some different ideas for you about how to lose the weight. You can read about them on this blog. I hope you’ll check them out.

And hey, how about this Barack Obama fella? Am I right, girlfriend?!