Can Oprah escape the toxic diet culture she helped create?

Oprah Winfrey has created an empire over the past four decades. She's the host of a successful daytime talk show that aired for 25 seasons. She also has a TV network, a lifestyle magazine and has received 18 Daytime Emmy Awards.

But to a lot of people, she is also known for her involvement with Weight Watchers. Oprah recently stepped down from the company's board of directors after disclosing that she's been taking weight loss drugs similar to Ozempic to maintain her weight.

Now, Oprah's asking us to embrace ourselves as we are. In the Weight Watchers special she hosted a week ago called Making the Shift: A New Way to Think about Weight, she declared, "We've been shamed and we've been told that unless we meet a certain standard of size, we didn't deserve to be accepted or even to be loved. I'm done with it. I'm done with the shaming"

The thing is, she is saying all of this as a newly thin person, which is why people think her message isn't landing the way she hoped.

To unpack the role Oprah has played in the conversation around toxic diet culture and weight loss, writers Scaachi Koul and Gianluca Russo join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud on Commotion.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, plus a chat about the revival of X-men '97, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: I want to begin with maybe a personal question for each of you. Gianluca, Oprah has been the face of diet culture for a long time. Since well before you were born. How much of a presence has she been in your life and your relationship with your own weight? 

Gianluca: For me, she's always existed as the person who was at the centre of the conversation around weight loss. I'm someone who experimented with every weight loss possibility growing up —with every different diet and method I could use. And I feel like she was always trying something new that maybe I could try as well. 

She really existed as almost this example to follow, which I think is true in a lot of different things she does in life. But specifically when it comes to weight, that's kind of the role she always played. So even if I wasn't directly looking to her, she always had some kind of impact on my mindset or what I was thinking or where I was looking for my next possible way to lose weight.  

Elamin: Scaachi, what about you? What did she mean to you?

Scaachi: I watched every episode of Oprah from 1994 until the end of the show. I'm very familiar with her routine about weight and diet. My mom went on every single diet that she talked about. I did a bunch of the diets that she talked about. I have walked with her on this path. 

I'm frustrated a little bit by the way that she talks about all of this. I think some of it is strange. And the funny thing about Oprah too, is she's cosplaying as a normal person with us. When she talks about these things, she's pretending as if she's having the same journey that we're all having and her saying, "It's not your fault, it's out of your hands," is a beautiful thought. 

Oprah is a billionaire, so she is fundamentally having a different conversation with herself and her body and her doctors than the rest of us are having. But she's done something really impressive, which is making her seem approachable.

Elamin: I want to take a moment to listen to this exchange. It's from 1985. This is Joan Rivers interviewing Oprah on The Tonight Show. 

Clip from The Tonight Show: 50 pounds. You shouldn't let that happen to you. You know what? No, I don't want to hear it. Let me tell you this. Are you single? You must lose the weight. We're starting a diet with Oprah.

Elamin: Gianluca, how do you feel hearing that?  

Gianluca: It feels like a good portrayal or depiction of what so many people go through in terms of the way they're ridiculed for their body, which I think is why so many people related to Oprah during this time period. She never "got away with it." She was always attacked for it in these ways. It was something people could relate to. So it's kind of painful to hear that. And of course, I hope that we have made progress and we're not that deliberate when we're attacking people for their weight nowadays. 

Elamin: In the special that aired last week, Oprah talked about how much that moment hurt her and how she went on to gain a lot of weight after that. She yo-yo dieted for like 40 years afterwards. And now it seems like she's trying to say, "I'm done with that story that I started 40 years ago." In the past year or so, we've seen Oprah resign from the board of Weight Watchers. She's disclosed that she is taking one of those new weight loss drugs. Part of putting this story behind her is her acknowledging this part that she played. She played a huge part in creating a toxic diet culture and then is apologising for her role. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low