Appearing yesterday on The View, a show that couldn’t possibly exist without the trail she blazed, Oprah Winfrey, promoting her new book, ‘Enough,’ had this to say about her recent, semi-permanent, GLP-1-induced weight loss: “All these years I thought I was overeating. I was standing there with all the food noise, what I ate, what I should eat, how many calories was it going to take. I thought that was because of me and my fault. Now I understand that if you carry the obesity gene, if that is what you have, that is what makes you overeat. You don’t overeat and become obese. Obesity causes you to overeat.”
“Right,” say the ladies of The View.
“Obesity causes you to have all of that food noise. And what the GLP-1s have done for me, and I know a number of other people is to quiet that noise.”
The View panel nods along. “Yeah, yeah,” they say. But not everyone is nodding.
In a post on X yesterday, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the world’s healthiest man, wrote:
Dear Oprah,
Yes, you were overeating!
For years!
And it wasn’t some mystical obesity gene” puppeteering your fork.
It was your choices.
Stop selling surrender as science.
Our kids deserve the truth that real change starts with personal accountability, not excuses.
MAHA.
RFK Jr.’s response, with its line breaks and puppet metaphors, almost reads like an alternative-health poem. And it marks an incredible breakthrough in government-Oprah relations. After generations of coddling America’s favorite self-made TV billionaire entrepreneur (second-favorite if you count President Trump), our government is finally finding the courage to tell Oprah it was her own fault that she was fat.
This is all part of a wider health battle going on in this country. You can say a lot of things about the Trump administration, but you can’t say it’s not taking the obesity crisis seriously. The administration isn’t anti-“fat shots,” as the President calls them. Thanks in large part to administration efforts, they are less expensive and more accessible than ever.
But there’s a larger movement afoot, and it goes far beyond blaming genetics. You have a new government food pyramid that emphasizes protein consumption over carbs, and the “Pete and Bobby Challenge,” a punishing workout regimen that marks the most comprehensive government-encouraged exercise program since Michelle Obama did Zumba on morning TV.
The question is: should retroactively fat-shaming Oprah be part of that equation? After all, Oprah’s weight struggles have been an ongoing American soap opera, background noise as the rest of us also try to shed those extra pounds. At the peak of her influence in the 1990s, Oprah worked with Rosie Daley from the Cal-a-Vie health spa in Southern California. Together, they published In the Kitchen With Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes, which, in 1994, featured such novel concepts as flavoring your mashed potatoes with mustard instead of butter.
Curiously, Oprah parted ways with Rosie and replaced her with chef Art Smith, a merry gay Southerner who plumped her up with delicious fried chicken. They parted ways in 2007. Smith himself lost 70 pounds during the pandemic with an exercise routine that included running on repurposed railroad tracks. Now Winfrey is effectively shilling for Big Pharma, which was how this weight-loss weepie was always going to end.
RFK Jr. and Oprah have one important thing in common: they’re both mega-rich celebrity elites who’ve survived into their seventies. No matter what side of the fat wars you fall on, you’ll have to agree that with a little effort and willpower, a vast army of publicists and assistants, and countless millions of dollars, you, too, can shed those pounds. Everything else is just food noise.
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