Jan. 2, 2008
I found the People magazine in which Oprah is quoted as saying she "fell off the wagon" this past year, resulting in a 40-pound weight gain and a selflessly awful photo in a lumpy purple track suit. "How did I let this happen?" her self-written caption wailed. Well, Oprah knows how: She gave up making herself a priority, she writes, which so many of us do. She says she stopped exercising and went back to eating poorly, and the next thing you know, the year's kaput and so's her figure. But she's vowing to climb right back on that wagon, and sure enough, the commercial I saw last night for the Oprah show was back on the theme of "Your Best Life."
I wonder if this means Oprah is letting all of us know it's perfectly okay to recycle lost dreams and aspirations, and that even at age 54 a woman can reactivate a goal gone south. Or maybe it means Bob Greene, Oprah's trainer, had a long heart-to-heart with his favorite no-show client and told her, Look, we were all set to do a bunch of shows where you eat right and work out. This was supposed to make you fit and make me look like a good use of ninety bucks an hour. But noooo. You had to fall off the wagon. Haven't personal trainers been hurt enough by the economic downturn? Oprah, if you don't start hitting the gym again, another whole sector of the service economy will collapse!
I have no idea what -- if anything -- Bob Greene said to Oprah. And it doesn't matter, because she's back on the wagon and we're all getting back to business with her. Next Monday Oprah begins a full-week immersion into Best Lifedom, 2009-style, and I don't know about you, but I can't wait. Instead of reading that People magazine laying on the couch the magazine had been living under during the holidays, I read it on the stationery bike, hating every second of my 30-minute uphill peddle. But I did it because I believe somewhere Oprah's on her bike, too, sweating and hating just like me, and our hate is linked in an arc of calorie-burning misery from my stationery bike to hers.
We all need some kind of fantasy to get us on that damn bike, and today this was mine.