I might have been born well after the fact, but I don’t need to have seen Oprah Winfrey’s infamous “fat wagon” segment at the time it aired in 1988 to have felt its repercussions. Regardless of when you were born, you certainly know the one: the moment wherein the talk show host proudly wheeled out a wagon full of raw, butchered animal parts, wrapped up in plastic like they came straight from a serial killer’s lair.
She wants to reframe obesity as “a disease” and “not a failure of willpower.” But she also warns against “settling for whatever you could get and not what you deserve.” She says you don’t have to choose to do anything with your body if you don’t want to, including losing weight, but uses words such as “relief” and “redemption” to describe her own experience with weight loss drugs in the press.