There but for the Grace of God Waddles You

Why are mediocre skinny people so self-righteous?

Opray Winfrey was some sort of bigwig at Weight Watchers, which is odd, given her lifetime of disastrous failure to control her weight. I often remark on the absurdity of making Oprah Winfrey a diet guru. It’s like asking Amber Heard how to be a great wife.

I have received hundreds of emails advertising OPRAH’S WEIGHT LOSS SECRETS, but I have never received a single email selling weight loss secrets from people like Steve Buscemi or Kate Moss. Why is that?

Oprah started taking drugs to lose weight, and while this was working, she lied and denied using drugs. Then she got caught, and she was out at Weight Watchers, an organization which relies on bad diet food and willpower. Two things that don’t work very well for the vast majority of people. If you’re fat at 20, you will almost certainly be fat at 60, unless you’re one of those people who get fat not because of cravings but because you stuff yourself in spite of not having them.

Those people exist. They’re the ones who drop 70 pounds in mid-life and then say, “I just quit eating so much.”

You can use heroin regularly and never become an addict, if you’re a certain type of person. Some people drink like crazy and retain the ability to quit and never look back. We are not all the same.

I took Ritalin for ADD, and I developed an incredible tolerance. A typical dose is 10 milligrams per day, and I sometimes took 120, not for fun, but to compensate for the tolerance. A lot of Ritalin users become addicted, but I never did. When my doctor switched me to something else, I didn’t have withdrawal symptoms, and I didn’t care whether I ever saw Ritalin again. When I was in college, I drank in a manner I would call “competitive,” but I have never, ever thought, “Man, I need a drink right now.” I have never had the DT’s. I’ve never panicked because I couldn’t get a drink. There have been plenty of periods in my life during which I went over a month without a single drink, just because I didn’t feel the desire.

I have taken all sorts of opioids for pain. When they ran out, they ran out. It meant nothing to me.

I’ve never had any kind of withdrawal symptom from giving up anything.

People are different.

Oprah failed at Weight Watchers, just like many people defeat bariatric surgery. She will probably fail at Ozempic eventually. It comes with problems.

Now she’s in trouble for making some incredible, truthful remarks. Incredible in that they reveal astonishing obtuseness. She is elderly, and she says she has only recently realized thin people are thin because they don’t have intrusive thoughts about food. She sincerely believed they were better people with more character.

She’s right. This is why most thin people are thin, although others can credit cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and disorders. It’s amazing that she didn’t realize this until she was so old.

There are definitely some people out there who have food cravings and stay thin anyway, because people are different, but let’s be honest. Most thin people are thin because they just don’t find food that interesting.

Thin people who think they like food as much as fat people are like women who think they like sex just as much as men. They’re lying to themselves and everyone else.

I’m a normal man. I can be physically attracted to someone I hate or feel contempt for. I could have extremely satisfying relations with such a person. I am instinctively tempted to be nice to unsuitable people, even though I know I will never let myself be involved with them. I can even be attracted to a cartoon or a photo of a woman who died 50 years ago! Going an hour without a sexual thought is not a possibility. Very few women are like that, but women love to lecture men as though self-control explained the differences in our behavior and thoughts.

Homosexual men commonly have over a thousand partners per year. Lesbian couples often have sexless relationships. Think about that.

My mother didn’t care whether she ate or not. She told me so. She often forgot to eat. Her weight got up to around 110 once, and she was disturbed. I never heard her say something like, “Cheesecake would really hit the spot right now.” She never got in the car to go get her favorite food. She rarely touched desserts. She never went into a kitchen and asked, “When is the food going to be ready?”

Her dad was the same way. He was almost 6’3″, and he was vain about his weight. Whenever he started to pass 180, he just ate less until his weight went back down.

Neither of them were highly disciplined people. My mother was killed by an addiction, which proves she didn’t have the kind of willpower a person like Oprah would need to stay thin.

My dad’s sister was highly disciplined. She ran her house like a Marine barracks. She was a teacher. She was busy all the time with things busy wives do. She was accomplished. She was as big as a whale.

Consider all the thin idiots we know of. Not post-Ozempic thin. Famous people who were thin throughout most of the last century. Charlie Sheen is thin whether or not he’s on drugs. Tom Sizemore wasn’t fat. Andy Dick is skinny. Think of all the thin musicians who can’t stay out of rehab and who keep people waiting in studios for 5 or 6 hours because they have so little character they can’t get out of bed.

I have used cocaine. I thought it was wonderful, but I still didn’t become addicted. Other people become addicted in a day. If cocaine (more accurately, the sensation of cocaine wearing off) made me feel the way it makes those people feel, I would be an addict right now. Same goes for alcohol and other drugs. I would guess I have 40th-percentile willpower. Not enough to save me.

Oprah calls the intrusive thoughts “food noise.” They exist for some people but not others. They are probably the voices of demons. Compulsive behavior comes from demons.

Self-righteous thin people who only maintain discipline in the area of food are criticizing Oprah now because she told the truth. They want to be admired for something they never earned. They’re telling the rest of humanity that people who overeat just aren’t trying. That’s a load. There are people who commit suicide because they want to be thin so badly. People get dangerous surgery that doesn’t work. They go to fat-control resorts. The idea that fat people are not willing to make sacrifices is a canard.

My mother smoked two packs a day and made fun of my dad for eating compulsively, but she died at 61, and he made it to 87. Her problem was much worse than his. He smoked when he was young, and he quit in 8 minutes. He saw a headline about the discovery that smoking caused cancer, he took one cigarette out of a full pack, he smoked it, he threw the pack away, and that was it. Not one cigarette for the remaining half-century of his life.

She tried hypnosis. She tried accupuncture. She took horrible scare classes where they showed people slides of cancerous lungs. She still couldn’t beat nicotine.

There are fat people out there who maintain perfect exercise routines. They keep their houses perfectly. They work hard. Their bills and taxes are always in order. They never drink or take drugs. They never, ever procrastinate. They have exceptional character. They’re still fat, because they face temptation weak-willed thin people don’t face and could never handle.

Look at a photo of men in prison yards. Most are not obese. These are among the weakest-willed people in society, and they have are given starchy, sugary food. Their exercise time is limited. Why aren’t they all obese? Oprah’s critics have an answer, but it makes no sense.

It’s very interesting to see how poorly human beings understand themselves in 2025, after thousands of years of trying. Centuries after the scientific method came into being. We can put a hundred billion (b, not m) transistors on a chip you can lose in your pocket, but we still have no idea how we, ourselves work.

Oprah is an unhappy and unfulfilled person. She has fame and billions, but her personal life is nothing, her career has been selfish and destructive to society, she hasn’t grown up, she doesn’t know God (in fact, she fights Yeshua), and she can’t defeat the most humiliating challenge of her existence. Now when she is finally right about something and has a revelation she should have had when she was 20, people are punishing her for it.

Do you often think about foods you miss? Do you have a hard time putting the fork down? Do you get excited when you go to your favorite restaurant? If not, you can’t put yourself in Oprah’s shoes. And you probably can’t afford them anyway.