Posted on: Wednesday, December 18, 2002

SHAPE UP
Eating well, working out helps Oprah shed pounds

By Ann Oldenburg
USA Today

Cardiovascular exercise — including a weekly 75-minute run — has helped Oprah Winfrey get rid of 33 pounds since January. Advertiser library photo • June 15, 1996

Oprah Winfrey has been struggling with her weight since she was 22.

Now the entertainment mogul, who turns 49 in January, is trying to make peace with food once again. Her new method? Weight resistance training and a healthier diet. Total weight loss since January: 33 pounds.

In the new issue of O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine (on newsstands this week), photos show her doing lat pulls, squats and bicep curls. She's in form-fitting clothes. Smiling. It's all part of a routine she has worked out with her longtime personal trainer, Bob Greene.

In 1988, the country watched as she pulled a little red wagon filled with 67 pounds of fat onto the stage of her talk show and proudly showed off her size-10 Calvin Klein jeans. She had lost it by drinking OptiFast shakes for four months.

"I got down to 145 pounds and stayed there for one day before the regaining began," she says in O. She kept gaining until she was 237 pounds in 1992, her highest weight, she says.

Winfrey turned to Greene and began a vigorous cardio plan. In 1994, she ran a marathon. Then, four years later, came her beef trial and the "devastating disappointment" of pet movie project "Beloved" bombing at the box office. "I emotionally ate my way back to around 200 pounds."

When she started having chest palpitations last year, her doctor said that her blood pressure was 180/90 and that she needed to lose weight. "Tell me something I don't know," she thought.

But she kept searching for the root of her racing heart and sleepless nights.

Finally, she found answers in a book called "The Wisdom of Menopause." Its author, Christiane Northrup, suggested eliminating refined carbohydrates. So Winfrey cut out white rice, white pasta and white bread, and she cut back on salt.

"I lost 10 pounds almost immediately. At that point, I wasn't trying to lose weight — I was trying not to die."

Enter Greene again. In January, the two devised a training plan, alternating upper- and lower-body workouts at least five times a week, along with doing 30 minutes of aerobic exercise each day.

"I'm on no particular diet, I just eat smaller portions, and I still watch the refined carbohydrates," she writes. "I favor fish, chicken, fruit, vegetables and lots of soups. And I don't eat after 7:30 p.m. Not even a grape."

But what is most important to Winfrey: "I feel great. I'm sleeping well. I'm loving myself."

Greene says he knows fitness is a daily challenge for her. "She's never going to say, 'I love working out.'" But he thinks this program might be the one that sticks.

"I really do believe, at this time in her life, it's for the right reasons — her health, no pressure to look a certain way," he said. "She does love being fit. She's really in a good place. She's doing it for the right reasons."

Get with the new program

Oprah Winfrey asked her longtime pal and personal trainer Bob Greene to design a six-week boot camp for her. In part, it was a slim-down blitz to look good for the 2002 Emmy Awards. But she also wanted to jump-start a rededication to fitness, Greene says.

The purpose of the program is to "elevate you physically," he says. Then, after you return to a less intense, normal workout routine, you're at a higher level of fitness.

Greene's regimen

• Cardiovascular: 45 minutes of aerobic exercise, six mornings a week; 20 minutes of aerobic exercise, four or five evenings a week (before dinner); a once-weekly 75-minute run.

• Strength training: 30 to 40 minutes, four or five times a week.

• Abdominal work: three sets of 30 incline crunches, every day.

• Stretching: after every workout.

• Abstaining: no alcohol.