“You can have it all, you can’t have it all at once.” A lot of people other than Oprah Winfrey have said this, sometimes in slightly different words. A variation is, “You can have it all, but you can’t do it all.” The meaning is the same, because among the things a person wants to have are the freedom and capacity to do the things a person wants to do. Anyway, most of the people who say these things are women — but that is a whole different essay.
Among others, writer Katie Fox has expanded on the concept:
The pressure to seize the day and make the most of every moment can rob us of our joy in the present. But it can also destroy the measured, patient hope we have for our future, looking ahead at other seasons to come and trusting that the dreams we’ve had to put up on the shelf will still be there waiting for us when we’re ready to dust them off again.
Of course, if an idea has any validity at all, surely more than one person will have thought of it. And another person has probably already said it out loud, only the time wasn’t right, or some other circumstance prevented the world from noticing the glaring importance of the concept. It would be interesting to trace back through the archives of history and learn who is credited with the very earliest known use of the thought, “You can have it all, just not all at once,” whichever way it is expressed.
But the important point here is that everyone who ever expressed this thought has been a link in a chain of humans who carry forward the message: You cannot eat a lot, or the wrong things, or a lot of the wrong things, and also possess a slim figure.
Way back in 1977, the co-anchor of a news show at WJZ TV in Baltimore made her first visit to a diet doctor. The 23-year-old Oprah weighed 148 pounds when a doctor placed her on a 1,200 calories-per-day program, and in two weeks she had lost 10 pounds. And in two months, she had regained 12. This started a revolving-door existence through all the popular diets of the time.
But, as she later learned, “I was starving my muscles, slowing down my metabolism, and setting myself up to gain even more weight in the end.” By 1984, she was up to 200 pounds, and in 1986 told the public that she hated herself for it.
In an interview the same year, she said,
All the fame and the success doesn’t mean anything if you can’t fit into the clothes. If you can’t fit into your clothes, it means the fat won. It means you didn’t win.
Then came the infamous “wagon of fat” episode when Oprah thought she was cured, but immediately, relentlessly, the weight came back. As she later said, “You have to find a way to live in the world with food,” and it was in 1992, at her 237-pound heaviest, that the star met the exercise physiologist and personal trainer who helped her find that way and turn her life around.
As we have seen, Bob Greene has been a marvelously helpful influence on Oprah Winfrey through the years, and thanks to the power of her endorsement, has also been immeasurably helpful to thousands of other people too. One feature of his method is to stop someone in their tracks and insist on examining basic questions, the ones that must be addressed whether you are a butcher, baker, or candle-stick maker; a stay-at-home mom, or one of the wealthiest women in the world:
1. Why are you overweight?
2. Why do you want to lose weight?
3. Why haven’t you been successful?
It took Oprah a couple of years to have an important epiphany:
I finally realized that being grateful to my body, whatever shape it was in, was key to giving more love to myself. Although I’d made the connection intellectually, living it was a different story.
(To be continued…)
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “You Can Have It All (But Not All at Once),” TheArtOfSimple.net, 06/11/14
Source: “The Highs and Lows of Oprah Winfrey’s 50-Year Weight Loss Journey,” MSN.com, 2024
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