Oprah Makes the Commitment

I was standing on the front porch of my new home in California, the one I've worked on for three years as a gift to myself. I was looking at the mountains folding over on themselves and my yard filled with oak, pine, and redwood trees, thinking how this property is really graced by God, a promised land, and I suddenly said to myself: I do not want to be an unhealthy fat person standing in the doorway of this beautiful house.

That's when everything really clicked.

I'm not struggling anymore. I've lifted the veil. Because when you're wrestling with your weight and not being the person you know you can be, you are living behind a veil. And every person who is buried in fat knows that. When I turned 50 a year ago January, I made a vow to myself that I would live only in the space of moving forward. I wasn't feeling my biological clock ticking; what I felt was my life clock chiming, "Is that all there is?" The answer is, no! There's always more—you just have to open yourself to the possibility of being transformed by it all.

So after many years of my weight going up and down—of saying on Monday "I'm going to do it" and by Wednesday failing—I realized that the commitment to do well and to be well is a lifetime of choices that you make daily. The space to live in is not "I'll try." Not "I want to." Not "I really want to." It's "I have decided."

Oprah Makes the Commitment continues...