Oprah: Shedding the Weight to a Better Life

What do you want?

According to Oprah, if you had asked her that question at any time over the past two decades, she would have given you the same answer: "I would say, 'I want to be fit. I want to be healthy. I want to be strong.' Which is really PC for 'thin.' ... I cannot tell you the countless hours and the enormous amount of wasted energy I have spent wanting my thighs to be a different size."

Oprah has made no secret of her weight loss struggle over the years. In this Super Soul Session, she reveals how she completely shifted her perspective on losing weight.

The turning point came on a vacation in Hawaii last year, Oprah says, when a sprained ankle gave her license to overeat. She found herself 17 pounds overweight and feeling defeated by countless failed diets.

That was when Weight Watchers called. According to Oprah, it felt like an intervention: "I started with a commitment to see things differently in my mind. I shifted the way I saw the weight."

Oprah began to re-examine her relationship with her body and with food. She took a long, hard look at her body and realized how grateful she was for it. "I started blessing and thanking my body for carrying me all these years," she says.

She also decided to stop lying to herself about her food habits. "I realized the real problem was my using food to repress my feelings," Oprah says.

When she started telling herself the truth, she had an aha! moment that shedding the weight isn't just about physical pounds; it's about finding a deeper fulfillment. "I'm not my hair," Oprah says. "Or my thighs. Or the size of my jeans. Or the size of my waist. There's only really one knowing. One knowing: Who are you? And where do you come from?"

Oprah says this spiritual breakthrough is what was missing in her previous struggles with weight loss. "That's why this time is different for me than all the other times I tried to shed the weight," she says. "This time for me was about going beyond the scale, literally, to shed the weight in my mind and my body, and free my spirit."

In this uplifting session, Oprah reveals how living your best life starts with making a commitment to freeing yourself of mental burdens and to fully live in the present moment.