Oprah Winfrey Calls 1986 Chat About Diet and Cellulite with Cindy Crawford and Other Models a ‘Breakthrough Moment’

Angela AndaloroThu, August 13, 2026 at 6:35 PM UTC

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Oprah Winfrey (left), Cindy CrawfordCredit: Ron Galella/Getty(2) -

Oprah Winfrey is opening up about the early days of her historic career

The former talk show host looks back at a moment when she felt that The Oprah Winfrey Show was given an opportunity to bring serious and personal discussions to the table

Winfrey also talked about finding a way to be her authentic self while still appealing to a television audience that seemed to grow year after year

Oprah Winfrey‘s career transformed in a way that she continues to marvel at.

The businesswoman, 72, recently spoke with the Television Academy about her historic career, which began with her anchoring a local morning show in Chicago.

Speaking about the early days, she talked about staying true to who she was while also evolving into a television personality.

“I owe so much to Dennis Swanson [then general manager of WLS-TV]. I said, ‘I’m going to be a Black woman for as long as I live. I cannot become something that I’m not. I’m a Black woman who is also overweight. There’s nothing I can change,’ ” she said.

Oprah Winfrey in 1986Credit: Ron Galella/Getty

Swanson assured Winfrey that she was free to be herself. She recalls her first time hosting AM Chicago.

“It’s me trying to cook with one of the Chicago Bears. The skillet doesn’t work, and it’s just one big fiasco after another. Then I realize there’s no audience,” she shared.

“So, the next day I’m like, ‘We’ve got to have an audience. Can we put 12 chairs in a room in the studio?’ And that’s what we ended up doing. We would go out on the street and ask people to come in to get warm, and we would give them free coffee.”

Oprah Winfrey in 2001Credit: Spencer Platt/Newsmakers

Just two years later, Winfrey would be in a vastly different place in her career. It was in 1986 that The Oprah Winfrey Show premiered and the host experienced what she calls “the big breakthrough moment.”

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“The big breakthrough moment for me was having Cindy Crawford, Cheryl Tiegs and a bunch of other models on the show talking about cellulite. I said, ‘Honey, I could tell you something about cellulite.’ And I told the story of being on an Atkins diet and not eating any carbs for a couple of weeks and only having hot dog buns in my freezer,” she shared.

“Telling the story of the first diet is what really broke the veil for me in a way that nothing else had. I could feel the difference in the tone of the audience and the level of relatability. I think it caused me to build connection with the audience in a way that I hadn’t before.”

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Oprah Winfrey in March 2026Credit: Lyvans Boolaky/WireImage

While she experienced immense success with that approach, there were also detractors. Winfrey didn’t let them dictate what she did, but she did take the criticism into consideration.

“I got all the pushback from my critics — the hater-ation of ‘Oprah’s trying to start her own church.’ ‘Oprah thinks she’s a god.’ What I realized is, you never tell people you’re going to change their lives. You just do it, and you let them tell you,” she said.

Winfrey took that criticism and went to her production team with a new mission statement: “I said, ‘From this day forward, we will not produce a show unless it is intentional.’ This is the secret to why we were number one all those years,” she says.

“You need to present to me what the intention is, and I have to find a truth in that intention for myself. If your intention and my intention align, we’re going to be really powerful, because we’re both trying for the same thing.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”