NEED TO KNOW
- Oprah Winfrey has been with her partner Stedman Graham for nearly 40 years
- Winfrey, 71, says Graham has been by her side when she was her heaviest and and when she was at her thinnest
- Graham ‘has been nothing but supportive’ she says
Oprah Winfrey says Stedman Graham has been a steady presence by her side for nearly 40 years as she struggled with obesity.
“He has absolutely been nothing but supportive through all of it,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “When he met me, I was 200 pounds. And it’s never made one iota of a difference.”
Says Winfrey’s longtime hair stylist Nicole Mangrum of Winfrey’s relationship with Graham: “I see there’s love and care and commitment. I see people that care about each other. He’s somebody who’s encouraging, and they’re just there for each other.”
Winfrey does remember one moment of self-doubt, however, when she wondered about his being with her.
Early in their relationship, in 1988, she and Graham went together to watch a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks. “I remember the announcer saying Mike Tyson’s weight: 218 lbs.”
As she sat by Graham’s side: Winfrey thought to herself: “Wow, Here’s this handsome guy sitting with somebody who weighs as much as the heavyweight champion of the world.”
Vinnie Zuffante/Getty
“In that moment, I felt sorry for Stedman,” Winfrey writes in the new book she’s cowritten with obesity expert Dr. Ania M. Jastreboff, Enough: Your Health, Your Weight and What It’s Like to Be Free.
But Winfrey says, the shame was in her own head, not something Graham put on her.
“He was with me at my heaviest,” she says of another painful memory from 1992 when she attended the Daytime Emmy Awards weighing 237 pounds. In the weeks leading up to the show, she says she couldn’t find anything to wear and was ashamed to even go to a seamstress and get measured.
She had a custom suit made, but was praying that she wouldn’t win her category so she didn’t need to get up in front of the crowd. “I was confident that we should win Best Talk Show and Best Talk Show host, but I just didn’t want to be in that overweight body.”
John Barrett/Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com
When her name was called as the winner, “and I had to walk up in that gold skirt, I was so embarrassed that people were going to be looking at me from behind.”
gayle king/instagram
Winfrey, who is now taking a GLP-1 medication to help her manage her obesity, says the drugs have helped her stop obsessing about food and her weight. And, she says, the change in her life has benefitted her connection with Graham, as well as others in her life.
“I’ve seen all of my relationships improve because the energy and presence and vitality and clarity that I bring to them is so different,” Winfrey says. “I just feel like I have more to give to everybody.”
Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like To Be Free will hit shelves on Jan. 13 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
