Oprah Winfrey: I wouldn’t go to Don Johnson’s party because I thought I was ‘too fat’

Oprah Winfrey admitted she once didn’t attend Don Johnson’s Christmas party because she thought she was “too fat.”

During Tuesday’s episode of the “Jamie Kern Lima” podcast, the media mogul got candid about her biggest dieting mistakes, including when she lost 67 pounds from a liquid diet in 1988 and quickly regained it.

“I didn’t have a morsel of food for five solid months in losing that weight on Optifast,” she said, referring to the weight management product that replaces food with shakes.

Winfrey, 70, reflected on when she debuted how much weight she lost by wheeling in a wagon filled with fat on an episode of the “Oprah Winfrey Show” in November 1988.

“Three days later, I was 5 pounds heavier, and a week later I was 10 pounds heavier,” she recalled.

By December of that year, the TV personality was so ashamed of her rapid weight gain that she started to dodge invites to A-list events.

“The week before Christmas, I remember Don Johnson — the Don Johnson, of ‘Miami Vice’ — was having a party and had invited me and some members of my show to come, and I wouldn’t go because I thought I was too fat to go,” Winfrey said.

She continued, “I’d gone from 145 [pounds] on the day of the show. I think I was 157 [pounds] in the course of, like, a week and a half or two. And the shame started again.”

Amid the “Color Purple” star’s decades-long weight loss journey, she’s encountered “hurtful” messages about her body image, including when a photo of herself in a “beautiful black dress” in 1987 was printed on the front of a magazine with the headline “Drumpy, Frumpy and Downright Lumpy.”

She also reflected on the time the 1990 comedy show “In Living Color” did a shameful skit about her featuring Kim Wayans.

“‘In Living Color’ had done a skit where the woman was doing something, and she just kept eating and getting fatter and fatter and fatter and the comedy bit was that eventually she just exploded,” Winfrey said, recalling how the whole audience laughed at the bit.

At the time, critics poking fun at the Mississippi native were “accepted,” while the torment stayed with her for years.

“For 25 years, there was a tabloid story or some exploitation of my weight,” she claimed. “Making fun of my weight was a national sport.”

However, as Winfrey recently turned 70, she is done weight-shaming herself into the next decade of her life.

“I was judgmental because I have been so judged,” she said. “I actually don’t know anybody who’s been more publicly judged about their weight than myself and I have carried and borne the shame of other people.”

In the past year, Winfrey has slimmed down as she admitted to using a weight-loss medication, though she didn’t confirm if it was the celebrity-favorite Ozempic.

“The fact that there’s a medically approved prescription for managing weight and staying healthier, in my lifetime, feels like relief, like redemption, like a gift, and not something to hide behind and once again be ridiculed for,” she told People in December.

In May, the actress also apologized for promoting unideal ways of weight loss for the past 25 years.