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From ‘Children Are Starving in China’ to Just Taste These Spinach Brownies
Like Oprah, have your cake, and trash it too
By Mary MacVean
Did you happen to watch Oprah Winfrey dump the sizeable leftovers from a bananas Foster birthday cake into the trash? Nearly 3 million people have, and she explains it as part of her January reset — time to get back on the right track.
Good-bye cake, Oprah says on Instagram as she triumphantly slides it off the plate and into an apparently empty trash bin. It’s a step to “get back in control of how I want to live,” she says.
In one strident swipe, Oprah hit all sorts of buttons for me. All that wasted food. It just seems wrong. Then I also see it as a serious bit of self-care; if that cake makes you anxious, makes you spend way too much time thinking about cake, well … I am more important than a sugary hunk of cake, no?
I am not criticizing Oprah, whose cake video also is a promotion for WW. Oprah, part owner of the former Weight Watchers, behaved like many of us have. Are there any serious dieters who have never eaten a bit of ice cream or half a big, hot pretzel, or a lavishly sauced pasta — whatever — and dumped the rest? The more alluring the food the more virtuous it seems to make sure you never eat more of it, right?