A saddened Oprah Winfrey, in Copenhagen for the Olympic announcement, vowed to lose 70 pounds as her gift to Chicago to compensate for losing the 2016 Games.
“I’m so shocked I could eat the entire dessert cart at Cheesecake Factory,” said Winfrey. “But I’m not.”
Instead, Oprah has vowed to lose 70 pounds, or roughly the equivalent of the famous wagon-load of fat she lost several successful diets ago, in time for the Games seven years from now.
“Seventy pounds over seven years isn’t very much when you break it down,” said Oprah. Actually, it comes out to 10 pounds a year, or one-fifth of a pound a week. There are 3500 calories in a pound, so in order to lose the one-fifth of a pound per week, she would need to cut her caloric intake by 700 calories a week, or 100 calories a day. A one-ounce bag of Cheetos has 160 calories.
“And if I exercise, as little as packing into storage the 10,000 diet books I’ve featured on my show over the years, I’m home free,” said Winfrey.
Winfrey said she was offering a challenge to Chicagoans to lose weight to show the world the “I will” spirit of Chicago. ”We don’t want to look like pigs to the rest of the world. So if I can lose 70 pounds, I want Chicago to lose 700 million pounds,” she said.
Las Vegas oddsmakers predict Oprah will weigh 25 pounds more than she does now when the Olympics roll around, and that the weight gain will be commensurate with the cost overruns the city would have experienced had the city won the Games.
