Making The Connection Oprah’s New Video Chronicles Her Struggles To Overcome Her Weight Problems And Take Control

And now, the Oprah Winfrey diet video.

But before you castigate her as an opportunist; before you cynically say, “Uh-huh, here we go - let’s make Oprah even richer”; before you shrug and shell out the $22.99 for “Oprah: Make the Connection,” let’s get one thing straight: All proceeds from video sales go to a Boston-based charity called A Better Chance that helps place minority students in college preparatory schools.

And let’s get something else straight: “Oprah: Make the Connection” is not a diet video, it’s a lifestyle video. Handsomely produced, it chronicles Winfrey’s journey from a life of out-of-control eating to one in which she holds the power.

It includes Winfrey reading from her daily diary, talking in a campfire setting with other women with control problems, working out with her personal trainer. The video strives for candor, so we see her at her biggest and most vulnerable, without makeup and not happy about having to walk the treadmill, and sharing some excruciating memories.

“The only reason to do anything at this point is to be of some service to other people,” Winfrey said by phone in between tapings of her talk show in Chicago.

“I’m already in millions of homes each day. I certainly have enough attention, enough money, enough fame. The only reason (to be so open) is that you can use your life experience to enlighten someone else’s. For so many years, I struggled. To a great extent, people don’t know how deep the pain was for me, how much of a struggle it was.”

As host for a dozen years of the most popular show on daytime television, Winfrey is more familiar to most of us than the next-door neighbor. More than once, she’s openly discussed and publicly fought her personal battle of the bulge.

That’s all part of the video, including the time she hauled out a nasty wagonload of fat to show how much she’d lost on the Optifast diet. She admits on the video that she started putting it back on the same day she did that show.

“I think the $30 billion weight industry has been destructive to many of us, and the perception has been, ever since I was an adult (her dieting began at age 20), the next diet, the next pill, the next protein shake will be the cure,” she said. “So I’m here to tell people to stop lying to yourself, that it is an industry, that the only thing that’s going to work is you.”

To reach the stage where she truly wanted to do something permanent about her weight problem, she hit a rocky bottom, which the video documents. She was humiliated with the way she felt and looked at a recent Emmycast. She heard heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson’s weight announced before a fight - 216 pounds - and realized she weighed exactly the same. She was fodder for the tabloids and the gossip subject at parties - sometimes with her lean and handsome boyfriend Steadman Graham in listening range.

She recounts on the video one instance in which he repeated what he overheard. It hurt.

“When those women said, ‘She may have everything but she still has a fat ass,’ that’s exactly what I thought about myself,” Winfrey shared over the phone.

“And that’s the only reason it could hurt so badly. If that’s not the way you feel about yourself, you just discard that. But because that is primarily how I felt, that’s why it hurt so badly. Because I thought, ‘I deserve it.”’

She finally reached a point where she was ready to do something about her problem, to finally “make the connection.” It’s a program that involves a daily gut-check, sensible eating and daily exercise. It’s a lifelong commitment with a spiritual component, one in which you take control over your life.

“For many years, I didn’t believe,” she said. “All success is based on your belief and your ability to succeed, but I just did not believe. Not only did I not want to, I didn’t believe that exercise would work. I, like everybody else, believed that the “next” diet would be the one, that the problem was I wasn’t sticking to it. Now I know that for me and my body type, if I don’t exercise, I gain weight.”

The video, like trainer Bob Greene’s book, “Make the Connection,” lists and illustrates “the 10 steps to a better body - and a better life.”

The mention of Winfrey’s trainer brings up an oft-made assertion: “If I had a personal trainer, I’d lose weight, too.”

“Anybody who says that is using that as an excuse, ‘cause anybody who has ever had a trainer knows that a trainer does not do it for you,” Winfrey said. “I’m grateful to him; he came along when I had hit bottom and no one believed that I could succeed. But what Bob did for me was provide the information that I believed in and followed, that’s really all he did for me. And that’s what I’m doing for other people.”

While in Philadelphia during the summer to make the movie “Beloved,” she was without Greene. But that didn’t stop her from working out, she said - jogging, treadmill, Stairmaster.

That’s the bottom line - the point of it all. Her eating and exercise plan is as much a part of her life now as bathing.

“For every day I bathe, I work out,” she said with a healthy laugh.