Just Say Noprah

“A panini maker is the thing to have.” Oprah Winfrey

Susan Reimer, the very funny Baltimore Sun columnist, once wrote an article listing things experts recommend that we do each day. As I recall (and can’t verify because someone borrowed my autographed collection of Reimer’s columns—if it was you, would you please return it?) the list consisted of around fifty items including “stretch,” “floss,” “eat five fruits and vegetables,” “walk in nature,” “try something new,” “clean off your desktop,” “read for pleasure,” “laugh out loud,” “find three items to donate/trash,” “lay out your clothes for the next morning,” “find time for you,” and “get enough sleep.” Woah—doesn’t leave much time for a shower (unless you’re wiping down the walls with a squeegee, another item on the list).

And these recommendations were nothing compared to the number of tasks Robyn Okrant attempted in the highly entertaining Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk. Okrant’s mission for 2008 was to follow all of the advice disseminated by the admirable and successful Ms. Winfrey via her show and O magazine. She used Oprah’s web site as an additional resource—for example, when husband Jim became a little irritated after she told him Oprah said his bedside TV had to go, she searched Oprah.com for relationship advice.

Okrant says she launched the Living Oprah project to investigate whether she could really “Live Her Best Life” (Winfrey’s mantra) by following someone else’s idea of what a Best Life is. In the first month, she spent over $700 and almost 100 hours on assignments such as concocting Blueberry Oatmeal bars with a hidden layer of spinach (“like green slime”) and incorporating sea life into her décor. She has her clothes tailored, changes her lightbulbs to energy-efficient ones, and names five terrific things about herself. She adds a fabulous chair to each room ($429.62).

Within the next month her husband is remarking “That shirt is totally cutting that lady in half. It’s a really bad length for her body type” (watch Oprah much??) and Okrant is regularly contemplating the state of her fecal matter (according to Oprah’s team doctor Mehmet Oz, it’s supposed to be S-shaped). “Not only do I stare at myself in every reflection I pass to make certain I am acceptably dressed,” Okrant remarks, “but now I need to study the toilet bowl to make sure I’m a proper pooper.”

As the task list and the number of people following her progress via her Living Oprah blog grow exponentially, Okrant struggles to reconcile O’s advice to think about consumption with her recommendation to immediately purchase a new pink cell phone. She reflects that although from the outside things look good—she is dressing more stylishly, getting in better shape and advancing her writing career—she often feels tired and stressed. “While the pressure of making the wrong choice is lifted from my shoulders,” she reflects, “….life in this manner is like an endless run on a woman-sized gerbil wheel.”

Okrant is a yoga teacher, writer and performer, her husband is an artisan, and she was completing a graduate degree at the time the project was going on. Somehow she made it through a year in which she invested almost $5000 and 1200 hours to live (sort of) like Oprah, and even kept her sense of humor and what seems to be a genuine fondness for the Queen of Talk. I would have bailed the day I had to wear those leopard-print flats (“They go with nothing, so they go with everything!”) to the Celine Dion concert.

At the end of the year, Okrant admits, the results were mixed. She acknowledges that she gained “incredible insight into how I might achieve a happier, more fulfilling life,” but also gets that she'll never find her best self by seeking the approval of others. Of course, perpetuating standards many of us will never be able to live up to is profitable. Much of the self-help programming and media aimed at women exist because of our constant state of dissatisfaction with ourselves; if all of this stuff worked, we wouldn’t need it. And clearly the industry expects us to fail and try again—even O magazine ran a story entitled “If You’ve Gained Back Every Pound.”

For me, it’s not about the panini maker, although I do enjoy O magazine and would like to give Oprah a big hug for introducing me to Not Your Daughter’s Jeans. I think Okrant sums it up well: “The biggest compliment I can give Oprah is to acknowledge and appreciate all the lessons I learned from her this year, and turn off my TV.”