This is the thing: When you have been as challenged in your struggles with weight as I have, that is a glorious moment, to be able to walk down a red carpet in a red dress that you know fits you and you feel great in. I mean, literally, as I put on the dress I said, "This makes getting up at 5:30 in the morning all those days [to exercise] when I didn't feel like it, worth it." Because when I put the dress on, as structured and formal as the dress was, it felt like a nightgown – it was so comfortable.
I haven't even had a potato chip in ... I don't know. I used to eat them by the bag – 5-oz. bags, not 1-oz. Olive oil and then rosemary, oh, man, I'm addicted to chips. And I can't have just one chip, and I know it, so it's like crack. There have been a couple of times I would just go in the store, pick up a bag, smell it and put it down. I know I can't, I can't do it.
You and Stedman Graham have been together for 18 years. He's a successful market consultant and a motivational speaker, but you've got most of the fame. Is that still a challenge?
I am not an easy person for anybody to be with long-term. You have to have such a strong personal confidence in order to withstand being with somebody to whom the attention is always directed. We have such respect for each other and for each of our paths in the world. I understand that his speaking to people on a grassroots level and me speaking to the world from the platform that I do, are similar.
But do you argue?
Other people might argue about shoes left on the floor or you didn't come home for dinner. We argue about vision versus no vision. All the time. There's not a day that we don't talk about [imitating Graham] "What you need is a greater vision." Even when we were teaching our [leadership] class together at Northwestern University, he would stand up and tell these graduate students, "You need to have a vision, there's a process to success," and I would say, "Or you don't, 'cause I didn't have one."
What's next?
I don't know because as you know I don't have a vision. [Laughs.] I live in the moment. People are saying to me, how are you going to top this? It's not my desire to top it, my desire is to keep manifesting for myself the life I was meant to live, and so that could take me anywhere.
• By Tom Gliatto. Cindy Dampier, Brenda Rodriguez and Jenny Sundel in Santa Barbara
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