O You! Says I’m Living My Best Life

I’m trying to live my best life.  It’s the only one I’ve got, right?

I’m an Oprah fan. Yes, I said it. I’m not over the top about it. I watched her show, I’ve tried to watch things on the OWN network, I wrote a piece about one of its programs on MomsLA.com. I’ve never purchased her magazine, though, and I tried but didn’t really get into Oprah’s Life Class.  But still, there are 11 pages of blog posts that reference Oprah here on this blog alone.

I’m a much bigger fan of Suze Orman, though, and also Peter Walsh, who came to town to participate in what I liked to think of as “Oprahcon” – O Magazine’s O You! event at the LA Convention Center last month. Once I arrived and experienced the event, I realized that more than a conference, it was like an old school tent revival, with Oprah as the main event preacher. And that was just fine, because it was entertaining, inspiring, and even educational.

Thousands of people swarmed the convention center that day, some of them standing in line for hours before the doors opened. The sponsors of the event set up interactive experience booths in a big hall, and speaker sessions took place off to the side, with a main auditorium for the opening speeches and Oprah’s closing sermon. I mean speech.

I attended as a guest of Oral B, the oral care product company, which was a sponsor of the event because they support living your best life through dental care. And while that seems like a stretch, I went into this with a very open mind. Dr. Jonathan Levine, renowned dental care expert and a spokesperson for Oral B, sat down with me for a few minutes to talk about why those two things go together very well.

Dr. Levine told me that the number one reason adults go to see a dentist is to improve their smiles, but what most people don’t realize is that your overall health is inextricably connected to proper dental care. Recent developments in technology and practices have helped forward-thinking dentists provide screenings that can detect problems in your body that you would never imagine. Stewart and I go to a pretty modern dental office and every time I go my hygienist Kerri pulls out some new fancy test, and she always checks my blood pressure. What’s awesome about this is that, as Dr. Levine pointed out, people see their dentist twice a year, far more often than they might visit their internist, so it’s wise for the dental office to take advantage of that frequency.

While my dentist is really interested in keeping the most advanced equipment in her office, not all of them are. Levine says that as group dental practices grow in number with younger dentists getting on board all the time, the prevalence of this school of thought will rise and patients will benefit. But in the meantime, he considers it a professional duty as he visits places all over the country and the world – he is a regular guest on Oprah’s anointed Dr. Oz’s show – to educate his peers and patients about the need for dentists to communicate among themselves and with internists.

Levine also founded Glo Good, a special charity that aims to bring better oral care to underserved populations around the world by providing equipment and training to those communities. Levine has focused on smile improvement in his career, and he has developed teeth whitening products, whose sale benefits the charity, among many other advancements to help people get better smiles.

With Oral B, Levine helps spread the message about the Oral Health Challenge – the idea that it’s important to have a healthy mouth. We tell our kids that all the time – brush in the morning and at night, right? But it’s important for us to remember that we need to keep our mouths healthy as adults, too. Some very friendly superstar hygienists at the Oral B booth at O You! were handing out special Oral B power toothbrushes to the attendees, and we got to be photographed with special messages to our favorite hygienists back home:

To emphasize the idea that oral health and overall health are so connected, Oral B also had a yoga instructor taking guests through basic stretches and moves to get their blood circulating.  Similar booths were set up all over the main expo-ish area by the other sponsors. The O You! team itself had set up this cool chalkboard cube for people to write six words that describe their lives. I couldn’t think of my own so I just stood there and smiled, and threw it out to Twitter.

That up there was from @alexishinde

Aside from those brand booths, the speeches were the main events. There weren’t too many to choose from, which I thought was great because that meant whatever I chose, I wasn’t missing much. I heard the talks from: Suze Orman, Martha Beck, Laura Berman, Peter Walsh, Iyanla Vanzant, and of course, Oprah Winfrey. The frenzy in the giant room when she took the stage was like nothing I have ever seen. She even opened up the session to questions at the end of her talk, which could have been an invitation for disaster, and it kind of was for a second. Remember Crying Girl on American Idol a couple of years ago? Yeah, that totally happened here.

I was struck by the free form of the talks that each member of Oprah’s court gave. Suze Orman confessed that she had no plan for what she was going to say. The others seemed a tiny bit more organized, but there wasn’t much in the way of notes or presentations. That didn’t matter. Everything I heard made sense to me on that particular day in my life. Even the fact that I was there at all was a consequence of a serendipitous alignment of conditions.

The next day I told my friends that I was feeling an Oprah hangover. The event was basically an entire day of looking at myself and my life and assessing what’s what and “calling a thing a thing,” as Vanzant would say. That’s basically what I’ve been doing for the last few months now: attempting to be kinder to myself, clearing my full plate, making room for the next big thing, aligning my priorities, blah blah.  I came away from the O You! experience with a new commitment to flossing (and I’m not even being sarcastic about that), plus a nice confirmation that I am doing the right thing for myself right now.

I mean, if Oprah and her friends say so, then it must be true.

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Now here are some more pictures:

The experience and opinions about O You! are my own.  I was a guest of Oral B who provided my ticket and transportation.