Michelle Obama Recalls Ellen DeGeneres Push-Up Competition
Back in 2012, Ellen DeGeneres famously challenged Michelle Obama to a push-up competition live on her self-titled talk show.
While discussing Michelle's public health campaign 'Let's Move,' which had been launched in the US a couple of years prior, Ellen wound up asking the First Lady about her own workout routine.
After Michelle noted that she tended to focus on cardio, lifting weights, and plyometric training, Ellen interjected and asked if she did push-ups. Seemingly caught off-guard, Michelle replied that she did in fact do push-ups — prompting Ellen to challenge her to a friendly contest then and there.
Michelle ended up winning by doing 25 push-ups, while Ellen gave up after 20. 'How amazing is that, come on?!' Ellen asked the audience afterwards.
Fast forward to today, and Michelle has reflected on the push-up competition during a new appearance on Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast.
The topic was brought up after Michelle noted that she's 'at the age' where she wakes up with random aches and pains, prompting a discussion about what kinds of workouts she and Amy do.
When Amy asked if she's able to do push-ups, Michelle replied, 'Yeah…Well, now I do them on my knees. This is another thing — I don't need to do regular push-ups. I have nothing to prove,' before noting that she finds 'regular' push-ups 'hard' because her 'arm length doesn't go all the way down.'
Michelle then recalled, 'In fact, you know who pointed that out was Ellen because my first term, she challenged me to a push-up competition. I'm the First Lady!' Amy quipped, 'Sounds like Ellen.'
Michelle continued, 'She heard that I worked out, so I'm on her show doing push-ups. And I did more push-ups than her but she still says I didn't go down all the way. Anatomically, I don't think I can. My arms are very long and she's a much smaller person than me.'
Michelle's remarks have since sparked a heap of discourse online, with several people suggesting that it was pretty bizarre for the First Lady to randomly be challenged to a push-up contest live on air.
'The entire premise of this is wild and I cannot believe it actually happened. Ellen was something else,' one person said in response to Michelle's latest quotes. 'This is genuinely so wild to me,' someone agreed.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and check out Michelle's full appearance on the Good Hang podcast here.
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But you get people scared of what they're eating to the point where people stop eating vegetables because they're worried about the pesticides, which is just not good for their health. This fear is definitely taking hold. I think it's because the mediums on which this information travels are exacerbating that fear. You already mentioned the food dye announcement and why that was concerning to you. What are some of the other actions that you think aren't necessarily achieving the stated goals? If you step back and start to look at what actions have actually been taken, what you're actually seeing is a full-on assault on science throughout HHS. You're seeing a complete gutting of NIH, which funds much of the research needed to understand what in hyper-processed foods is undermining people's health and how to actually identify those correlations so you can regulate it very aggressively. 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If there's some common ground to be found with Republicans, then great. We could get a lot done. But we can't just turn over the keys to this issue to people who are not serious. When you worked in the Obama White House, you pushed better nutrition labeling, active living, bans on unhealthy foods in school meals and trans fat. The recent MAHA report pointed the finger at similar programs for chronic illness. Is that a place where you and MAHA advocates are on the same page, and how do you balance that with the concerns you've raised? There's no clean answer to that. We largely, not entirely, share the same critique when it comes to food. Vaccines are another thing which are important to also talk about. People are trying to pick the issue that they like and can get around and pretend like the rest isn't happening. It would be great if we got food dyes out, but it would pale in comparison to if he continues down the path to undermine vaccines as the foundation of public health and people start dying, like they are, with measles. That is not even close to a trade. For all of my food friends who read this, or everybody in policy who are like, 'Oh yeah, I can work with him on this issue, but I'm going to turn a blind eye to that,' that doesn't work. That's going to lead to devastating outcomes. On the report, I share the general critique of the problem. I spent my life saying those things and working on these issues. That's the easy part. What matters is what you do about it. How do you actually change what people are eating, and what is it going to take to really put the country on a different trajectory when it comes to health? So far, I've seen absolutely no indication that the issues that they're focused on are going to have any meaningful or measurable impact on public health. Frankly, there's many other things that I think are going to be extremely detrimental. We will see. We're only a few months in. I could, depending on what happens, have a different perspective in six months or 12 months. RFK has blamed the food industry for Americans' poor health. He's argued that government institutions are overwrought with corporate influence. Do you think he's right? And what do you think about RFK's approach to trying to curb corporate influence? I'm all for curbing corporate influence. I had some big fights with industry. I won some of them, and sometimes I got my ass kicked. It's the nature of Washington when you're threatening the basic interests of an industry. What's stunning to me is that the food industry so far has been silent. They haven't done anything to fight back, which says to me that they're not feeling threatened yet. I think they're waiting to see what's going to happen. I'm sure they're doing some stuff in the background, but this is nothing like what we were dealing with. I agree that we should put the public's best interest first, not succumb to industry influence. I think the way that RFK talks about it is a real overstatement down a very dark conspiracy theory. The idea that JAMA and the American Medical Association and the New England Journal are just like corporate journals that just put corporate, completely distorted research out for the sake of making profits, it's just not serious. He starts to discredit the very institutions, like HHS, that you actually need to do the work to rein in industry. The way that industry does make inroads is that they fund a lot of research. If you want to reduce industry influence, you should dramatically increase [government] investment in funding of scientific research on agriculture and climate change, on food and nutrition. One of the biggest fights in the Obama era was over stricter nutrition standards for school lunches. The administration won some of those battles, but quite a few children still have obesity, according to the latest data. Is there anything you wish the Obama administration had done differently? Are there things policymakers should be doing differently? School nutrition is just one part of a young person's diet. You're not going to solve kids' health issues just through school nutrition, but obviously it's a huge lever to pull. If we really want to make progress, you have to look much more holistically at the food environment that people are living in. This is generational work. It's going to take literally decades of work to shift, not just the policies, but our culture, our businesses, to change how people are eating. I think the one thing we missed would have been a much stricter restriction on sugar across the board. We had it for drinks,, but we didn't [apply it across the board], and that was a miss. We should have pushed harder on sugar. I think the policy was a really important start. It can always be improved and strengthened. Both the first Trump administration and this one are looking to roll back some of that. The thing that we have to not forget — and this is true for schools, and certainly true for SNAP and WIC — is the biggest problem is not enough money for these programs. I started doing a lot of work on finding ways to restrict sugary drinks as an example from the SNAP program. But if you want to do that and actually get the health outcomes you need, you need to also increase the total dollar amount that people have so they can purchase healthier food. Part of the reason why people are drinking these things is they're the cheapest available drink. Coke is cheaper than water sometimes. RFK recently called sugar 'poison.' Do you agree with that? One of their tactics to obfuscate truth in science is dosage, right? The amount that we're consuming matters. If you had a birthday cake on your birthday and you have a cookie — my kids eat a cookie, they're not dying, they're not being poisoned to death. They're fine. I think the problem is the amount of sugar we're consuming and the sizes of the portions we have. It's the cumulative amount of sugar. It's probably technically not exactly the right word, poison. But I don't take issue with that. I think the levels of sugar consumption for young people are deeply alarming and are absolutely going to drive preventable death and disease for millions and millions of people. It already is and will continue to do so. It is a very serious problem. But what do you do? I can't wait to see the policy proposals here. It's a tough problem to solve. It is not a problem that can be solved overnight, and it's going to take a very comprehensive effort to really shift the amount of sugar we're consuming, but it should be the goal of this administration. They should work very hard at it in a very serious and science-based way. Thus far, I have not seen that.
