Posts Tagged ‘HBO’

Howard Stern calls Girls' Lena Dunham a "little fat girl"

By Natalie Abrams,

Howard Stern has never been one to mince words, but he certainly caused a stir after calling Girls‘ creator and star Lena Dunham a “little fat girl.”

Last Monday, the America’s Got Talent judge discussed his distaste for the HBO comedy on his radio show. “It’s a little fat girl who kind of looks like Jonah Hill and she keeps taking her clothes off and it kind of feels like a rape,” he said. “I don’t want to see that.”

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For her part, Dunham seems to be taking Stern’s comments in stride. “I did find out that Howard Stern really hates [Girls], which I’m a Howard Stern fan and I believe he’s earned his right to free speech and he should go for it,” Duham said Thursday on the Late Show, according to US Weekly. She even joked that she’d like to have one of his comments written on her gravestone. “It’s so hard for little fat chicks to get anything going these days.”

The second season of Girls premiered Sunday on HBO.

View original Howard Stern Calls Girls‘ Lena Dunham a “Little Fat Girl” at TVGuide.com

Other Links From TVGuide.com

• Howard Stern
• America’s Got Talent
• Jonah Hill
• Girls
• Lena Dunham

View the original article on TVGuide.com

Article source: http://www.kptv.com/story/20570989/howard-stern-calls-girls-lena-dunham-a-little-fat-girl

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Howard Stern calls Lena Dunham ‘little fat girl’

Article source: http://wonderwall.msn.com/tv/howard-stern-calls-lena-dunham-little-fat-girl-1729281.story

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Howard Stern calls Lena Dunham ‘little fat girl’

Article source: http://wonderwall.msn.com/tv/howard-stern-calls-lena-dunham-little-fat-girl-1729281.story

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Howard Stern calls Lena Dunham ‘little fat girl’

Article source: http://wonderwall.msn.com/tv/howard-stern-calls-lena-dunham-little-fat-girl-1729281.story

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Howard Stern calls Lena Dunham ‘little fat girl’

Article source: http://wonderwall.msn.com/tv/howard-stern-calls-lena-dunham-little-fat-girl-1729281.story

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Stern calls 'Girls' star ‘fat’

Article source: http://wonderwall.msn.com/tv/howard-stern-calls-lena-dunham-little-fat-girl-likens-girls-sex-scenes-to-rape-1729281.story?GT1=28135

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Today's News: Our Take

Article source: http://www.siftingsherald.com/article/20130112/NEWS/301129984/196/features

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The fat of the land

At my parents’ house a few months ago, they were watching the HBO documentary “The Weight of the Nation.” I was just dropping off something, so I didn’t have time to sit down and watch it with them. But I happened to catch one of the interviewees saying something that stuck with me: “Dieting helps you lose the weight. Exercise keeps it off.”

Like 63 percent of Americans, I struggle with weight. In fact, I was discharged from the Army in 1992 owing to a combination of not being able to keep the weight off and bad ankles. I’m not especially proud of that, but such is life.

Now the series is available on DVD, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who struggles with weight loss, or knows someone who does, or has children. Essentially, almost everyone in America.

There are four parts to the documentary:
• “Consequences” examines the overall obesity epidemic in America and its health consequences by looking at communities that struggle with the problem.
• “Choices” looks at the science behind obesity and weight loss. It wonders why we can’t find a “miracle pill” that will help people lose weight.
• “Children in Crisis” examines the obesity problem in children. It looks at why our kids are getting fatter and why we’re seeing “adult” diseases in children as young as 8.
• “Challenges” examines the forces keeping Americans obese. Our environment and genetics are part of the problem; our political and financial systems are another.

The DVD set also features 12 bonus shorts that expand upon issues covered in the series, or focus on specific issues within the obesity problem:

• Healthy Mom, Healthy Baby: The Risks of Excess Weight
• Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes
• Latino Health Access: A Model of Community Action
• Nashville Takes Action: A City Battles Obesity
• Can a Lifetime of Excess Weight Lead to Heart Disease?
• Poverty and Obesity: When Healthy Food Isn’t an Option
• Stigma: The Human Cost of Obesity
• Overweight in the Workplace: How Wellness Programs can help the American Workforce
• The Quest to Understand the Biology of Weight Loss
• Is Weight Something We Inherit?
• Healthy Foods and Obesity Prevention: Increasing Markets for Fruit and Vegetable Farmers
• Obesity Research and the NIH

There’s a lot of scary information in this four-hour documentary, if you’re one of the people that struggle with weight. Some of the things that resonated with me:

• I have two young children, and I was rather surprised to find out that fruit juice (which I always regarded as a healthier alternative) was just as bad as drinking sugar-sweetened soda.

• I always knew that the food manufacturers and advertisers were more interested in their bottom line, but I’d never seen it so blatantly presented.

• I’d heard about “set points,” but this explained how some people can eat the same amount that “healthy” people eat but still gain weight.

• Our bodies are designed for a food-scarce environment. We are genetically programmed to crave sweets because they gave us energy. Now in our modern, food-rich society, this works against us.

Where I found this series lacking was some of the questions that it didn’t ask:

• What about diet sodas? They are barely mentioned at all, and only in passing. And while you can find plenty of websites on the evils of artificial sweeteners such as aspartame (Nutrasweet), there is no conclusive peer-reviewed study that confirms it. You would think that we would have something by now.
• And on a similar subject: is it possible that the use of artificial sweeteners actually increases our sweet tooth desires?
• What about the increased use of high-fructose corn syrup as a real sugar substitute? According to the documentary, weight levels started going up significantly in the 1980s. Isn’t that about the time we started using fructose as a substitute?

Bottom line: $20 isn’t much to pay for this series, as it is very informative and has some very good information for consumers to know. However, you can watch the entire series plus the bonus shorts, on the Web for free at http://theweightofthenation.hbo.com. Your call.

The Weight of the Nation
HBO Studios, 400 minutes, not rated, 16 episodes, 3 discs, $19.97

Article source: http://blog.mysanantonio.com/dvd/2012/08/the-fat-of-the-land/

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Fat Lot of Good Diet Advice Does

We, as a culture, have some weird views about appetites. We accept readily that some people are just born with an appetite for alcohol and drugs while others aren’t. We accept that the former would have to struggle much more to control their drinking (say) than the latter for their entire lives. If people vary in their sexual appetites, we tend to think those on the lower end of the desire scale are probably just repressed in some way. And what about eating? Easy. Thin people eat less and exercise more. Fat people eat more and exercise less. It’s simple thermodynamics. Ask fat people to exercise more and eat less – and boom, obesity problem solved. The ones who don’t do that – well, they’re just out of control. They eat even when they are not hungry. They are self-indulgent.

So the advice – eat less, move more! – is given over and over and over again, by medical professionals and Oprah and the First Lady. The statistics, however, are grim. Less than 5% of people who lose weight by any method keep it off for ten years. Those stats are worse than heroin addiction.

I cannot imagine the medical community recommending a medication that had a less than 5% long term success rate and came with plenty of unpleasant side effects, such as irritability, constant hunger, severely restricted ability to socialize. Yet the advice remains: eat less, move more!

If it is that simple, why doesn’t the advice work?

I used to believe the “simple thermodynamics” idea, and I used to be fat. Then I started a medication for another condition, and my desire to eat shifted drastically. All of a sudden, I didn’t crave eating nearly so much, and I lost weight without nearly as much effort as I used to use. And the thing is, we all know this. Everyone knows that certain drugs, such as amphetamines or pot, can affect appetite. Yet we still have this odd persistence of belief that people are equally in control of their appetites, and the ones who are fat are just more weak-willed than the rest of us. On becoming thinner, I became privy to the contempt in which thin people hold fat people. It is intense.

There is a cultural explanation of obesity as well. Food deserts, advertising, etc. The question remains. Why are some people particularly susceptible to such messages? Two people can live in the same environment, and one will get fat and another won’t.

We seem weirdly resistant to the idea that weight gain can depend on an individual, yet not be an individual’s fault. Yet we at least partially accept this in the case of, say, alcoholism.

If Gary Taubes has done nothing else, he has done an excellent job in tracing the origins of our belief in the thermodynamics explanation of weight. If you are truly interested, I highly recommend his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Even if you don’t accept his positive hypothesis, that is, that the obesity epidemic is caused by wide availability of sugar and carbs, his take-down of the eat-less-move-more advice is thorough, convincing, and valuable.

For those who don’t have the time to wade through his book, here’s a nice link on the philosophical problem of the thermodynamic explanation – that is, that the thermodynamics of weight gain are trivially true.

Say instead of talking about why fat tissue accumulates too much energy, we want to know why a particular restaurant gets so crowded…. So what we want to know is why this restaurant is crowded and so over-stuffed with energy (i.e., people) and maybe why some other restaurant down the block has remained relatively empty — lean.

If you asked me this question — why did this restaurant get crowded? — and I said, well, the restaurant got crowded (it got overstuffed with energy) because more people entered the restaurant than left it, you’d probably think I was being a wise guy or an idiot. (If I worked for the World Health Organization, I’d tell you that “the fundamental cause of the crowded restaurant is an energy imbalance between people entering on one hand, and people exiting on the other hand.”) Of course, more people entered than left, you’d say. That’s obvious. But why?And, in fact, saying that a restaurant gets crowded because more people are entering than leaving it is redundant –saying the same thing in two different ways – and so meaningless.

Now, borrowing the logic of the conventional wisdom of obesity, I want to clarify this point. So I say, listen, those restaurants that have more people enter them then leave them will become more crowded. There’s no getting around the laws of thermodynamics. You’d still say, yes, but so what? Or at least I hope you would, because I still haven’t given you any causal information. I’m just repeating the obvious.

This is what happens when the laws of physics (thermodynamics) are used to defend the belief that overeating makes us fat. Thermodynamics tells us that if we get fatter and heavier, more energy enters our body than leaves it. Overeating means we’re consuming more energy than we’re expending. It’s saying the same thing in a different way…

Answering the “why” question speaks to actual causes. In the restaurant analogy, okay, maybe this restaurant has particularly great food, or it’s happy hour; the drinks are cheap. Maybe it’s pouring outside so a lot of people ran into the restaurant to stay dry. Maybe every other restaurant in the neighborhood, including our lean restaurant down the block, was recently closed by the local health bureau and this is the only one that didn’t have cockroaches in the kitchen and so remained open. Maybe it’s in the theater district and the shows just got out and now every restaurant in the neighborhood is packed with the post-theater crowd. Maybe the word has spread that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie frequent this restaurant regularly, or Oprah, and this attracted a crowd hoping for a glimpse of celebrity.

All these would be valid answers to the question we asked. Some speak to the conditions inside the restaurant (the quality of the food, the price of the drinks, celebrity customers); some speak to conditions immediately outside (a rain storm, no competition, the theater schedule). They all provide the causal information we’re seeking. They answer the “why” question. That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call “vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t…

As for the great majority of experts who say (and apparently believe) that we get fat because we overeat or we get fat as a result of overeating, they’re the ones making the junior-high-school-science-class mistake: they’re taking a law of nature that says absolutely nothing about why we get fat and assuming it says all that needs to be said. This was a common error in the first half of the 20th century. It’s become ubiquitous since.

Here’s another bit he wrote recently on the new HBO documentary on obesity which sums up his view nicely, and here’s a criticism of him which echoes my own hesitance about him, i.e., I totally buy his critical view, and am not 100% sold on his positive view. That said, I lose weight eating low carb. The more fat I eat, the more weight I lose. It is also a kind of unpleasant way to eat, and not in line with my ethics. I’d like it not to be true. I am ethically sympathetic to vegetarianism. When I tried to follow through on that recently, I gained weight and became anemic. So I am now restricting myself to well-treated animals as an ethical second-best.

Yet if his criticisms can get at least some people to stop giving fat people the simple eat-less-move-more, and stop the contempt for them, Gary Taubes has done amazing work.

Tagged as:
eat less move more,
gary taubes,
low carb,
obesity

Article source: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/russellsaunders/2012/06/fat-lot-of-good-diet-advice-does/

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Fat Doctor beats death, comes home to Cozzy’s

NEWPORT NEWS — Richard Pryor loved The Fat Doctor.

Pryor enjoyed watching the younger man perform, always greeted him warmly, and provided a piece of advice that The Fat Doctor has never forgotten.

“He told me that if you want to be a great comedian, you’ve got to take your pain on stage and make it funny,” The Fat Doctor says. “There has to be a willingness to do that. Until he told me that, I would shy away from things that were painful to me. But now, it’s just the way I look at life in general — there’s always a funny side to everything if you can find it.”

The past year has given him plenty of experiences from which to draw inspiration. On Friday and Saturday, The Fat Doctor — born Darcel Blagmone — will take the stage for three shows at Cozzy’s in Newport News, the club that has always been his favorite. They will be his first headlining performances since he suffered a heart attack and a stroke 14 months ago.

He is 53 years old. In 1998, doctors told him his heart was so bad that he had a 50-50 shot of living another two years. Last March he was in a coma for more than a week after his stroke.

“Three days in, they started telling my family to come in and say goodbye because I wasn’t going to make it,” he says. “Then on the eighth day, I opened my eyes and started talking.”

Almost immediately, he began planning for his return to the stage. The stroke had affected his memory, so he had to re-learn the routines that had become his trademark over the previous three decades — not just the words, but the pitch-perfect timing he had honed.

He is not just a performer, but also a teacher of young comedians. His pupils have included Martin Lawrence, Tommy Davidson (“In Living Color”) and Donnell Rawlings (“The Dave Chappelle Show”). Now he had to start teaching himself all over again.

“I always had faith that he would be back,” says Cocoa Brown, the comedian from Newport News whom The Fat Doctor calls his goddaughter. “I knew he wasn’t finished yet. He still had stuff to do. Doc’s resilience is amazing and insurmountable.”

He has worked hard to build up his physical strength and to reconstruct his act. He says he has regained about half of the weight he had lost following the stroke, pushing his weight back to about 300 pounds. (Lorain Cosgrave, owner of Cozzy’s, joked that the last time she saw him, he looked more like The Medium Doctor.)

While working on his memory, he was delighted to find that the video games he enjoys so much – particularly “Madden” football — actually helped sharpen his thought processes.

“My wife set up the PlayStation and told me to give it a try,” he says. “I didn’t think I could do it. My mind was so slow and the games are so fast. She said, ‘Why don’t you see if it helps you, instead of running from it.’ I got mad and said, ‘I ain’t runnin’ from a damn thing!’ She tricked me into doing it.

“But it really helped me. If anyone tries to say that video games are harmful, I would have to rebut them vehemently.”

The Fat Doctor — who grew up in the D.C. suburbs and now lives in the Richmond area — will come to Cozzy’s armed with some new material, which he has honed at some shorter gigs opening for his former students in the past few months. But he also will have plenty of his familiar older bits, too, because he knows the crowd has come to expect it. Cozzy’s, he says, is the one place where the audience knows his routines as well as he does.

It’s a relationship that goes back almost 20 years, and Cosgrave says she can’t remember the last time she had an unsold seat for a Fat Doctor show.

“He’s a really, truly funny man, and just a great guy,” Cosgrave says. “He always has time to sit and talk with people after the show, and when he comes back he remembers them. People respond to that. All we have to do is say ‘Doc is coming,’ and people will show up.”

When The Fat Doctor was recuperating from his stroke a year ago, Cosgrave held a benefit at Cozzy’s and raised almost $2,000 toward his medical expenses. That’s typical of the relationship between this performer and this club.

“We don’t even do contracts anymore,” The Fat Doctor says. “If I walked in there and only 10 people showed up, I would tell her, ‘Don’t worry about paying me — I’ll go up there and you just give me a beer.’ And if she has standing-room only, she’ll give me a little more than we agreed on. We look out for each other.

“I’ve auditoned for HBO shows before, and if I ever get one, I want to film it at Cozzy’s. That’s against HBO’s rules, because the room is too small for their criteria, but I’m telling you that I would find a way to do it. That is probably my favorite place to work in the entire world.”