Blake Hammond Brings on the Fat Jokes

It is always interesting to hear fat jokes from an obese comedian (others, not so much.) For anyone who works in the field of obesity prevention or alleviation, an overweight standup comic’s act might contain useful insights and even revelations.

For Blake Hammond, who bills himself as “Cincinnati’s premier fat comedian,” it all started when he was a small and “somewhat sickly” child, ditching first grade to stay home and watch Saturday Night Live reruns. He especially liked the Weekend Update segments, and later, after earning a degree in journalism, he became a freelance writer of reviews and features. But his reviews somehow tended to turn into roasts.

Accepting that he mainly wanted to write jokes, he started to dabble in live comedy by going up at open mics. At the same time, he was working intermittently at a restaurant, which enabled him to keep a finger on the pulse of what everyday people were thinking about, which is useful knowledge for anyone who puts together a comedy routine. With another comic, Jeremy Johnston, he co-hosts a podcast whose format is “two fat guys on a couch talking.”

Self-image and other issues

Hammond variously describes himself as a guy who looks like an Easter egg, a failed celebrity chef, or Jabba the Hutt. He talks about being picked on in grade school, “but I was fat, so I deserved it.” He recalls the marriage proposal he made: “I got down on my knee and my girlfriend called 911.”

He objects to the term “person of size” because it abbreviates to POS, the same initials as a very rude insult. (Sadly, his funniest fat jokes are not suitable for repetition here.) And there are dark hints. Hammond told an interviewer that he suffers from “crippling anxiety,” and he has referenced suicide. He talks about fat nightmares, which include shopping at the Big and Tall store and being weighed by the doctor.

Of course, if a certain type of crime occurs, there is an advantage to being fat, because “If they find a body on a hiking trail, they’re not going to come looking for me.”

For more on the intersection of obesity and comedy, see these posts:

“How Funny Is Obesity, Anyway?”
“A Strange Fellowship”
“Edutainment and Jim Gaffigan’s Books”
“Hefty Humor”
“Is Laughter Always Good Medicine?”
“Lisa Lampanelli and Stuffed”
“Mindy and Monica”
“‘Insatiable’ Revisited”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Cincinnati Comedian Blake Hammond to Tape Amazon Prime Special at MOTR Pub,” Citybeat.com, 10/26/21
Image by Twitter

More About New Drugs, Strong Arguments

Believe it or not, the response of a TV personality to a TV writer is worthy of an article in the New York Post. Gary Janetti quipped, “This summer on Bravo, The Real Housewives of Ozempic,’ to which Andy Cohen replied, “It’s already airing.” This exchange offered a foundation for unloading information about the popular weight-loss drug, just in case anybody in America has not heard of it yet.

Mayo Clinic endocrinologist Meera Shah had something to say about Ozempic and its siblings, in terms of their side effects. It seems that many people are not that bothered, and others are willing to tolerate the nausea, pain, diarrhea, and constipation. Folklore has it that the uncomfortable results diminish over time, but the cold fact is that “at least 10% of patients who start these drugs have to be taken off of them because the side effects do not improve.”

Dr. Shah specifically mentions the mental anxiety related to not knowing when a bathroom emergency will arise, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. It is very nerve-wracking to never know when pain might hit, or whether it is safe to eat away from home, or if a restroom is readily available. It gets worse. The brain is connected to the gut, and when the brain is in turmoil because of this kind of stress, it tends to make intestinal issues even more pronounced.

There is another medically significant issue: the threat of malnutrition because the appetite is suppressed too much for the person’s own good.

Shah said she commonly has to advise patients to take multivitamins or protein supplements in addition to the medication because they aren’t getting the nutrients they need from food.

Dr. Shah also mentioned to journalist Cara Korte that the job of a diagnosing physician is more difficult when a patient is not forthcoming about previous issues around eating disorders. If a patient admits to a history of disordered eating, she refers them first to another staff member, a behavioral psychologist.

Jens Juul Holst, who helped to develop the GLP-1 drugs, told the press, “[I]t’s unlikely that people will want to stay on the drugs for more than two years.” After a while, it’s a drag to not have an appetite or enjoy eating.

“That may eventually be a problem, that once you’ve been on this for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can’t stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life,” Holst said. Some of these meds have been available since 2005, and “studies have shown that people don’t stay on them for a long time.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Andy Cohen jokes ‘The Real Housewives of Ozempic’ is airing on Bravo,” NYPost.com, 06/21/23
Source: “Ozempic side effects could lead to hospitalization — and doctors warn that long-term impacts remain unknown,” CBSNews.com, 06/10/23
Source: “Scientist Who Pioneered Drugs Like Ozempic Says They Make Life ‘So Miserably Boring’ After Two Years of Use,” People.com, 06/15/23
Image by Lance Fisher/CC BY-SA 2.0

New Drugs, Strong Arguments

One of the fastest-moving news stories of the past months has been explosive growth in the release of, and the voracious market for, weight-loss medications based on semaglutide and other GLP-1 agonists.

Early in 2021, the “game-changer” chatter had already started, after The New England Journal of Medicine published news of semaglutide as an anti-obesity pharmaceutical. Phrases like “new era” and “huge potential” were being thrown around, and turned out to be quite prophetic.

Also prophetic: “Semaglutide is likely to be expensive,” as journalist Gina Kolata noted in The New York Times. (The injection “pens,” whether multiple-use or single-use, surely represent a significant proportion of the production cost.) And even then, cautious voices were saying things like,

A high-dose regimen of the drug has not been studied long enough to know if it has serious long-term consequences. And it is expected that patients would have to take it for a lifetime to prevent the weight loss from coming back.

In the spring of this year, some experts curbed their enthusiasm with phrases like “efficacy… within confined parameters,” “downside that some overweight individuals may not be inclined to acknowledge,” and “significant health hazards, such as pancreatitis and thyroid cancer.” Since then, both ecstatic endorsements and dire predictions just keep piling up.

At the top of the worry list for some is the prospect of children getting daily or weekly injections, while others hold that, in the name of preventing childhood obesity, “anything is justifiable.” By “anything,” they presumably mean acquainting and providing minors with injectable drugs which, face it, will happen anyway if the kids get type 2 diabetes.

A piece by Judith Wood was subtitled, “We should do the humane thing for our children, rather than question the ethics of weight-loss injections.” Having grabbed the audience’s attention — “What? Abandon ethics?” — the journalist justified the extreme stand by noting that the obesity crisis is “no longer looming, it has entered that state where it has well and truly arrived.”

And the United Kingdom may have reached the point where its citizens must face unpalatable facts and consider doing even “the unthinkable.” One argument is that due to the yearly cost of obesity-related illnesses, the United Kingdom is bound to run out of money:

Two in three adults in the UK are overweight or obese; if they weren’t, the NHS could save almost £14 billion… Maybe we can’t save those struggling with the effects of excess weight. But we can sure as hell try and save the next generation.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “‘A Game Changer’: Drug Brings Weight Loss in Patients With Obesity,” NYTimes.com, 02/10/21
Source: “Mounjaro Weight Loss,” Benzinga.com, 05/06/23
Source: “David Heathcote: Childhood obesity. Is there a better solution than injecting our children?,” ConservativeHome.com, 05/12/23
Source: “Anything is justifiable to avoid childhood obesity in Britain,” Telegraph.co.uk, 05/19/23
Image by Rob Lee/CC BY-ND 2.0

Dr. Pretlow to Participate in Significant Upcoming Event

An interesting virtual get-together and meeting of minds will take place in August, and Dr. Pretlow will be a participant (more on that later). This is not surprising, because the basic ideas are derived from the document “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” authored by Robert Pretlow & Suzette Glasner.

There is a great deal of interest in developing ways to diminish the cues that lead to overeating: the pervasive intrusion of advertising; the ubiquitous presence of fast-food outlets; the holidays on which people feel compelled to eat for social approval; and other insidious factors.

But getting rid of cues, triggers and temptations can only go so far. There is a number of reasons, some of them having to do with American freedoms. After a certain point, people begin to push back, muttering such phrases as “nanny state” and “government overreach.” But the aversion is not only to political involvement.

Basic human nature prompts children to start saying “No!” at an astonishingly early age. As kids grow, they can develop unrelenting stubbornness when being told what is good for them by parents, teachers, partners, or even healthcare professionals. The resistance trait often carries into adulthood. It tags along, as part of the familiar and unexamined luggage we drag through the years and sometimes need to be reminded about, so we can take it to the landfill and dump it in a hole.

The interesting part

There are people on whom cues and triggers do not work. They can look a bag of chips or a chicken wing straight in the eye and be unmoved. What is it about such people? What is their secret? Where does this superhuman ability come from?

If we consider the proposition that the true culprit is stress, the outlook becomes more hopeful, because that can be handled to some extent. If a person isn’t stressed out, cues and triggers have less opportunity to sink their teeth in. Apparently, some folks are simply not constitutionally predisposed to crumbling under stress. As with so many other human problems, there could be a genetic element.

It is also possible that these fortunate individuals have successfully and non-violently removed one or more sources of stress from their lives — and if so, this is also worth looking into. Maybe some folks have learned to cope with stress by cultivating proactive, creative and effective ways to burn off nervous energy. They don’t get overwhelmed and eat themselves into oblivion, because they have developed toolkits. A person can learn a skillset, which is what BrainWeighve is all about.

What to look forward to

The August event, “Consensus Building Workshops on addiction-like symptoms related to consumption of certain foods,” is the creation of four colleagues whose ambitious goal is to persuade the World Health Organization “to include symptoms of addiction related to food, as a disease, in the International Classification of Disease, ICD-11.”

It will consist of a number of online workshops on the subject of food addiction as a disease.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Springer.com, 06/22/22

Obesity and Telehealth

The term telehealth covers a lot of ground. It has to do with using electronic technologies to disperse needed information and support vital communication, especially between medical personnel and patients, and includes the ability to ask for and receive advice. People can absorb helpful information and then ask the professionals about the need for and availability of intervention. The technology is particularly brilliant at monitoring everything from a patient’s vital signs to their food intake.

A lot of people cannot walk, and many more do not drive, which is also acutely limiting. A lot of people should not go out because of compromised immunity, or they live too far from the nearest medical center to make a journey practical or possible. Thanks to technology, a medic can not only ask for a description of the symptoms but look at the rash or the swollen throat from afar. All of that is in the specific area of telemedicine, a term that leans toward more direct care.

Expansive telehealth

The larger category of telehealth can include distance learning for professionals, data management, presentations, staff meetings, supervisory sessions, and other functions the patient is not directly connected to.

In the summer of 2012, Janna Stephens, who went on to become a very large presence in the field, wrote this about a certain age group:

[T]he intervention needs to be something that will stimulate them and something they want to do. Adolescents spend hours on their smartphones and use applications to do just about everything. So why not weight loss?

In 2014, Stephens and two co-authors published “Technology-Assisted Weight Management Interventions: Systematic Review of Clinical Trials.” After examining nearly 40 appropriate studies, they concluded that overweight and obese adults could certainly benefit from behavioral interventions assisted by technology. But sadly, out of even such a small number of studies, only a few used mobile devices and…

[…] none was able to identify which features were most responsible for changes in outcomes, and few reported long-term outcomes.

In the following year, Stephens published “Smartphone Technology to Decrease BMI in Overweight and Obese Adolescents.” The object was to arouse interest in studying the use of a smartphone app to help high school students lose weight. She described the application’s purpose as “self-monitoring of dietary habits and physical activity… combined with a one time behavioral counseling session.” She also specified that the philosophical basis for the study was Social Cognitive Theory, “which focuses on strategies to increase self-efficacy for healthy behaviors.”

In the same year Janna Stephens RN, BSN, Ph.D., was also one of three co-authors of “Young Adults, Technology, and Weight Loss: A Focus Group Study.” The researchers sought out the opinions of young adults about obesity, weight-loss counseling, and smartphone technology, and discovered (and remember, this was back in 2015):

Although young adults do not know about specific technology that exists, they are open to learning this technology as long as it fits into their lifestyle.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Technology Can Trim Childhood Obesity,” Newswise.com, 08/09/12
Source: “Technology-Assisted Weight Management Interventions: Systematic Review of Clinical Trials,” LiebertPub.com, 12/22/14
Source: “Smartphone Technology to Decrease BMI in Overweight and Obese Adolescents,” Grantome.com, 01/01/15
Source: “Young Adults, Technology, and Weight Loss: A Focus Group Study,” Nih.gov, 02/18/15
Image by EpicTopTen.com/CC BY 2.0