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Wednesday, August 30, 2006

When your idols show their feet of clay
Posted by Jill | 6:54 AM
Everyone sooner or later has that experience when the famous person whose work they admire does something dumb, or offensive, or in some way steps over the line. You may have known perfectly well for years that Jerry Garcia used too many drugs, but the music was so good you were willing to look past that -- until he drops dead at 53 in a rehab clinic. Yes, the cause of death was officially a heart attack and sleep apnea, but he was in a freaking rehab clinic. Maybe you've watched Kenneth Branagh's Henry V ten times, but it just isn't as good anymore now that you know how he ended up treating Emma Thompson. And if you were a Mets fan last year, once Anna Benson opened her mouth, you no longer cared what her husband Kris did on the mound, because what kind of a guy marries a skeeze like this?

Now it's no secret that in my view, life just hasn't been the same since the cancellation of Morning Sedition last November. It's also no secret that few bloggers, if any, have been bigger Marc Maron boosters than Your Humble Blogger. I take credit that I'm not as bad as that bizarre woman Leslie who called Sam Seder's show last night when Maron was a guest and sounded vaguely stalkerish, but since April 1, 2004, I've been as good a non-insane evangelist for Maron's work as it's possible to be.

It's also no secret that I have battled with my weight most of my life, and in middle age my weight seems to have won. Of course at 4'10", the progeny of overweight parents and never particularly athletic, this was sort of inevitable, but here I am.

I rarely eat at fast food restaurants, and when I do it's Wendy's, where I get either a Mandarin Orange Chicken Salad or a small chili with a side salad; or Subway, where I get one of those 6" low-fat Jared-the-Subway-Guy sandwiches. I don't drink sugary sodas. I enjoy good food, which is probably the problem, because at my height, with a metabolism that's so slow the only time I lost significant weight in my life was the time I was on 300-800 calories a day, going to 1-hour aerobics classes five nights a week -- and I lost 13 pounds in 16 weeks. That's it. I was starving, crying all the time, hungry all the time -- and I lost less weight than most people do by simply cutting out the bag of chips at lunch.

So I have been fighting this losing battle with my weight, trying to be active and ending up with chronic sciatica and hip problems after doing step aerobics for the last two years -- and not losing any weight.

Yes, I'm too fat. Yes, my BMI is over 30. But it's not for lack of trying. And it doesn't help when newspapers tout a National Cancer Institute study finding that even a few pounds overweight, especially for women, results in a 20-40% higher risk of death. That this contradicts another study by by the NCI and the Centers for Disease Control which found that slightly obese people had a LOWER risk of death.

I'm always skeptical of studies like this, not just because their findings are all over the lot, but because the bias against overweight in this country is so pervasive that I have a hard time believing that these protocols are structured with an eye towards overcoming these biases. And when studies like this one and another showing a higher death risk from ovarian cancer among obese women seem to show higher risk for women than men from being overweight, I compare these results against a society in which sitcoms show paunchy fat guys with anorexic-looking wives in tight jeans, and I wonder just how carefully these protocols are being written.

This particular study used BMI as an index to measure obesity, at the same time that new research seems to show that BMI is not a reliable index. But guess which research got all the press. And tucked away in the ovarian cancer study is is this:

According to the researchers, the findings are not definitive because the sample population was small and because the researchers used a study method that entailed using data from previous studies. In addition, the findings might not be definite because obese women might receive a lower dose of chemotherapy than nonobese women in relation to their body surface, which could allow the tumor to grow in those women; fluid in the body cavity might have artificially increased the BMI of some women; and other conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, which are more common among obese women, could have affected the obese participants' survival rates. However, the researchers said that it is unlikely the variables caused the lower survival rate of the women and that the additional fat tissue in overweight and obese women is more likely the cause of the additional risk of death...


And why is it unlikely? Is it perhaps to cover the behinds of physicians? Just asking, is all.

I have no doubt that there are obese people in this country, particularly children, who are obese because they eat too many Big Macs and drink too much high-fructose corn syrup-laden sodas and too many Frappuccinos, and whose diet consists of high-fat meats and too much pasta. But I've known any number of obese people who actually eat far less than their thin counterparts. I've gone to lunch with thin people who are still putting it away long after I've put 2/3 of my food in a take-home container. Sometimes those thin counterparts are more active, but not always. I know a young woman who's a size 2, but has chronic digestive problems and migraines. And these "researchers" will tell you she's healthier than I am.

So it's against this backdrop of contradictory science in which only the "lose weight now" studies get the attention, that we get back to the point of this entry, which is when your idols have feet of clay, and in this case it's about Marc Maron.

It seems that life in the nip and tuck capital of the world has affected Mr. Maron, for he's decided that picking on fat people is worth including in his comedy repertoire. That this most incisive of political humorists during his time on progressive talk radio has reverted back to fat jokes is pretty damn pathetic, if you ask me. The bit takes the form of fat marshals posted at fast food restaurants telling fat people not to order certain items. Oh, that's a knee-slapper, isn't it? Has anyone ever gone to a restaurant where there wasn't some busybody looking askance at a fat person eating something that our culture says overweight people shouldn't eat -- or worse, confronting that person -- a perfect stranger -- on it? These are the same people who tell pregnant women they shouldn't drink wine, and it's none of their damn business.

Marc Maron makes a lot of noise about being formerly fat, so he says knows how hard it is to keep one's weight down, but I suspect that he's formerly fat the way I was fat in high school, which is to say "only in one's own mind." I understand that when you live in L.A. and you're in show business, being fat is worse than having cancer, but that doesn't make it funny. And even if you DO manage to have some kind of career in stand-up as a fat guy, you're going to end up playing Edna Turnblad in the Las Vegas production of Hairspray.

So if Marc Maron is reading this (and if you are, post in the comments why), here's a little word of advice? Lose the fat jokes. They're cheap, they're not funny, and I know you're capable of better.
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