Welcome to the Fat Emperor podcast.

I'm your host, Ivor Cummins.

You can imagine in the early 1980s, we didn't have much of a problem with weight.

When I came out to California, Southern California from Louisiana in 1991, I had a mission. I noticed that childhood obesity was on the rise and I

went into the Nickelodeon and Disney were the only two places at the time

that even had children's programming it wasn't like it is today where you

have a thousand channels you know you basically had the three big channels, NBC, CBS, ABC, and then you had a couple of

cable channels and only two of them dealt with childhood fitness and our childhood programming.

And I walked in and I'll never forget these meetings. I thought that I was going to blow the world apart in 1980 in 1991.

And I walked in and said to Disney, I said, hey, I've noticed that childhood obesity is on the rise.

And we need to do something. And they said, we agree. We agree. What would you say we do, Vinnie?

And I said, okay, we need to get rid of sugars and grains. And they literally laughed me out of the office. And I tried to curtail my speech a little bit when I went to Nickelodeon, and I got laughed out of the office again. And I realized at that moment that it was an uphill battle that I wasn't going to win because

they weren't willing to tell their people not to eat Kellogg's and, you know, fruit loops and,

you know, fruit roll-ups and Snickers bars because that's all they sold.

Big sponsors.

Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly so I realized right from

day one that I couldn't win that game so I didn't try I just went into to private

business every now and then I would try to get on the radio and do things like that

because I did have a popular radio show in New Orleans called Talking Fitness and

whenever I tried to do radio in L.A., they basically said, you don't have a voice for radio.

You sound like an idiot.

They said, they literally said I sounded like a jock.

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