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“Large” Restaurant Customers need special accommodation?
Replies
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FireOpalCO wrote: »What I find interesting is how little we are talking about how restaurants are failing to provide comfortable seating for medically normal weight range people, and it's on purpose. There have been several articles in the past year about how restaurant owners are purposely laying out their seating to be too close together for several reasons.
1. The more tables they fit in, the more diners they can sit at once.
2. If tables are tight together and people aren't that comfortable, they don't linger after their meals, they pay and leave. That increases table turnover.
This isn't "I'm heavier than the norm" or "I'm taller/shorter than the norm". Some restaurants are intentionally making people uncomfortable to increase profit.
I would not go to such a restaurant.
I don't give YELP reviews, but you'd think people would. The restaurant business is a pretty high failure rate one, you'd think it would matter.
But then I mostly just go to local places, not chains, so my perspective might be different. For chains it might not make a difference.
I do find sometimes tables are closer than I'd like, but never any pressure to leave/not linger, and I think some just don't mind the closeness (and more diners within code requirements is of course more profitable).1 -
OP here - it’s been interesting reading everyone’s comments.
Can I throw out one more question?
If the woman in the story is going to all the trouble to create an app to find rstiarants with seating large enough for her, is she also accepting/acknowledging/resigning herself that (at only 30) she will always be obese?
Maybe.
Maybe she's just not ready yet, but hasn't given up on the idea she might eventually lose weight. Some people enjoy creating apps and this seems like someone recognizing an opportunity.
I was fat (newly) at 30, and thin at 33. At 30 I didn't feel like I had control over it and felt hopeless about my weight. But that didn't mean it stayed that way.1 -
amusedmonkey wrote: »
I'm assuming there were some typos in what i bolded but I'm genuinely curious as to what you're saying in the bolded bit. Addressing the bit where you said, "promoting those with health threatening eating disorders the time of the article would be quite different" (again, without really understanding what you're saying). I think a lot of people would say that eating disorders (and eating disorders are, more or less by definition, health threatening) are very much promoted in various areas. The fashion industry, various sports (horse racing I'm looking at you - but also gymnastics, ballet, lighter weight categories of wrestling, etc), advertising to some extent, and the general lack of resources/understanding for various specific eating disorders and/or eating disorders in specific demographics of people.At any restaurant, ove people buy a lot more food than healthy slim people.
From a purely business stand point, wide load seating makes sense.
Bars make most of their profits from the small percentage that are alcoholic and alcohol abusers.
Of course, if wise load swimming was seen as accommodating or promoting those with health threatening eating disorders the time of the article would be quite different.
I didn't get obese by having a healthy "relationship with food."
I also wouldn't say that I have ever had an "unhealthy" relationship with food. I became obese (the first class of it) over probably 7 or 8 years, I don't use food to quell or bolster my emotions, and I never ate mindlessly or when I wasn't hungry. I simply ate as if I was exercising as much as I did when I was in high school - except I wasn't doing the same amount of physical activity. That's not an unhealthy relationship, that's simply not paying attention to the quantity and type of food I was eating compared to how much exercise I was doing.
I second that not every fat person has a troubled relationship with food. My relationship with food is great, I might argue I may be doing better than some people of normal weight. I love food, I don't feel guilty for enjoying it, I don't binge punish myself, I don't restrict it, I'm not afraid of it...etc. One of the reasons I didn't latch onto a fad diet when I first started is that I refuse to use food formulas as punishment for the crime of overeating (which is what many diets are). I like food, I ate it in excess, I gained weight. Simple facts, nothing to feel ashamed of or feel guilty about.
Some people absolutely do gain weight because of a "bad relationship with food", but it grinds my gears when it's generalized as a rule that every fat person must be this way because of emotional baggage. It's almost meant as an insult in some cases, which devalues the experience of those who actually do get obese because of unresolved emotional baggage, and ignores that there are people who simply like food or have a larger appetite than their activity level - you'd be surprised how small of a surplus you need to go from normal weight to overweight.
Exactly. It also assumes that people who are overweight and have mental health issues must be be overweight because of that. I have plenty of mental health issues, but none of them have an impact on my eating habits (my therapist would agree with me on that), nor my drinking habits for that matter - alcohol or otherwise.5 -
amusedmonkey wrote: »amusedmonkey wrote: »
I'm assuming there were some typos in what i bolded but I'm genuinely curious as to what you're saying in the bolded bit. Addressing the bit where you said, "promoting those with health threatening eating disorders the time of the article would be quite different" (again, without really understanding what you're saying). I think a lot of people would say that eating disorders (and eating disorders are, more or less by definition, health threatening) are very much promoted in various areas. The fashion industry, various sports (horse racing I'm looking at you - but also gymnastics, ballet, lighter weight categories of wrestling, etc), advertising to some extent, and the general lack of resources/understanding for various specific eating disorders and/or eating disorders in specific demographics of people.At any restaurant, ove people buy a lot more food than healthy slim people.
From a purely business stand point, wide load seating makes sense.
Bars make most of their profits from the small percentage that are alcoholic and alcohol abusers.
Of course, if wise load swimming was seen as accommodating or promoting those with health threatening eating disorders the time of the article would be quite different.
I didn't get obese by having a healthy "relationship with food."
I also wouldn't say that I have ever had an "unhealthy" relationship with food. I became obese (the first class of it) over probably 7 or 8 years, I don't use food to quell or bolster my emotions, and I never ate mindlessly or when I wasn't hungry. I simply ate as if I was exercising as much as I did when I was in high school - except I wasn't doing the same amount of physical activity. That's not an unhealthy relationship, that's simply not paying attention to the quantity and type of food I was eating compared to how much exercise I was doing.
I second that not every fat person has a troubled relationship with food. My relationship with food is great, I might argue I may be doing better than some people of normal weight. I love food, I don't feel guilty for enjoying it, I don't binge punish myself, I don't restrict it, I'm not afraid of it...etc. One of the reasons I didn't latch onto a fad diet when I first started is that I refuse to use food formulas as punishment for the crime of overeating (which is what many diets are). I like food, I ate it in excess, I gained weight. Simple facts, nothing to feel ashamed of or feel guilty about.
Some people absolutely do gain weight because of a "bad relationship with food", but it grinds my gears when it's generalized as a rule that every fat person must be this way because of emotional baggage. It's almost meant as an insult in some cases, which devalues the experience of those who actually do get obese because of unresolved emotional baggage, and ignores that there are people who simply like food or have a larger appetite than their activity level - you'd be surprised how small of a surplus you need to go from normal weight to overweight.
Interesting. I personally interpret the statement of an unhealthy "relationship with food" to include (but not limited to) emotional eating AND overeating enough to be overweight over a period of time, with neither having to be true at the same time.
I don't interpret it that way, because what is overeating enough to be overweight? If person A eats the same amount as person B, but person A is more active/taller/has higher neat or whatever, does person B really have a bad relationship with food? Is appetite mismatch or a sedentary job a relationship with food? Is the body doing what it does best in an age of abundance a relationship with food? I don't know, I would think a relationship would be less passive than this.
Question 1: Overeating enough to be overweight as measured by multiple tools (body fat percentage, BMI, waist-to-height ratio, etc) for that particular individual
Question 2: Assuming you're implying that person A is at a healthy weight, and person B is not at a healthy weight, then yes, person B really does have a bad relationship with food. It's not an attack or moral judgement. It just means person B has not yet developed a habit to eat the right amount to stay at a healthy weight. I would feel bad for person B though. It would suck to be short (under 5'0" (~152 cm) tall?) with a big appetite and a sedentary job and lifestyle. Bonus sympathy if person B is old and female. It would take a lot of careful practice to reach and maintain an optimal weight.
Question 3: In many ways, yes.
Question 4: Lol. Idk 100% myself, but if the body is storing enough fat to cause a person health issues now or in the future, it's doing what it does "best" wrong.4 -
tbright1965 wrote: »A century ago, people couldn't imagine the average family having so much food that obesity would be common.
We've always had the obese, but as a smaller percentage of the population.
Probably couldn't imagine the average Joe or Jane working in an office and having to find ways to exercise if they wanted to.Bry_Fitness70 wrote: »Nobody 50 years ago would have ever believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them.
I can only speak for my line.
My subsistence farming grandparents (1920s) could only dream of times when they didn't need to scrabble every minute to cook, hunt, tend livestock, preserve food and more so that their 9 kids would make it through the Winter with enough to eat. Sometimes they were down to mostly dry beans and squirrels/rabbits they could shoot, until the eggs, milk and produce picked up in Spring.
It would have been pure fantasy to them to think that not only would their adult grandchildren not have to work themselves skinny from dawn to dark as they were doing, but that those folks' children would just play and go to school all day, rather than being sent out to work the barn and fields - often others' fields, for scant money for the household - from perhaps age 5 on. (My dad routinely picked cucumbers for pay at age 5, because cucumbers grow low; carried water home in the biggest kettle he could hold, from 1/4 mile away every day, alongside older sibs with buckets, until they got their own well and hand-pump.)
So, yeah, my grandparents "never would have believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them."
But it's not so clear to me that they would've been appalled. It's at least as likely that they would've thought their descendants had been transported to some magical annex of heaven.
Fifty years ago - your stated time horizon - was my adolescence, my parents' time. They might have been surprised in a different way by our present times and attitudes compared to their parents, shaking their heads ruefully, bemused at so many of us wallowing (literally) in plenty, complaining about our "victimhood" and other people's "sense of entitlement", at our wasteful and fruitless self-soothing and self-seeking in a world (and sometimes country) of refugees, poverty, and varied horrors. But by then, 1969s/70s, quite a few people were fat, including some of my line. No one made much of a thing about it.
Re-engineering common areas to accommodate difference (earned or accidental) is a massive luxury, in historical terms and global terms. How should we react? Gratitude, and charity outside our tiny, fortunate circle, might be a good start. Decrying others' obesity, or others' desire for accommodation,in that context, might just be another form of self-absorbed tail-chasing.
Or not. :drinker:10 -
lleeann2001 wrote: »rheddmobile wrote: »rheddmobile wrote: »HeliumIsNoble wrote: »Anyway, on topic. Let's play a game of things that could be done by our more local elected officials (but probably won't be) to make it easier for people to achieve calorie balance without trying. Proposals will reflect our own observations, for obvious reasons, and they won't be universal problems.
When new suburban residential developments are proposed, the following questions should be asked in planning:
1) could fit healthy adult residents of the houses typically get to a local school, supermarket and doctors' surgery within less than 20 minutes' walk?
2) Would typical journeys to any of the above be safely walkable along routes that a sensible responsible adult would be willing to walk down with a young child on a tricycle?
If the answer to either of these is no, the residents will find it much easier to drive, and we know what a sedentary lifestyle can do for your weight, don't we? It can be fixed by making housing developers obliged to construct these amenities on the housing development they're building. It should not be acceptable for developers to build and sell a couple of thousand family houses, and then build a local school a couple of years later.
If you haven't guessed, this happened locally. In the meantime, the streets were gridlocked elsewhere in town, because the kids had to go to school somewhere, that definitely wasn't within walking distance. At least, it wasn't walkable if their parents were to have any hope of getting to work on time!
I often see people posting that you don't need an expensive gym membership to get fit, just a pair of trainers, which brings me to another matter.
Going jogging is cheap yeah, but if you were a petite woman who wanted to go jogging to get fit, would you feel safe running around your local area in the evening after getting home from work? This one is only partially a planning issue. You need well-lit routes; basically the opposite of a set of deserted alleyways, but we also need to come down hard on boneheads who think it's funny to shout mocking epithets at people out jogging or cycling. If Jane Smith experiences people making intimidating comments to her from their cars, she probably won't be going jogging again.
Safety is definitely a factor when running where I live. I’m a woman, but I don’t run my neighborhood even with my husband. We’ve been shot at twice and seen guns used several times while running here, and only last week two people were shot by someone firing through the glass door into their apartment, on the street we used to run down. As a result we get into the car and drive fifteen minutes to half an hour, to get to a park where it’s safer to run.
@rheddmobile you must live near my wife and I. I wish I were joking. We leave the area for long walks and such. And it is absolutely unsafe for any woman to go alone.lleeann2001 wrote: »rheddmobile wrote: »HeliumIsNoble wrote: »Anyway, on topic. Let's play a game of things that could be done by our more local elected officials (but probably won't be) to make it easier for people to achieve calorie balance without trying. Proposals will reflect our own observations, for obvious reasons, and they won't be universal problems.
When new suburban residential developments are proposed, the following questions should be asked in planning:
1) could fit healthy adult residents of the houses typically get to a local school, supermarket and doctors' surgery within less than 20 minutes' walk?
2) Would typical journeys to any of the above be safely walkable along routes that a sensible responsible adult would be willing to walk down with a young child on a tricycle?
If the answer to either of these is no, the residents will find it much easier to drive, and we know what a sedentary lifestyle can do for your weight, don't we? It can be fixed by making housing developers obliged to construct these amenities on the housing development they're building. It should not be acceptable for developers to build and sell a couple of thousand family houses, and then build a local school a couple of years later.
If you haven't guessed, this happened locally. In the meantime, the streets were gridlocked elsewhere in town, because the kids had to go to school somewhere, that definitely wasn't within walking distance. At least, it wasn't walkable if their parents were to have any hope of getting to work on time!
I often see people posting that you don't need an expensive gym membership to get fit, just a pair of trainers, which brings me to another matter.
Going jogging is cheap yeah, but if you were a petite woman who wanted to go jogging to get fit, would you feel safe running around your local area in the evening after getting home from work? This one is only partially a planning issue. You need well-lit routes; basically the opposite of a set of deserted alleyways, but we also need to come down hard on boneheads who think it's funny to shout mocking epithets at people out jogging or cycling. If Jane Smith experiences people making intimidating comments to her from their cars, she probably won't be going jogging again.
Safety is definitely a factor when running where I live. I’m a woman, but I don’t run my neighborhood even with my husband. We’ve been shot at twice and seen guns used several times while running here, and only last week two people were shot by someone firing through the glass door into their apartment, on the street we used to run down. As a result we get into the car and drive fifteen minutes to half an hour, to get to a park where it’s safer to run.
@rheddmobile you must live near my wife and I. I wish I were joking. We leave the area for long walks and such. And it is absolutely unsafe for any woman to go alone.
You've actually been shot at???? Wow!. This is horrifying. You cant even run while minding your own business without getting shot at.
Yep, afraid so. I’m in Memphis, BTW, and not a particularly bad neighborhood, just a declining one. Lots of zip codes here are much worse. I’m more than usually aware of the crime level here at the moment since I happened to hear the shots fired which hit the two people the other night. Which would make the fourth time I’ve been a “witness,” on some level, to a shooting, including a gas station robbery when I literally watched a guy get shot. My mom and I were discussing this just yesterday trying to count the number of people we have a connection to who have been murdered, since her house cleaner called to say she could not come in since her son was shot and killed outside a bar. It definitely has an impact on the way I live my life, knowing that these things happen regularly here. For example, the park where I run has signs instructing people not to run without a buddy for safety reasons, and the local runner’s club rates trails by safety. It has to have some impact on the fitness levels of the population, when the first thing said to me whenever I say I’m a runner is, wow, you run alone here?
@Phirrgus Where are you, if you don’t mind me asking?
@rheddmobile We're just south of Boston. When you spoke initially about the risks in your area it just sounded so much like home...Dear Lord that is sad 😂
We keep hoping though. It's a good neighborhood,, our neighbors are fantastic and we may actually be seeing a decline in crime over the past year or so. We love to walk, but she won't go alone which I'm good with as I don't even like her being out front alone. Not long ago 4 guys in a car attacked a couple of teenagers out front. They were grabbing the girl...no way to know if it was a robbery or kidnapping attempt, or both. I got to her first and they panicked and fled thank God. My best half is a real braveheart type 💪lol, but I refuse to take chances. So we drive to Cape Cod or New Hampshire lol.
@Phirrgus Where exactly r u ? I mean I dont want to stalk you. I live in Massachusetts as well. Dorchester to be exact. but i can put either boston or Dorchester on my address.
I go through Dorchester fairly often. One of the offices I work out of is in southy 🙂 I'm not comfortable putting exact location out online though. I'm weird that way lol.3 -
tbright1965 wrote: »A century ago, people couldn't imagine the average family having so much food that obesity would be common.
We've always had the obese, but as a smaller percentage of the population.
Probably couldn't imagine the average Joe or Jane working in an office and having to find ways to exercise if they wanted to.Bry_Fitness70 wrote: »Nobody 50 years ago would have ever believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them.
I can only speak for my line.
My subsistence farming grandparents (1920s) could only dream of times when they didn't need to scrabble every minute to cook, hunt, tend livestock, preserve food and more so that their 9 kids would make it through the Winter with enough to eat. Sometimes they were down to mostly dry beans and squirrels/rabbits they could shoot, until the eggs, milk and produce picked up in Spring.
It would have been pure fantasy to them to think that not only would their adult grandchildren not have to work themselves skinny from dawn to dark as they were doing, but that those folks' children would just play and go to school all day, rather than being sent out to work the barn and fields - often others' fields, for scant money for the household - from perhaps age 5 on. (My dad routinely picked cucumbers for pay at age 5, because cucumbers grow low; carried water home in the biggest kettle he could hold, from 1/4 mile away every day, alongside older sibs with buckets, until they got their own well and hand-pump.)
So, yeah, my grandparents "never would have believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them."
But it's not so clear to me that they would've been appalled. It's at least as likely that they would've thought their descendants had been transported to some magical annex of heaven.
Fifty years ago - your stated time horizon - was my adolescence, my parents' time. They might have been surprised in a different way by our present times and attitudes compared to their parents, shaking their heads ruefully, bemused at so many of us wallowing (literally) in plenty, complaining about our "victimhood" and other people's "sense of entitlement", at our wasteful and fruitless self-soothing and self-seeking in a world (and sometimes country) of refugees, poverty, and varied horrors. But by then, 1969s/70s, quite a few people were fat, including some of my line. No one made much of a thing about it.
Re-engineering common areas to accommodate difference (earned or accidental) is a massive luxury, in historical terms and global terms. How should we react? Gratitude, and charity outside our tiny, fortunate circle, might be a good start. Decrying others' obesity, or others' desire for accommodation,in that context, might just be another form of self-absorbed tail-chasing.
Or not. :drinker:
Interesting. I went to HS in a small rural community in the 1970's out of 100 kids in each HS class maybe 4 or 5 were fat (as in high BF %) It was interesting, our PE teacher was commuting to a university working on a Masters Degree that also had students in the program from an urban area. They had a project where they tested the rural kids vs urban kids on a number of strength, endurance and flexibly parameters. As a group the rural kids smoked the urban kids. Don't know about weight comparisons, but I would guess that given their superior performance on the physical tests the rural kids were most like lower bodyfat as a group also.1 -
I'm short (well, average height for a woman - 5'4") and have been seated many times in restaurant booths where my feet dangle, the table is so high I can't cut my food without my elbows uncomfortably high and splayed, I have to perch on the edge of the seat, etc. If everything starts being made bigger, I'm not going to be able to eat at a restaurant either, and I'm not sure that's better (especially because I'm far from an outlier size-wise, 5'4" is pretty darn common).
I'm only 5ft and I have the same problem with legs dangling and high tables and/or not close enough in some places. I struggle to get onto bar stools as they are too high for me - and if I do manage to get on one, my legs dangle and hurt after a short time.
My local cinema has changed the height and depth of the seats and my feet no longer reach the floor so now I sit on the front row and take a folding stool with me otherwise I am in pain.1 -
Theoldguy1 wrote: »tbright1965 wrote: »A century ago, people couldn't imagine the average family having so much food that obesity would be common.
We've always had the obese, but as a smaller percentage of the population.
Probably couldn't imagine the average Joe or Jane working in an office and having to find ways to exercise if they wanted to.Bry_Fitness70 wrote: »Nobody 50 years ago would have ever believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them.
I can only speak for my line.
My subsistence farming grandparents (1920s) could only dream of times when they didn't need to scrabble every minute to cook, hunt, tend livestock, preserve food and more so that their 9 kids would make it through the Winter with enough to eat. Sometimes they were down to mostly dry beans and squirrels/rabbits they could shoot, until the eggs, milk and produce picked up in Spring.
It would have been pure fantasy to them to think that not only would their adult grandchildren not have to work themselves skinny from dawn to dark as they were doing, but that those folks' children would just play and go to school all day, rather than being sent out to work the barn and fields - often others' fields, for scant money for the household - from perhaps age 5 on. (My dad routinely picked cucumbers for pay at age 5, because cucumbers grow low; carried water home in the biggest kettle he could hold, from 1/4 mile away every day, alongside older sibs with buckets, until they got their own well and hand-pump.)
So, yeah, my grandparents "never would have believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them."
But it's not so clear to me that they would've been appalled. It's at least as likely that they would've thought their descendants had been transported to some magical annex of heaven.
Fifty years ago - your stated time horizon - was my adolescence, my parents' time. They might have been surprised in a different way by our present times and attitudes compared to their parents, shaking their heads ruefully, bemused at so many of us wallowing (literally) in plenty, complaining about our "victimhood" and other people's "sense of entitlement", at our wasteful and fruitless self-soothing and self-seeking in a world (and sometimes country) of refugees, poverty, and varied horrors. But by then, 1969s/70s, quite a few people were fat, including some of my line. No one made much of a thing about it.
Re-engineering common areas to accommodate difference (earned or accidental) is a massive luxury, in historical terms and global terms. How should we react? Gratitude, and charity outside our tiny, fortunate circle, might be a good start. Decrying others' obesity, or others' desire for accommodation,in that context, might just be another form of self-absorbed tail-chasing.
Or not. :drinker:
Interesting. I went to HS in a small rural community in the 1970's out of 100 kids in each HS class maybe 4 or 5 were fat (as in high BF %) It was interesting, our PE teacher was commuting to a university working on a Masters Degree that also had students in the program from an urban area. They had a project where they tested the rural kids vs urban kids on a number of strength, endurance and flexibly parameters. As a group the rural kids smoked the urban kids. Don't know about weight comparisons, but I would guess that given their superior performance on the physical tests the rural kids were most like lower bodyfat as a group also.
In my neighborhood (US Great Lakes state, lived outside town of 1700, in a rural poverty area), very few kids were fat, but a fair minority of adults were - overweight to class 1 obese, mostly. No one seemed to make much of a thing about it, in others.
Common for overweight adult women to want to lose weight themselves, though, and try, with probably about the same average success rate as now, i.e., low.
For sure, far fewer were fat than now.2 -
lleeann2001 wrote: »rheddmobile wrote: »rheddmobile wrote: »HeliumIsNoble wrote: »Anyway, on topic. Let's play a game of things that could be done by our more local elected officials (but probably won't be) to make it easier for people to achieve calorie balance without trying. Proposals will reflect our own observations, for obvious reasons, and they won't be universal problems.
When new suburban residential developments are proposed, the following questions should be asked in planning:
1) could fit healthy adult residents of the houses typically get to a local school, supermarket and doctors' surgery within less than 20 minutes' walk?
2) Would typical journeys to any of the above be safely walkable along routes that a sensible responsible adult would be willing to walk down with a young child on a tricycle?
If the answer to either of these is no, the residents will find it much easier to drive, and we know what a sedentary lifestyle can do for your weight, don't we? It can be fixed by making housing developers obliged to construct these amenities on the housing development they're building. It should not be acceptable for developers to build and sell a couple of thousand family houses, and then build a local school a couple of years later.
If you haven't guessed, this happened locally. In the meantime, the streets were gridlocked elsewhere in town, because the kids had to go to school somewhere, that definitely wasn't within walking distance. At least, it wasn't walkable if their parents were to have any hope of getting to work on time!
I often see people posting that you don't need an expensive gym membership to get fit, just a pair of trainers, which brings me to another matter.
Going jogging is cheap yeah, but if you were a petite woman who wanted to go jogging to get fit, would you feel safe running around your local area in the evening after getting home from work? This one is only partially a planning issue. You need well-lit routes; basically the opposite of a set of deserted alleyways, but we also need to come down hard on boneheads who think it's funny to shout mocking epithets at people out jogging or cycling. If Jane Smith experiences people making intimidating comments to her from their cars, she probably won't be going jogging again.
Safety is definitely a factor when running where I live. I’m a woman, but I don’t run my neighborhood even with my husband. We’ve been shot at twice and seen guns used several times while running here, and only last week two people were shot by someone firing through the glass door into their apartment, on the street we used to run down. As a result we get into the car and drive fifteen minutes to half an hour, to get to a park where it’s safer to run.
@rheddmobile you must live near my wife and I. I wish I were joking. We leave the area for long walks and such. And it is absolutely unsafe for any woman to go alone.lleeann2001 wrote: »rheddmobile wrote: »HeliumIsNoble wrote: »Anyway, on topic. Let's play a game of things that could be done by our more local elected officials (but probably won't be) to make it easier for people to achieve calorie balance without trying. Proposals will reflect our own observations, for obvious reasons, and they won't be universal problems.
When new suburban residential developments are proposed, the following questions should be asked in planning:
1) could fit healthy adult residents of the houses typically get to a local school, supermarket and doctors' surgery within less than 20 minutes' walk?
2) Would typical journeys to any of the above be safely walkable along routes that a sensible responsible adult would be willing to walk down with a young child on a tricycle?
If the answer to either of these is no, the residents will find it much easier to drive, and we know what a sedentary lifestyle can do for your weight, don't we? It can be fixed by making housing developers obliged to construct these amenities on the housing development they're building. It should not be acceptable for developers to build and sell a couple of thousand family houses, and then build a local school a couple of years later.
If you haven't guessed, this happened locally. In the meantime, the streets were gridlocked elsewhere in town, because the kids had to go to school somewhere, that definitely wasn't within walking distance. At least, it wasn't walkable if their parents were to have any hope of getting to work on time!
I often see people posting that you don't need an expensive gym membership to get fit, just a pair of trainers, which brings me to another matter.
Going jogging is cheap yeah, but if you were a petite woman who wanted to go jogging to get fit, would you feel safe running around your local area in the evening after getting home from work? This one is only partially a planning issue. You need well-lit routes; basically the opposite of a set of deserted alleyways, but we also need to come down hard on boneheads who think it's funny to shout mocking epithets at people out jogging or cycling. If Jane Smith experiences people making intimidating comments to her from their cars, she probably won't be going jogging again.
Safety is definitely a factor when running where I live. I’m a woman, but I don’t run my neighborhood even with my husband. We’ve been shot at twice and seen guns used several times while running here, and only last week two people were shot by someone firing through the glass door into their apartment, on the street we used to run down. As a result we get into the car and drive fifteen minutes to half an hour, to get to a park where it’s safer to run.
@rheddmobile you must live near my wife and I. I wish I were joking. We leave the area for long walks and such. And it is absolutely unsafe for any woman to go alone.
You've actually been shot at???? Wow!. This is horrifying. You cant even run while minding your own business without getting shot at.
Yep, afraid so. I’m in Memphis, BTW, and not a particularly bad neighborhood, just a declining one. Lots of zip codes here are much worse. I’m more than usually aware of the crime level here at the moment since I happened to hear the shots fired which hit the two people the other night. Which would make the fourth time I’ve been a “witness,” on some level, to a shooting, including a gas station robbery when I literally watched a guy get shot. My mom and I were discussing this just yesterday trying to count the number of people we have a connection to who have been murdered, since her house cleaner called to say she could not come in since her son was shot and killed outside a bar. It definitely has an impact on the way I live my life, knowing that these things happen regularly here. For example, the park where I run has signs instructing people not to run without a buddy for safety reasons, and the local runner’s club rates trails by safety. It has to have some impact on the fitness levels of the population, when the first thing said to me whenever I say I’m a runner is, wow, you run alone here?
@Phirrgus Where are you, if you don’t mind me asking?
@rheddmobile We're just south of Boston. When you spoke initially about the risks in your area it just sounded so much like home...Dear Lord that is sad 😂
We keep hoping though. It's a good neighborhood,, our neighbors are fantastic and we may actually be seeing a decline in crime over the past year or so. We love to walk, but she won't go alone which I'm good with as I don't even like her being out front alone. Not long ago 4 guys in a car attacked a couple of teenagers out front. They were grabbing the girl...no way to know if it was a robbery or kidnapping attempt, or both. I got to her first and they panicked and fled thank God. My best half is a real braveheart type 💪lol, but I refuse to take chances. So we drive to Cape Cod or New Hampshire lol.
@Phirrgus Where exactly r u ? I mean I dont want to stalk you. I live in Massachusetts as well. Dorchester to be exact. but i can put either boston or Dorchester on my address.
I go through Dorchester fairly often. One of the offices I work out of is in southy 🙂 I'm not comfortable putting exact location out online though. I'm weird that way lol.
It's ok. I might see you one day and call you out...lol..no worries..😁1 -
I have a problem with a lot establishments. I'm just under 5 feet tall and most of the time, well just about all of the time, my feet never really rests on the floor. I have to point my toes to touch the floor. At the end of my visit the muscles in my legs often ache after keeping my toes pointed. I don't blame these establishments for not meeting my shortness needs. I blame my parents for giving me the short DNA gene. I don't see anyone writing an article about how the needs of short people are not being met.3
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I'm sure it would take less than five minutes to find as many articles about how uncomfortable people who are tall get when traveling by air or train though. Complete with blaming airlines ie - "airlines are profiting from making tall people more uncomfortable by limiting the amount of legroom"8
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Theoldguy1 wrote: »tbright1965 wrote: »A century ago, people couldn't imagine the average family having so much food that obesity would be common.
We've always had the obese, but as a smaller percentage of the population.
Probably couldn't imagine the average Joe or Jane working in an office and having to find ways to exercise if they wanted to.Bry_Fitness70 wrote: »Nobody 50 years ago would have ever believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them.
I can only speak for my line.
My subsistence farming grandparents (1920s) could only dream of times when they didn't need to scrabble every minute to cook, hunt, tend livestock, preserve food and more so that their 9 kids would make it through the Winter with enough to eat. Sometimes they were down to mostly dry beans and squirrels/rabbits they could shoot, until the eggs, milk and produce picked up in Spring.
It would have been pure fantasy to them to think that not only would their adult grandchildren not have to work themselves skinny from dawn to dark as they were doing, but that those folks' children would just play and go to school all day, rather than being sent out to work the barn and fields - often others' fields, for scant money for the household - from perhaps age 5 on. (My dad routinely picked cucumbers for pay at age 5, because cucumbers grow low; carried water home in the biggest kettle he could hold, from 1/4 mile away every day, alongside older sibs with buckets, until they got their own well and hand-pump.)
So, yeah, my grandparents "never would have believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them."
But it's not so clear to me that they would've been appalled. It's at least as likely that they would've thought their descendants had been transported to some magical annex of heaven.
Fifty years ago - your stated time horizon - was my adolescence, my parents' time. They might have been surprised in a different way by our present times and attitudes compared to their parents, shaking their heads ruefully, bemused at so many of us wallowing (literally) in plenty, complaining about our "victimhood" and other people's "sense of entitlement", at our wasteful and fruitless self-soothing and self-seeking in a world (and sometimes country) of refugees, poverty, and varied horrors. But by then, 1969s/70s, quite a few people were fat, including some of my line. No one made much of a thing about it.
Re-engineering common areas to accommodate difference (earned or accidental) is a massive luxury, in historical terms and global terms. How should we react? Gratitude, and charity outside our tiny, fortunate circle, might be a good start. Decrying others' obesity, or others' desire for accommodation,in that context, might just be another form of self-absorbed tail-chasing.
Or not. :drinker:
Interesting. I went to HS in a small rural community in the 1970's out of 100 kids in each HS class maybe 4 or 5 were fat (as in high BF %) It was interesting, our PE teacher was commuting to a university working on a Masters Degree that also had students in the program from an urban area. They had a project where they tested the rural kids vs urban kids on a number of strength, endurance and flexibly parameters. As a group the rural kids smoked the urban kids. Don't know about weight comparisons, but I would guess that given their superior performance on the physical tests the rural kids were most like lower bodyfat as a group also.
In my neighborhood (US Great Lakes state, lived outside town of 1700, in a rural poverty area), very few kids were fat, but a fair minority of adults were - overweight to class 1 obese, mostly. No one seemed to make much of a thing about it, in others.
Common for overweight adult women to want to lose weight themselves, though, and try, with probably about the same average success rate as now, i.e., low.
For sure, far fewer were fat than now.
This is consistent with my experience.2 -
So here's my paternal line ggg-grandfather. Unlike most of my family of that generation, he was not a farmer, but a well-off merchant in London. And he was fat, even by today's standards (indeed, quite in contrast with my dad, his gg grandson, who is pretty thin). Privilege is why:
13 -
And yes, I guess I'm fat-shaming Victorian gentlemen. ;-)13
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Bry_Fitness70 wrote: »Nobody 50 years ago would have ever believed that in the future people would overeat to the extent that we actually need to re-engineer our common areas to physically accommodate them.
Definitely not after just getting done rebuilding after total destruction from 25 years prior... At least in the part of the world where I'm from.0 -
And yes, I guess I'm fat-shaming Victorian gentlemen. ;-)
A certain admiration for 'full figured' has been well documented in artwork over the centuries. In some regions of this globe, even today, some cultures consider is a sign of 'well to do', if the family members are well fed...1 -
HeliumIsNoble wrote: »
Me too. Best-case scenario is they have a very different idea of what 'woo' means to me.lleeann2001 wrote: »manderson27 wrote: »I do have sympathy for obese people as I was once 280 lbs myself. But it was just this kind of thing, second guessing about chairs, being uncomfortable eating in front of people, feeling like an outcast in certain circumstances, not being able to join in with even normal activities, not being able to find nice clothes or look good in the ones I could find, that made me take a long look at myself and my lifestyle.
So I chose not to have to deal with those things anymore. Once I lost some of the weight I realised how much easier my life was (just putting on a pair of socks was now effortless) and determined not to go back. So those problems were the catalyst to me seeking a healthier lifestyle. If the world had changed to make me more comfortable about my size I would probably have carried on and eaten myself to 300, 400, lbs and an early grave.
Should we make an ATTEMPT to accommodate all shapes and sizes in public places absolutely but should obese people EXPECT to be accommodated everywhere? No.
The more we normalise obesity means there is even less incentive for people to make a change. This is only my opinion and I could well be proved wrong by statistical evidence.
Take smoking. (I am an off again on again smoker so know a bit about this) When I started smoking it was accepted everywhere. In the home, in public, in the work place. I can't remember any of my family or friends that didn't smoke. The outliers were non smokers, at that time anyway. We enabled each other by making it the norm. Restaurants, bars, clubs, offices, factories all provided ashtrays for us so we could kill ourselves in comfort and among friends.
When the law was changed to reflect the dangers and smokers were made to feel uncomfortable about the habit and not allowed to smoke in all the places where they had previously been able to, smoking reduced significantly. A lot more people made the change because they did not want to die and they did not want to be made to feel uncomfortable about their habit and excluded from public places. Now hardly any of my friends or family smoke and those that do are trying to quit.
Maybe this isn't the best comparison but it does show that disapproval of unhealthy lifestyles by society can make a difference, at least to the people who can accept a hard truth. And the hard truth with obesity is that it is unhealthy and is killing thousands and costing the health services massive amounts of money. Just like smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse. None of which is condoned in general society.
By making it the norm as a society we are not just accepting it we are actively enabling it.
I appreciate your comment so much! Maybe not enabling heavy people WILL give.them incentive to change. But then there will always be those who think they can be 300 PLUS POUNDS AND STILL BE healthy...? Isnt that another thread around here somewhere??...🌹
Knowing that I didn’t ‘fit’ in many places, and having people stare at me and mock me, did not give me incentive to change. I’d been fat since early childhood, I’d tried and been failed by a hundred different diets, and I’d lost all hope and belief that I could change.
It did make me hate myself to the point of self-harm and being suicidal, though. Do you think that’s a good thing?
I wonder why someone (2 someones) would "woo" this? Just wow.
I was wondering the same thing.
When I started I thought the Woo was a good thing- like in the movies when all the people get drinks or something and go "WOOOOOOOO PARTY"1 -
So here's my paternal line ggg-grandfather. Unlike most of my family of that generation, he was not a farmer, but a well-off merchant in London. And he was fat, even by today's standards (indeed, quite in contrast with my dad, his gg grandson, who is pretty thin). Privilege is why:
He would need a booth. Me too and I only dine in restaurants that have them. He looks like a no nonsense fella. I like his style.2 -
My husband works in commercial architecture, and one of their recent projects was a restaurant renovation for locally owned chain of "country cooking" buffets. The plans were drawn showing wall mounted toilets in the restrooms. The owner asked what they were rated for, weight wise, and the answer was 350 lbs. He shook his head and requested them to change to standard floor mount toilets, because (to paraphrase) many of their customers were larger than 350 lbs.8
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englishmuffinruns wrote: »My husband works in commercial architecture, and one of their recent projects was a restaurant renovation for locally owned chain of "country cooking" buffets. The plans were drawn showing wall mounted toilets in the restrooms. The owner asked what they were rated for, weight wise, and the answer was 350 lbs. He shook his head and requested them to change to standard floor mount toilets, because (to paraphrase) many of their customers were larger than 350 lbs.
The owner is a smart guy. But still, that's not the kind of costly accommodation that most of the conversation was all about, IMO, like buying expensive larger chairs or sacrificing a number of seats in favour of a spacious dining area. His move is deciding against a pricey style element in favour of damage control.4 -
jennifer_417 wrote: »It's interesting to me that this type of experience used to be seen as a source of personal shame, and now it's a reason for offense at others, because they have not accommodated the size of the person.
That's not what the article or -- especially -- any posters here have said. No one here is saying fat people should be offended by restaurant seats.
No, I didn't think any of the posters said that. I was responding more to the general tone of the article, which I admittedly did not read the entire thing. I should've been more clear.1 -
jennifer_417 wrote: »jennifer_417 wrote: »It's interesting to me that this type of experience used to be seen as a source of personal shame, and now it's a reason for offense at others, because they have not accommodated the size of the person.
That's not what the article or -- especially -- any posters here have said. No one here is saying fat people should be offended by restaurant seats.
No, I didn't think any of the posters said that. I was responding more to the general tone of the article, which I admittedly did not read the entire thing. I should've been more clear.
Honestly the idea that restaurant owners were shaming people who are obese was not the overall tenor of the article. I reread it this morning to make sure, and there are maybe three sentences, five at most, that fit that sentiment. The article primarily talks about ways in which owners are accommodating people (that was most of the article), the app that the person in the first picture designed, strategies that individual people have when they eat out (letting restaurants know about their size when making reservations, being upfront about not wanting to sit in a booth, etc). This thread has talked a lot about shaming, but the article spend next to no time on it.6 -
I'm sure it would take less than five minutes to find as many articles about how uncomfortable people who are tall get when traveling by air or train though. Complete with blaming airlines ie - "airlines are profiting from making tall people more uncomfortable by limiting the amount of legroom"
The thing is: You can do something about obesity. When it comes to height, be it short or tall, you are stuck with it for life. I cannot shrink myself. Yet in order to get adequate leg room on a plane as a tall person I have to pay extra.
To me it feels that, by blaming restaurants for not providing adequate seating for their size, obese people are not accepting of the fact that they do have a problem which needs addressing. Not to mention that the increasing accommodating of obesity will only make the problem worse. And given that it is proven that obesity is unhealthy, why would we even want to make the problem any bigger than it already is?
I don't go round complaining that tops or trousers are too short for me in most shops. Instead I find shops that do cater to me. I don't go around demanding free extra leg room on planes. I either grin and bear it on short flights, or pay extra if I can afford it. Because the problem is mine, no one else's.
9 -
runnermom419 wrote: »[
Completely anecdotal, BUT....I always maintain that if someone close to me would have said something or done anything other than make obesity be okay, I would have never gotten to 320 pounds. All my life, I was told that I fine, healthy, and just big boned. But, I was dying. My body wasn't designed to get that big. It wasn't until a doctor made me feel like crap about my weight did I start to do anything to change it.
Well my anecdotal evidence is that Dr.s suggested a "diet" for me as a 10 year old child at 4'11 and 118 lbs. My mom scrapped the diet but watched what I ate and restricted the number of my snacks. At 11 I was 5'4 and 125 lbs, 13 5'5 and 135. Up until age 12 I was always one of the tallest heaviest kids in class. Yes, it was a long time ago, I'm 53, and everyone had something to say about my weight.
Upshot is that all the way through HS I was hungry. Diets consisted of 1200 kcals and I was hungry. My highest weight was 180 in HS because I started eating at one point and couldn't seem to stop. Well know I know why. I had my RMR tested and as a 53 year old woman 5'6 and 176 lbs I require 1800 kcals to lay in bed. I go under 1500 and I am hangry enough to eat anyone alive who gets between me and food, and I am not nearly as active or carry as much muscle as I did then.
Shaming people does not work. Many of these people have eating disorder or underlying medical conditions. Yes, Dr.s need to be direct and people can be judgmental all they want, but they need to keep it to themselves.
7 -
lleeann2001 wrote: »manderson27 wrote: »I do have sympathy for obese people as I was once 280 lbs myself. But it was just this kind of thing, second guessing about chairs, being uncomfortable eating in front of people, feeling like an outcast in certain circumstances, not being able to join in with even normal activities, not being able to find nice clothes or look good in the ones I could find, that made me take a long look at myself and my lifestyle.
So I chose not to have to deal with those things anymore. Once I lost some of the weight I realised how much easier my life was (just putting on a pair of socks was now effortless) and determined not to go back. So those problems were the catalyst to me seeking a healthier lifestyle. If the world had changed to make me more comfortable about my size I would probably have carried on and eaten myself to 300, 400, lbs and an early grave.
Should we make an ATTEMPT to accommodate all shapes and sizes in public places absolutely but should obese people EXPECT to be accommodated everywhere? No.
The more we normalise obesity means there is even less incentive for people to make a change. This is only my opinion and I could well be proved wrong by statistical evidence.
Take smoking. (I am an off again on again smoker so know a bit about this) When I started smoking it was accepted everywhere. In the home, in public, in the work place. I can't remember any of my family or friends that didn't smoke. The outliers were non smokers, at that time anyway. We enabled each other by making it the norm. Restaurants, bars, clubs, offices, factories all provided ashtrays for us so we could kill ourselves in comfort and among friends.
When the law was changed to reflect the dangers and smokers were made to feel uncomfortable about the habit and not allowed to smoke in all the places where they had previously been able to, smoking reduced significantly. A lot more people made the change because they did not want to die and they did not want to be made to feel uncomfortable about their habit and excluded from public places. Now hardly any of my friends or family smoke and those that do are trying to quit.
Maybe this isn't the best comparison but it does show that disapproval of unhealthy lifestyles by society can make a difference, at least to the people who can accept a hard truth. And the hard truth with obesity is that it is unhealthy and is killing thousands and costing the health services massive amounts of money. Just like smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse. None of which is condoned in general society.
By making it the norm as a society we are not just accepting it we are actively enabling it.
I appreciate your comment so much! Maybe not enabling heavy people WILL give.them incentive to change. But then there will always be those who think they can be 300 PLUS POUNDS AND STILL BE healthy...? Isnt that another thread around here somewhere??...🌹
Why does it matter to you whether other people think they're healthy or not?
I think "things people believe" need to be focused into two groups. There's stuff that doesn't affect you. And then there's stuff that matters, like how can somebody think it's ok to park there?11 -
Here's a follow-up question for those who think uncomfortable (or impossible) seating is potentially helpful, because it will make obese people more likely to realize that they need to change their behavior in order to be healthier and more comfortable:
Let's say it works. So, we have an obese person who's seen the light, and is totally on-board with eating less, and moving more. If they're severely obese, they're going to continue to be fat for another year or two, while losing weight.
Do they need to keep feeling uncomfortable for those couple of years as reinforcement, or should we have little psychology tests or blood tests or something that will let them enter a special "way fat but saw the light" seating area where they can eat their salad in happy peace with the thin people from their Zumba class, or do they need to stay social pariahs until they actually comfortably fit the seating?
(Note to the literal: See "Swift, Jonathan: A Modest Proposal.")
Personally, I think it's not my job to effectively ostracize people for being fat, and not society's job generally. It may be a social responsibility (personally or collectively) to provide positive influences and incentives, but that's about it, IMO. There's plenty of psych research suggesting that punishment for negatives is less effective than encouragement for positives. While society takes it upon itself these days to constrain business owners - who are providing a service to the public - in various ways (like the ADA), we don't (usually) go to unreasonable extremes - like, I dunno, requiring private dining booths for people with social anxiety? If business owners choose to provide more accommodating seating, or private dining booths, or individuals create apps to make it easier to find accommodating seating or private dining booths, why should the rest of us care?
16 -
rianneonamission wrote: »I'm sure it would take less than five minutes to find as many articles about how uncomfortable people who are tall get when traveling by air or train though. Complete with blaming airlines ie - "airlines are profiting from making tall people more uncomfortable by limiting the amount of legroom"
The thing is: You can do something about obesity. When it comes to height, be it short or tall, you are stuck with it for life. I cannot shrink myself. Yet in order to get adequate leg room on a plane as a tall person I have to pay extra.
To me it feels that, by blaming restaurants for not providing adequate seating for their size, obese people are not accepting of the fact that they do have a problem which needs addressing. Not to mention that the increasing accommodating of obesity will only make the problem worse. And given that it is proven that obesity is unhealthy, why would we even want to make the problem any bigger than it already is?
I don't go round complaining that tops or trousers are too short for me in most shops. Instead I find shops that do cater to me. I don't go around demanding free extra leg room on planes. I either grin and bear it on short flights, or pay extra if I can afford it. Because the problem is mine, no one else's.
I don't disagree with you. What I was responding to, however, was someone saying that there weren't articles where people talked about (or maybe the person said complained) the issues that come with people doing XYZ thing while being shorter than average.
As I mentioned earlier today, almost nothing in the article involves people actually complaining or being disgruntled about restaurants lack of accommodation. There's also no or almost no blaming of restaurants in the article (I'm not sure where people are getting this from other than just not reading the article). The majority of it is about what restaurants are doing to accommodate people and what people are doing to find restaurants that are accommodating.5 -
runnermom419 wrote: »[
Completely anecdotal, BUT....I always maintain that if someone close to me would have said something or done anything other than make obesity be okay, I would have never gotten to 320 pounds. All my life, I was told that I fine, healthy, and just big boned. But, I was dying. My body wasn't designed to get that big. It wasn't until a doctor made me feel like crap about my weight did I start to do anything to change it.
Well my anecdotal evidence is that Dr.s suggested a "diet" for me as a 10 year old child at 4'11 and 118 lbs. My mom scrapped the diet but watched what I ate and restricted the number of my snacks. At 11 I was 5'4 and 125 lbs, 13 5'5 and 135. Up until age 12 I was always one of the tallest heaviest kids in class. Yes, it was a long time ago, I'm 53, and everyone had something to say about my weight.
Upshot is that all the way through HS I was hungry. Diets consisted of 1200 kcals and I was hungry. My highest weight was 180 in HS because I started eating at one point and couldn't seem to stop. Well know I know why. I had my RMR tested and as a 53 year old woman 5'6 and 176 lbs I require 1800 kcals to lay in bed. I go under 1500 and I am hangry enough to eat anyone alive who gets between me and food, and I am not nearly as active or carry as much muscle as I did then.
Shaming people does not work. Many of these people have eating disorder or underlying medical conditions. Yes, Dr.s need to be direct and people can be judgmental all they want, but they need to keep it to themselves.
I’m curious, since your parents’ and doctor’s tactics did not work at all and in fact you believe they had the opposite of the intended effect, can you imagine an intervention which would have led to you losing weight? Or is your point that you didn’t need to lose weight? I notice 5’4” and 125 is normal BMI - times have definitely changed since we were kids, that would definitely not make you the heavy kid in a class today.
0 -
Here's a follow-up question for those who think uncomfortable (or impossible) seating is potentially helpful, because it will make obese people more likely to realize that they need to change their behavior in order to be healthier and more comfortable:
Let's say it works. So, we have an obese person who's seen the light, and is totally on-board with eating less, and moving more. If they're severely obese, they're going to continue to be fat for another year or two, while losing weight.
Do they need to keep feeling uncomfortable for those couple of years as reinforcement, or should we have little psychology tests or blood tests or something that will let them enter a special "way fat but saw the light" seating area where they can eat their salad in happy peace with the thin people from their Zumba class, or do they need to stay social pariahs until they actually comfortably fit the seating?
(Note to the literal: See "Swift, Jonathan: A Modest Proposal.")
Personally, I think it's not my job to effectively ostracize people for being fat, and not society's job generally. It may be a social responsibility (personally or collectively) to provide positive influences and incentives, but that's about it, IMO. There's plenty of psych research suggesting that punishment for negatives is less effective than encouragement for positives. While society takes it upon itself these days to constrain business owners - who are providing a service to the public - in various ways (like the ADA), we don't (usually) go to unreasonable extremes - like, I dunno, requiring private dining booths for people with social anxiety? If business owners choose to provide more accommodating seating, or private dining booths, or individuals create apps to make it easier to find accommodating seating or private dining booths, why should the rest of us care?
Business owners aren't ostracizing fat people. Your post implies it is a deliberate effort to keep obese people out or make them uncomfortable or encourage them to lose weight. It isn't.
Most of the posts here are simply saying it is not the business owner's responsibility to make changes to accommodate morbid obesity. Big difference.
Nobody has a problem with a business owner who does decide to make a special effort to accommodate heavy customers. That is their right, and if they think it will make their business more successful they will do it. I am just saying they don't have to. If it would be extra expense and less revenue, they won't do it and they shouldn't be criticized for not doing it.6
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