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“Large” Restaurant Customers need special accommodation?

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Replies

  • fishgutzy
    fishgutzy Posts: 2,807 Member
    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."
  • aokoye
    aokoye Posts: 3,495 Member
    fishgutzy wrote: »
    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'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.

    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.
  • tbright1965
    tbright1965 Posts: 852 Member
    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.

  • lleeann2001
    lleeann2001 Posts: 412 Member
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    Phirrgus 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: »
    Phirrgus 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.
  • neldabg
    neldabg Posts: 1,452 Member
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    aokoye wrote: »
    fishgutzy wrote: »
    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'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.

    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.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    Phirrgus 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.

    Wow.

    I run around my neighborhood perfectly safely all the time, including in the morning before sunrise -- I love being out running when the sun comes up. I live in Chicago (murder capital of the US, apparently), but the crime in Chicago is generally in specific areas, not where I live.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    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).
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    edited March 2019
    amyepdx wrote: »
    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.
  • neldabg
    neldabg Posts: 1,452 Member
    edited March 2019
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    neldabg wrote: »
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    aokoye wrote: »
    fishgutzy wrote: »
    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'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.

    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.
  • Phirrgus
    Phirrgus Posts: 1,894 Member
    lleeann2001 wrote: »
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    Phirrgus 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: »
    Phirrgus 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.
  • Theoldguy1
    Theoldguy1 Posts: 2,454 Member
    AnnPT77 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.
  • prehistoricmoongoddess
    prehistoricmoongoddess Posts: 1,003 Member
    edited March 2019
    peleroja wrote: »
    kimny72 wrote: »

    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.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,012 Member
    Theoldguy1 wrote: »
    AnnPT77 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.
  • lleeann2001
    lleeann2001 Posts: 412 Member
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    lleeann2001 wrote: »
    Phirrgus wrote: »
    rheddmobile wrote: »
    Phirrgus 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: »
    Phirrgus 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..😁

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