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“Large” Restaurant Customers need special accommodation?
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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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