Simple solution:
The airlines measure the maximum width of each passenger, and sell seat space by the inch, subject to a minimum width.
Make the armrests mobile, and each passenger gets their allocated width. Everyone’s happy: skinnies aren’t subsidising fatties, and fatties (probably) aren’t paying for two seats.
Nobody’s laterally cramped, and nobody’s getting squished on. Furthermore, those who want to lie down can buy extra: as much space as they want (subject to maximum seating width).
Oh, give me a fucking break. My girlfriend, who is undoubtedly “large”, has a spreadsheet listing everything she’s eaten for the past four months or so. We know exactly what she’s eating and have very good estimates of how many calories she takes in. She eats less than I do most of the time.
Considering that she is on a 2600 calorie diet and I eat more than she does, why am I not gaining weight? I’m not particularly active. I work a desk job, I don’t exercise other than through normal activity, I don’t play sports. Why can I sustain a 2500-3000 calorie a day diet without gaining weight, while she gains one pound a week on 2600 (as per doctor’s orders)?
By the way, my weight dropped to 135 and held there when I was getting about 1700 a day. When I returned to my more usual 2500 calorie a day diet, I gained 15 pounds in a few months, but then stopped gaining weight with no dietary change. Explain that with your simple little formula.
CITE? I submit that this is commonly believed, unsubstantiated bullshit. I don’t think most of people who fatbash have ever looked at the dietary or activity habits of the obese, but just know that this factoid must be true.
Purchaces will be more expensive by themselves, but whether their lives are more expensive overall remains to be seen: being overweight seriously lowers your life expectation.
What’s up with all these overweight people being offended, by the way? Can’t you see people are trying to clarify that whilst they do not want to judge you by your size, you still might be an intrusion of their private space if the two of you sit alongside in economy class?
You’ll only make people bash you if you take up such a defensive stance without being attacked in the first place. Debate about the ways airlines should tackle this problem, but don’t call someone who resents donating half his seat to his overweight neighbour a “fat basher”. That’s just ludicrous.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t she pregnant as well? If so, then that alone would explain at least a significant part of a weight gain of a pound a week, right?
WHOA!!!
Let’s get this rant back on track. This is not a fat bashing rant. The OP is ranting that somebody (who happens to be fat) is invading her personal space. She even said:
If you want to rant about being being fatists or anti-fat or whatever, start you own damn thread. Sure, there are going to be (and have been) asshats posting messages that are fatist or anti-fat like “As far as overweight passengers are concerned, maybe the airlines could offer the option of transporting them in cargo in one of those slings like they use for whales and porpoises…” (which I’m hoping was said in jest).
This is a rant about being forced to give up personal space without being asked.
And on preview, I second what coldfire said.
If she didn’t eat a 2600 calorie diet (which is very hard for her; her more normal diet is around 1800 calories) she would not be gaining that weight. She’s only doing it because not gaining weight during the latter part of pregnancy is bad for the baby. Until she deliberately increased her calorie uptake (on doctor’s orders), she was not gaining weight despite being pregnant (and in fact lost weight).
I have to give up personal space on a airplane regardless of how large or tiny the person next to me is. Hell, when I flew back from Tampa this little tiny woman (couldn’t have been more than 5’2" and 100 pounds) sat not in the seat next to me, but in the aisle seat in a three-wide row with me in the window seat and the middle seat empty, and she still managed to invade my personal space.
It’s an airplane. The passengers are going to be packed in like sardines because that maximizes profit. If you don’t like it, fly first class, or charter a fucking airplane for yourself.
Oh, so if someone who’s of average size and weight wants the full comfort of his tiny economy class seat, and he can’t because the person next to him is overweight, it’s the average guy’s fault because he didn’t buy a first class ticket?
Gotcha Ya. Makes perfect sense.
Oh? How come I very rarely see anyone that I would call obese, let alone morbidly obese? Are europeans with glandular, dna, whatever problems kept in cellars? Or do we not have people with genetic or glandular problems in Europe? The US has a significantly higher rate of obesity than any other part of the world, if as you say the reason for this is in most cases “external” why is the same pattern not observed in the rest of the world?
As for the comparisons you make in the rest of your post, that is, imho, crap as well. Yeah there is a discussion as to whether alcoholism is linked to “external causes” as you say, but do you know what it is even more closely linked to? Drinking! My family has a history of alcoholism, so I made a choice as to how much care I would take in putting alcohol in my body. I drink very little, maybe the equivelant of a six-pack of beer per year. Would I like to drink more? Hell yeah. Do I? No. Do some people? Yeah. Whose fault is it if they loose their jobs because of it? Theirs. Life sucks, some peoples life is harder than others, some people have it dead easy. Get over it, and get on with it.
The “love the sinner hate the sin” comparison you made is a valid one. If somone is an alcoholic, and it in no way affects their job, then they should not loose their job. If somone being big as a house does not affect their ability to do their job, fine. Loosing your job in either of these cases, could well be argued to be discrimination. However, if the size of your bum, or the health problems connected to your weight, have a detrimental effect on the company you are hired at, or if your drinking problem has a detrimental affect, then pack your bags, you’re fired and it’s not discrimination. Just as everyone said, you having to pay more for food, cars, health insurance etc isn’t discrimination it is how shit works. My dad couldn’t get drunk from a 6-pack of beer, should they have given him 3 six-packs for the same price cos he had a “disease” that made him less easily satisfied?
Gimme a break.
Do tell how this woman in the aisle seat invaded your personal space.
Was she “rubbing up against” you?
Were parts of her body “spilling over and under the armrest and was in [your] seat”?
Were you “by her belly throughout the entire flight”?
Note: All the quoted text came from the OP.
Give you a fucking break? Given thast you asked so nicely, with pleasure.
Firstly, the quoted –this is hardly mitigation for the obese who claim “And you know I hardly eat at all.”– was part of a parenthetical comment on the subject of the statement calories in minus calories out equals weight gain.
That statement is as true for your girlfriend as it is for everybody else, IMO it needs no citation being a paraphrasing of the commonly accepted belief that we gain our nutritional needs from what we eat, and not, say, from what we think, or claim, we eat.
That you and your girlfriend have different metabolic rates could perfectly well explain the apparent disparity, you may well have a greater propensity to burn calories – maybe you fidget a lot, you seem to be of the excitable type, maybe your girlfriend secretly eats, maybe she is extremely sedate, how the hell would I know?
I note in the slurry of posts that followed that you say when your wife ate 1800 calories per day she lost weight, I respectfully suggest to you that it follows that in her current lifestyle she burns somewhere between 1800 and 2600 calories, QED.
Damn, it should have read:
Were you “forced to be smashed by her belly throughout the entire flight”?
Apologies for prematurely marrying you off, KellyM.
Oh, btw, if it is sizest to ask people who take up more than one seat to pay for extra, surely it is sizest that people who take up less than one seat should pay for a whole one? I know people skinny enough to have their briefcase in beside them on the seat, shouldn’t they pay less?
About that idea of pairing people up for comfort – one larger and one smaller than normal per pair of seats:
A) It’s already being done somewhat, on an informal basis.
B) It presumes that riders have no preferences in their seatmates.
Last year my sister and I took a five hour flight together. Both of us are slightly short (5’2 and 5’3) and now we are both (bless Dr. Atkins) of normal weights (around 110 each.) Naturally we booked side by side seats.
Before the flight started a stewardess asked if one of us would switch seats. Two rows back there were two people who weighed over 300 pounds each side by side, who couldn’t really cram into the allotted space.
We refused to swap.
It was not about comfort or fear that someone would ‘slop over’ into my unneeded space – I’m not crazy about having strangers touching me, but I’m not phobic about it. Nor did it have to do with prejudice against fatties – hey, I used to be 50 pound overweight myself, I don’t throw stones.
We simply didn’t want to give up five hours of each other’s company. We both work full time, we both have families and other demands on our time, we live about 60 miles from each other – how often do we get the luxury of hours to spend catching up with each other’s lifes?
And I bet something like that would be true of most people who aren’t travelling solo, at least on flights over an hour. Why should you lose the companionship of the people you like (or good working time if travelling with a business compatriot) just so the airlines can sort you out by size?
However this seat size problem is to be worked out, I truly hope it doesn’t come by eliminating the choice of sitting with your chosen travel companions.
Absolutely dead on. Obesity is entirely confined to the United States.
There is a tradition of American parents telling their kids to finish every bit of food on their plates, “because people are starving in Europe.” So it is the fault of all you anorexics that there are fat people in the United States.
Want a bite of my Danish?
Commonly accepted beliefs are often wrong. I repeat: CITE. Put up or shut up.
As has been said, this thread is not about being fat but about not buying enough space and making other people uncomfortable but all these threads end up with someone complaining. I am not judging anybody but the laws of physics apply to everybody. While it is true different people have different metabolisms it is also true that there is a correlation betwen calories ingested and obesity. Americans eat more and have more obese people than, say, China. There is no way around this fact. It is physically impossible to burn more calories than you ingest and not lose weight. Impossible.
You ignored the next sentance, that the US suffers from a significantly higher rate of obesity than any other population. I didn’t say entirely confined, I said overly represented.
And yeah, we get taught to empty our plates over here too, cos of “the starving babies in Africa” so it goes on and on, and the poster I was talking to is still talking out their ass.
KellyM, don’t mess up your own argument here, you just challenged somone on the statement that nutrition comes from what we eat? It’s like calling a cite on the link between breathing air and continuing to be alive. Not being aggro here, just calling for a bit of calm (or something, I think…)