Weight has always been one of those touchy subjects that have two extremes and no in between. You either condemn the overweight for being greedy and living unhealthy lifestyles or you are one of those people that feel pity for emotional eaters. I, as always, find myself on the fence. I can understand emotional eating, admittedly I do it all the time (I'm one of the fortunate people who have a fast metabolism), but I can't understand how someone could allow their weight to balloon to an extent that their health would suffer severely? And this brings me to a point that everyone seems to feel strongly about, how far should we go, as a society, to accommodate the obese?
By now, you've seen the picture I've attached, it was taken by a flight attendant appalled at the fact that an obese man had to squeeze himself in one seat and obviously for safety reasons this posed quite a problem. Now some airlines have a policy that state a person that cannot fit in one chair will have to pay the cost for two seats and if the plane is fairly empty they will receive a refund on the extra seat they paid for. If that is not accommodating, I really don't know what is.
After reading the article, I scrolled down the page to find the comments of people who had just read what I read and I was shocked at how expressive some people can be when it comes to their opinions. Needless to say, there wasn't very much room for sympathy or understanding. However, I tend to agree with some of them. I can't for one second, understand what they are going through or how hard it must be to lose weight that can be so easily picked up, but I can say that accommodating the obese is only making it easier. If I were overweight I would want someone to be honest with me, to tell me that it's unhealthy and I need to make some serious life changes.
This applies to the other end of the scale, I think the media perpetuates the lie of perfection if you are skinny to the point of a skeleton. Kate Moss recently said "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels", I can say with one hundred percent certainty that is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard and she should be ashamed for even saying that. I think we should be promoting HEALTH, it's not actually an issue about skinny or fat, it's an issue of living a full and happy life. Bombarding our bodies with junk food or forcing ourselves not to eat is a serious issue, which we would have to deal with in different ways. it's about health people and either way it's an issue that cannot be ignored.
