JACI STEPHEN: Why are so many female flight attendants so FAT some can’t even buckle up? 

Fat. I have said it there. No overweight, no morbid obesity, no thyroid problems. Fat.

And how fat do you have to be to not be able to fit in the folding seat of an airplane?

Chelsia Blackmon found out the hard way. A Spirit Airlines cabin crew member, she filed a lawsuit in Florida against them, alleging that she was discriminated against after not being able to fit into a pop-up seat on their Airbus A319.

Having been taken off the plane, Ms Blackmon, who is black, was reportedly given just over a month to lose weight, though she claims a white colleague was given several months. After Ms. Blackmon couldn’t fit in the seat a second time, she says she was fired from her by Spirit.

If it’s true that white attendees were given more time to lose weight, then you may have a case. It goes without saying that racial discrimination is morally wrong.

But apart from the legality of the case, there is a broader problem here. Just this. Should someone too fat to fit in a jump seat be allowed to get close to passengers who depend on the crew to ensure their own well-being at 30,000 feet in the air? Can someone who is clearly struggling with her own health be trusted to take care of hers in a crisis?

When are we going to stop making excuses for fat? Over there. I have said it again.

I fly a lot, on many different airlines, to many different countries and have noticed in recent years that female crew members, in particular, are getting bigger and bigger, less so the men, who generally seem to take a lot of pride in their appearance. .

But many of the women now struggle to even help him place his bag in the top locker, sounding like they’re lifting their own body weight as they gasp throughout the operation. Eventually, they give up and before paramedics need to be called to revive them, they resort to calling a male colleague to help them.

They even fight when they pass each other in the hallway. I have even seen a large woman with enormous fingers wrestling with a corkscrew and making it look like she was struggling to escape a mine shaft.

I had to climb my way through plus size attendants just to get to the bathroom. I’ve been semi-suffocating when a body descends on me trying to fix my TV screen.

It’s bad enough having to deal with fat passengers, taking up half their own seat in addition to their own, not to mention overweight crew members.

Obviously, people come in all shapes and sizes. I know it’s not easy to eat well and exercise when life is so busy that you don’t have a moment to yourself. And, of course, people have the right to make their own decisions. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

When your decisions start to affect everyone else, we have a problem. Flight attendants are just that: attendants. If you are too fat to bend down in a hallway and pick up a broken glass someone has dropped, then you are not ‘serving’ anyone.

Decades ago airlines had weight standards for flight attendants, which now seem obviously ridiculous, but maybe, just maybe, have the scales tipped too far in the other direction?

Anyway, I know I’m going to be accused of being fat, unfriendly, etc., but isn’t it about time we tackled this very serious problem and called obesity what it is? Eat excessively.

So, as you sit here fuming over your gallon of Diet Coke (have you ever seen a skinny person drinking a diet drink? No, neither have I), answer this honestly.

If being fat is such a good thing, why is the diet industry such a big business? Why do people travel to the other side of the world to get cheaper surgery to have their fat removed? Why do they take pills to try to lose weight faster? Why do people have wires placed in their jaws and gastric balloons placed to fill their stomachs?

Why did Rebel Wilson and Mindy Kaling decide to lose so much weight? Easy. It’s because they know they look and feel so much better than when photographers had to rummage through their bags to get the widescreen lens to fit their size.

Incredibly, 41.9 percent of American adults consider themselves obese.

Go to Las Vegas, a glutton’s paradise, where tourists, who start lining up at 5 am, are going to make the most of that All You Can Eat breakfast if it kills them, which, given the way they stack their dishes, it probably will. I look at their poor children, who are already terribly overweight before they reach double figures in age. This week, the Centers for Disease Control created a new body mass index (BMI) category for obese children because many were off the fat lists.

After Ms. Blackmon couldn’t fit in the seat a second time, she says, Spirit fired her.

Many will likely end up with disordered eating and body image issues. That’s not because of the pressure the media puts on them to be skinny—God forbid, they certainly have done so more in the past than they are now—but because they feel helpless.

The dangers of fat—heart disease, stroke, and much more—should be advertised in the same way that the health horrors of smoking are now being advertised. That’s not advertising or glorifying a ‘thin’ mentality, it’s just plain common sense.

I’ve never been what you’d call skinny and, yes, I’ve been on a diet, so I really don’t sympathize with what a lot of people put up with in their struggles. I empathize with the embarrassment and upset that the situation with Spirit has caused Ms. Blackmon if she is, indeed, found to have been the victim of racial profiling.

But there’s that word again. Now everyone is a victim and we live in a society where people increasingly refuse to take responsibility for the situations they find themselves in, and when it comes to fat, those situations are almost always provoked. by the individual. No one is force-feeding you. No one has starved you and then locked you in McDonald’s for the week. The pizza fairy hasn’t paid you a secret visit in the middle of the night brandishing a pepperoni pie.

At a time when we are struggling with energy bills, inflation, job cuts, and pesky life-stealing viruses, the solution to coping isn’t to stuff your face even more than before, yet that’s exactly what you need. many people did during covid. Research has revealed that snacking consumption increased and there was a preference for sweets and ultra-processed foods over fruits, vegetables and fresh foods. Okay, but there’s a chasm between eating comfortably and displaying a perverse desire to be Heffalump of the Year.

How bad does the health of the country have to be for someone to say: Enough?

Spirit Airlines might well have discriminated against Ms. Blackmon, but there was always something she could have done to avoid her situation in the first place. In fact, I will address it in the diet book that I have decided to write. There are no pages, just a title.

eat less.