Weight Loss and airplanes

Sometimes I feel that I need to address some relatively sensitive subjects in this blog. It is not very fun for an overweight person to be confronted with situations that point out to he/she how others around them react to them. Last nite, I took a Southeast airlines flight to Florida, and this airline has "open seating", which means that the people who enter the plane first choose their seats and then the later people fill in. Of course, the window and aisle seats fill up first leaving the middle seats for those people entering the plane last. I was watching this situation carefully last night, as I was one of the first people on the plane. It was obvious that the later people boarding, would walk by the rows that had overweight people in either the aisle or window seat in that row. As the plane was a full capacity flight, only at the end would those middle seats fill in, and you could almost see some angst on the faces of the people having to squeeze into that middle seat between the overweight people on the aisle and window seats.

I believe at one point this same airline was discussing making it mandatory for a person above a certain size to purchase 2 seats.

We think about our weight issues only affecting us..meaning that the increase risk of heart disease, diabetes,, cancer, etc., lower self=esteem etc. However, at times, we get into situations when it is painfully obvious that people will react to us differently, not knowing one thing about the "inner" part of us, just based on weight. This doesn't mean that our goal to lose weight is that some person we will never see again will be happier sitting next to us on a Southeast airlines flight. It does point out though that reality is that people who do not know us at all will often make a quick judgement as to whether they want to be near us based on our weight.