I don't travel a great deal and as I prefer to stay local and just go to places that are nice that happen to be nearby where I live. Fortunately for me I live in a wonderful part of the United States so that there are plenty of places within driving distance that I really enjoy going to. Therefore flight travel, which I hate, is not something that I do very often. I have in the past though, ended up in a seat next to a person that is seriously overweight and it is not a comfortable position to find yourself in.
I am sure it is just as uncomfortable for them as well because I am sure a great deal of anxiety comes along with being ultra-fat just generally speaking, not just when you have to squeeze into an economy sized seat.
You've likely seen the above picture making the rounds on the internet but recently I watched a video that showcased how a particular fat person was given a free extra seat and by doing so this resulted in a mother and her 2 teenagers being kicked off the flight, being forced to get a flight the following morning, and no accommodation was provided for them. This is just plain wrong.
I'm not fitness guru, but I do take reasonably good care of myself and am not obese, let alone spilling over into a 2nd seat sort of huge. Some people have I think correctly accused Southwest of encouraging and rewarding bad life choices with this policy and a number of things about it don't make any sense at all.
Just think about how airlines treat you if your bag is slightly over the weight limit: They are going to charge you an arm and a leg for it right? But for some reason if you weigh 2 and a half times as much as the average person, not only do they not charge you more for this, but they will actually give you someone else's seat in addition to your own even if that means that the normal sized person has to be booted from the flight.
This is absurd and if I flew more often than I do I would go out of my way to avoid Southwest Airlines. I think that boycotts are really the only thing we have left when it comes to sensibility in the world because it seems to me as though especially in the USA, things have gone completely mad.
In Southwest's case they even use an ultra-PC word for the fatties calling them "persons of size." I think I should have a huge bag next time I fly and when they refer to it as an oversized or overweight bag I should get irate, put it on TikTok and sue the company for insulting my bag's identity.
If you are fat there is a really good chance that this is the case because of poor life choices, not because of some unfortunate disease that you inherited from birth. I get that there are some exceptions but all of the fat people I know are that way because of the way they live their lives. Their poor decisions should not be something that has to inconvenience me as a consequence.
It's one of the only issues in life that you can literally "run away from."