Weight policy on airplanes

I have a friend who forwarded this story to me and I thought it needed to be shared and discussed.

Southwest Airlines threw actor/director Kevin Smith off a plane that he bought 2 tickets for because he got on an earlier flight with only one seat available. And obviously, he’s pissed.

I have mixed feelings about this issue and I feel like something really needs to be done about it. We, as a nation, need to look at ourselves and figure out why we are getting bigger.

Now let me clarify something--being overweight doesn’t necessarily mean being unhealthy or unhappy-- but it’s still a major problem that has become a national epidemic. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have started a food/wellness blog, and our nation wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars to work around it.

I will say that I do not agree that SW should have thrown him off of the plane and here is why: He purchased 2 tickets, probably because he knew he needed them both. Whether it’s because he was too big or because the seats were too small, it’s the same premise.
So why, then, did SW let him on another flight with only 1 seat available?

That is where I think they screwed up. If you’re going to enforce a rule, then enforce it from start to finish.

Listen, being overweight isn’t a good feeling for many. When I was 35 pounds heavier, I never felt comfortable in my skin. My knees hurt, my clothes didn’t fit right, I was slow, and I was unhappy. I worked my ass off to make myself healthier. I didn’t blame anyone else but myself, and I did what I had to do to learn about proper nutrition. I’m not by any means skinny, but I am happy and healthy. When I feel like I’ve gained a few pounds (like I did last week from sitting on my ass being stuck in my house thanks to the snow) I accept it and work a little harder to get back to where I feel good. It’s not a particular number on the scale, it’s just according to how my clothes fit and how I feel. That’s just me, and it’s because I didn’t like the way I felt when I was overweight. Plain and simple.

My life has changed dramatically since. Learning about health, nutrition, wellness, Ulcerative Colitis and how it affected our lives; these things have made me who I am today. But this was all by choice.

I have always been active, but now I am doing things I never thought I would have—training for a 1/2 marathon? As active as I was, being a soccer player even throughout college, I never would have thought I could do that. But now I see life in a different light thanks to the choices I’ve made to better myself.

If I had been thrown off a plane the way Kevin Smith was, I would have been pissed too. But we need to start making some better choices in our lives. They don’t have to be all at once, they don’t need to be the same changes I made…but we need to do something.