3. TIL There's an airline that charges by your total weight, so fat people pay more...

TIL There's an airline that charges by your total weight, so fat people pay more than thin people

Someone who is large enough to be a burden to others on an airplane has problems that aren't going to be solved by them having a sudden realization at the airport.

Most obese people are overweight because they have an eating disorder as a symptom of some form of mental illness, or because they seriously just don't care. (I wish the second group didn't exist to give the first group a bad name, but alas.)

Either way, it takes something a lot more jarring than being humiliated at the airport to encourage them to lose weight. Sure, it could be the last straw, the final event that sparks them to finally make a change in their life, but I think purposely making something humiliating in the hopes that it'll encourage people to change is really only damaging (in a similar vein, how many people have gone to buy a pack of cigarettes, and then changed their minds in disgust when they saw a picture of a diseased lung on the pack? I'm guessing somewhere south of "one").

For the former group, most of the time they're humiliated by their size, I think it'd only make them feel worse about themselves, thus reinforcing their mental illness which will only cause them to get worse. For the second group... I just don't know, personally I think they're a lost cause. I think they'd laugh off the "humiliation" or act like it's an achievement.

There's a difference between being mildly to moderately overweight and being altogether comfortable with that, and being extremely overweight and effectively being a "fatctivist" spouting "fat pride" and the like. Personally, I'm glad those people are just a vocal minority, but it's a shame that they give all overweight people a bad name by perpetuating the stereotype that obese people are ignorant and lazy.

TL;DR: Sorry that sortof turned into a diatribe - but in a nutshell, obese people either already feel humiliated enough that another humiliation will be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, or they're the type of people who are all but proud of their size and will wear the "humiliation" as a badge of honor.

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