No shoes, no shirt, no skinny, no service

This blog comes to you courtesy of Mississippi State Rep. John Read (R). Without his recently proposed and highly misguided bill, suggesting obese people be banned from restaurants, I wouldn't have been able to write this.

Most of you have likely heard about this by now. Read (who is also a pharmacist) and his fellow authors penned the proposed legislation as a reaction to the growing numbers of overweight and obese individuals (his state of Miss. is the first state to have 30% of adults be recognized as obese). He claims he never expected the measure to actually become law, but wanted to raise awareness. "I was trying to shed a little light on the Number One problem in Mississippi," Read has said.

Interesting. So by "shed a little light," does he mean embarrass the shit out of anyone carrying extra weight? As if overweight members of our society don't already have to face a mountain of other issues, including discrimination in almost every area of their lives, health problems, personal struggles and more?

I'm not encouraging everyone to go out and gorge on fast food in an effort to balloon up. Of course it's not healthy to be obese. But to actually suggest the idea that these people - our family members, our friends, or even us - be deinied FOOD in a public place? It's total and utter insanity. This isn't like going to Great America where you have to be "this tall" to ride a certain roller coaster for safety and liability reasons. This is talking about stripping people of their basic rights - to eat, to be seen in public, to have the freedom to go where they choose.

Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, told the Associated Press, "This brings bias against obese individuals to a new and appalling level, and at a time when significant progress is being made in the effort to stop blaming obesity on the people who have it and to address the social and political conditions that drive it."

This whole debacle reminds me of the recent scandale in Louisiana, where a man claimed a waitress at an all-u-can-eat restaurant charged him double because, "Y'all fat and y'all eat too much.". Perhaps that got the Miss. Representative's panties in a bunch.

I like the following quote from an owner of a Jackson, Miss. restaurant owner named Al Stamps who, yes, serves up the burgers and fries at his joint, Cool Al's, but still acknowledged the ass-backwardness of the suggested law: "There is a better way to deal with health issues than to impose those kind of regulations. I'm sorry - you can't do it by treating adults like children and telling them what they can and cannot eat."

Amen. Adults who are overweight know they are overweight. They don't need to be publicly shamed or refused food because of it. Steps like swapping out soda for skim milk in schools and including apples and carrot sticks in Happy Meals and encouraging our kids to be physically active are a few progressive steps towards helping the younger generations stride away from obesity. But ultimately, as adults, the decision to lose weight in a healthy way will lie in our own hands.

Comments

I've seen lots of angry commentary on that proposal in the last week, commentary that I very much agree with.

Let's just say, hypothetically, that people here do need to lose weight; it still seems like any real change in this aspect our our lives would have to stem from a ground-up movement rather than from something enforced by a bunch of jackass nattering nabobs at the top of the food chain.

It seems like a total about-face in our culture's eating habits would be required. I'm not even particularly talking about *what* we eat, so much as *how* we eat. I think if we could actually sit down and talk to family and friends at actual mealtimes, if we didn't feel so rushed in our daily lives, we might have a fighting chance to change the way we treat food, to change our food experience and treat ourselves a little better...

When will people learn that shaming people never works! At least not in the long run and presumably you'd want people making healthier choices for their whole lives.

People need to be inspired, loved & supported until they want to change.

Shaming. Doesn't. Work.

PS> Comrade - right on about changing how we eat!!