Weight Loss service: obese people who will join you at dinner

by philg

Conversation turned the other day to Tony Packo’s, the Hungarian restaurant in Toledo, Ohio that Klinger talked about on the TV show MASH. I only finished about half of my meal there because there were so many corpulent people at nearby tables.

This led to a new idea for a weight loss service: rent out obese people to those who wish to lose weight. Every time you sit down for a meal, your new 300 lb. friends will join you at the table. It won’t be a struggle to leave something on your plate.

9 thoughts on “Weight Loss service: obese people who will join you at dinner”

  1. I used to be morbidly-obese–now I’m just big-boned–but no matter how big I was I never would have taken offense to something like this.

    I don’t expect that’ll be the standard reaction, but then I don’t know the state of East Coast Fat Acceptance.

  2. Not only will you be relieved of the “struggle to leave something on your plate,” your “new 300 lb friends” will gladly offer to take home the doggy bag. Sounds like a win-win proposition to me!

  4. This actually works. A long time friend invited me and my family to dinner and many of the other people were quite obese. Both my kids would not do more than nibble, and ate very little for the next several days. Even my wife and I ate less than we usually do.

  5. My experience is the same as Peter’s (I’m 5 feet 8 inches tall, 125 lbs). And I always wondered how “all you can eat” restaurants survive, not to mention prosper. Normally I think I am the only profit-generating customer in the place, considering the number of heavy people observed. Maybe there’s more to the “all you can eat” business model than meets the eye. Can anyone who knows the business comment?

  6. I know that when I’m at the gym and I see a fatty that looks about my age I start to work out harder… you might have something here.

  7. Phil Atio: Several restaurant owners mentioned to me that overall, the cost of the food was small compared to other costs such as energy, labor, equipment, etc. so perhaps it is a combination of that and the getting of more people to show up (and make a habit of it).

  8. Maybe the next iteration can include hiring poor people to sit at the table while I balance my checkbook to inspire me to manage my money better. Or, how about hiring the homeless guy on the corner to sit at the bar with me, so when I see him get sloppy drunk, I will rein in my own drinking?

    Sure, many (though not all) obese people made poor choices, but if it’s OK to use them, why wouldn’t it be OK to use all of the millions of other people who made poor choices in other areas of their lives?

    I used to weigh 300 pounds and have lost 70 of it. More than once, when I was at my biggest, I’d be buying a snack at a convenience store and the person in front of me would turn back to look at my purchase and say something like, “fat bastard is buying snacks”. They’d then turn to their own purchase of 3 packs of cigarettes and 10 lottery tickets, content in their “superiority”.

    I don’t take offense specifically because of the weight issue. I really don’t care, myself.

    I do find other aspects of the suggestions offensive, though. To suggest that we make their problem WORSE by hiring them to sit and watch you eat, followed by taking home your leftovers to eat even more later seems exploitive in the extreme. However, if we’re going to exploit people who made bad choices, we should expand the idea out to all of the bad choices people make. After all, if this is a good idea, then there are plenty of analogous ideas out there.

    Obesity is a combination of biological problems and bad personal choices. Unfortunately, it’s one of the sets of bad personal choices that can be seen by everyone around you. I’m willing to wager that every single person out there has an area in their life where they make bad personal choices, but do so in an area that they can hide from the people in the street. Would you be wiling to sign up to have that area exploited to help someone out? Especially if their instance of the problem isn’t even as severe as your own?

    I hope that those slightly overweight people who would benefit from such a service manage to lose those 10 extra pounds. And if your new fat “friend” gains another 30 in the process of helping you and your other friends out, who’ll notice? After all, 30 pounds on a 350 pound person hardly makes a difference, right?

  9. I concur with most of what J. Wynia has noted. But I acknowledge that I will never forget an incident in 1993?1994? in a godforsaken desert location near Cairo, Eygpt, to which I had gone with my American friend and mentor (her sons were older than my three boys) to purchase a granite table top. My my girlfriend was almost as tall as I am (I’m 5’11”), but weighed a considerable amount, even by Egyptian standards. She spoke pretty serviceable Arabic, which apparently didn’t occur to the young men working there when they saw my Ford Taurus station wagon pull up. She told me the men said to one another, “You take the fat one; I’ll take the thin one.”

    I admit I probably ate less that day, feeling somewhat smug. We live in a society where every single woman feels too fat — even when your husband/boyfriend seems to like you just the way you are. And from what I’ve observed among the high school girls my sons have dated/attempted to date (I am a daughterless mom to four boys), it’s only gotten worse. T

    Enough whining.

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