JACI STEPHEN: Why are so many female flight attendants so FAT some can't even buckle up? 

Fat. There, I've said it. Not overweight, not morbidly obese, not thyroid challenged. Fat.

And how fat do you have to be not to be able to fit in a plane's jump seat?

Chelsia Blackmon found out the hard way. A member of the cabin crew for Spirit Airlines, she has filed a lawsuit in Florida against them, claiming that she was discriminated against after not being able to fit in a jump seat on their Airbus A319.

Having been removed from the plane, Ms. Blackmon – who is black – was then allegedly given just over a month to lose weight, though she claims that a white colleague was given several months. After Ms. Blackmon failed to fit into the seat a second time, she says, Spirit fired her.

If it's factually true that white attendants were given more time to lose weight, then she may well have a case. It goes without saying that racial discrimination is morally wrong.

But legalities of the case aside, there is a wider issue here. Simply this. Should anyone too fat to fit in a jump seat be allowed anywhere near passengers who rely on crew to secure their own well-being 30,000 feet in the air? Can anyone, clearly struggling with their own health, be relied upon to look after yours in a crisis?

When are we going to stop making excuses for fat? There. I've said it again.

I fly a lot, on many different airlines, to many different countries and have noticed the past couple of years that female crew members, in particular, are getting bigger – less so, the men, who generally seem to take great pride in their appearance.

Chelsia Blackmon (above) found out the hard way. A member of the cabin crew for Spirit Airlines, she has filed a lawsuit in Florida against them, claiming that she was discriminated against after not being able to fit in a jump seat on their Airbus A319.

But many of the women now struggle even with helping you get your bag into the overhead locker, sounding as if they're lifting their own body weight as they pant through the whole operation. Finally giving up and before paramedics might have to be called to revive them, they resort to calling upon a male colleague to assist.

They even struggle when passing each other in the aisle. I've even seen a large woman with enormous fingers battling with a corkscrew and managing to make it look like she was struggling to escape a mine shaft.

I've had to mountaineer my way through plus-sized attendants just to get to the rest room. I've been semi-suffocated when a body descends on me just trying to fix my TV screen.

It's bad enough having to deal with fat passengers, who take up half of your own seat in addition to their own, let alone overweight crew members.

Obviously, people come in all shapes and sizes. I know that it is not easy to eat right and exercise when life is so busy that you don't have moment for yourself. And of course, people are entitled to make their own decisions. But that's not what I am talking about.

When your decisions start to impact everyone else, we have a problem. Flight attendants are just that — attendants. If you're too fat to bend over in an aisle and sweep up a broken glass someone's dropped, then you're not 'attending' to anyone.

Decades ago, airlines had weight standards for flight attendants, which seem obviously ridiculous now, but maybe – just maybe – the scales have tipped too far in the other direction?

Regardless, I know I'm going to be accused of being fattist, unsympathetic and so on, but isn't it time we addressed this very serious problem and called obesity out for what it is? Overeating.

So while you sit here fuming over your gallon of Diet Coke (ever see a thin person drinking a diet drink? No, me neither), answer this honestly.

If being fat is such a great thing, why is the diet industry such big business? Why do people travel halfway across the world to get cheaper surgery to have the fat sucked out of them? Why do they pop pills to try to lose weight faster? Why do people get their jaws wired and have gastric balloons fitted to fill up their stomachs?

Why did Rebel Wilson and Mindy Kaling decide to lose a ton of weight? Easy. It's because they know they look and feel a lot better than when photographers had to dip into their bags for the widescreen lens to accommodate their size.

Incredibly, 41.9 percent of American adults are considered obese.

Go to Vegas, a glutton's paradise, where tourists, who start queueing at 5am, are going to make the most of that All You Can Eat breakfast if it kills them – which, given the way they pile their plates up, it probably will. I look at their poor kids, already hideously overweight before their age even reaches double figures. This week, The Centers for Disease Control created a new body mass index (BMI) category for obese children because so many were off the charts fat.

After Ms. Blackmon failed to fit into the seat a second time, she says, Spirit fired her.

Many will probably end up with eating disorders and body image issues. That's not because of the pressure the media puts on them to be thin – though heaven forbid, it has certainly done so more in the past than it does now – but because they feel powerless.

The dangers of fat – heart disease, strokes and so much else – should be publicized in the way that the health horrors of smoking now are. That's not advertising or glorifying a 'thin' mentality – it's plain common sense.

I have never been what you'd call skinny and, yes, I've been on diets, so I really am not unsympathetic to what many people endure in their struggles. I empathize with the embarrassment and upset the situation with Spirit has caused Ms. Blackmon if, indeed, it is found that she has been the victim of racial discrimination.

But there's that word again. Everyone's a victim now and we live in a society in which people increasingly refuse to take responsibility for the situations in which they find themselves, and where fat is concerned those situations are almost always caused by the individual. No one is force feeding you. No one has starved you and then locked you in McDonald's for the week. The pizza fairy has not paid you a secret visit in the middle of the night brandishing a pepperoni pie.

At a time when we are struggling with energy bills, inflation, job cuts, and pesky viruses that steal lives, the coping solution is not to stuff one's face even more than before, yet that is exactly what many people did during Covid. Research has revealed that snack-eating increased and there was a preference for sweets and ultra-processed food rather than fruit, vegetables, and fresh food. Okay, but there's a gulf between comfort eating and showing a perverse desire to be Heffalump of the Year.

How bad does the health of the country have to get before someone says: Enough?

Spirit Airlines might well have discriminated against Ms. Blackmon, but there was always something she could have done in order to avoid her situation in the first place. In fact, I'm going to address it in the diet book I've decided to write. There are no pages, just a title.

Eat Less.