Went to a concert recently. Didn’t end up staying for quite the whole to-do because the planning was terrible and there were only enough bathrooms for a few hundred people. Around 3,000 were there. So the wait was around an hour.  Not for me.

But we still had a good time.

Something I noticed is that there were no fat people there. I saw one fairly overweight woman. Just one. No obese men, and no even really chubby women except that one.

It was very odd, like being in another country. It was so noticeable that even my partner made mention of it even though she’s fairly oblivious to things like that most of the time.

This was an outdoor concert with plenty of room so it’s not that obese people were (potentially) worried about taking up too much space.

Part of it is that the crowd was young, mostly 18-25 years old. The rest I can’t explain.

A digression: I saw a girl wearing a Nirvana concert t-shirt and looked at her a little closer and realized she was about 18 years old.

She wasn’t even born when Kurt Cobain was still alive.

Dang.

That means I saw Nirvana live in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1993. When she was not even a glimmer in someone’s mind.

But back to the other topic. When I worked for another company a colleague and I had to travel to the UK for work. He was based in Bermuda where obesity is nearly as prevalent as it is in the US.

We were walking down the street one day in Guildford, outside of London. Like me, he tries to be respectful and not objectify women and not leer.  He’s a decent guy.

But he said to me as we were walking, “I didn’t know what it was at first, but when I got here I said, ‘All the women are really beautiful, not like where I’m from!’ And then I figured it out. There’s no fat people! Well, maybe a few but it’s amazing how everyone looks better when they don’t weigh as much as a bus.”

I agreed and noted that I had had the same reaction when I’d traveled outside the US. In Israel for instance I could not believe how ridiculously beautiful the women were — and then I realized that I’d spent a week in country and hadn’t seen a single woman over 150 pounds. Not one, anywhere.

That’s when I realized that — male or female — you can really improve your looks by just not being obese.

The concert was odd because I’m used to being surrounded as is typical in America by people who sound like Puff the Magic Dragon on a rough day after walking up a flight of stairs.

As I said, it was like being overseas again.