Resort urges plus-size vacationers to 'live large'

TANKAH, Mexico -- Christian Gassler used to dream of running down the beach like a lifeguard on "Baywatch." But instead, the 308-pounder always sucked in his gut and stayed put in his beach chair, worried about smirks and stares.

Vacation dinners were just as humiliating: "You'd go to eat and come back with a little bit of salad and be hungry for two weeks,'' said Gassler, 39, who said self-consciousness in front of skinny vacationers in little bathing suits kept him from the heaping helpings he really wanted.

Until now.

Gassler spoke as he tucked into the lunch buffet at Freedom Paradise, a newly opened Caribbean beach resort that bills itself as the world's only resort hotel designed for overweight guests.

"Here you feel free," said Gassler, who frolics with his wife and daughter on the beach here without worrying about holding in his flab. "Here you can breathe on the beach. That's the magic of the place."

Freedom Paradise, a 112-room resort on a perfect stretch of secluded beach 70 miles south of Cancun, promotes a simple idea: The world's population is getting heavier, and the tourist industry is missing out on buckets of money by not catering to overweight people. Give them a beach where they don't have to compete with "Charlie's Angels" look-alikes, and a buffet that serves up plenty of sheet cake, and they will come, the theory goes.

The first thing visitors to the resort see is a lobby gift shop displaying 5XL polo shirts as big as tablecloths, and enormous matching mango-colored sweat pants, bearing the resort's logo: "Live Large, Live Free." It is next to an ice cream freezer. Around the corner, even the little male and female figures on the bathroom doors look like the Michelin Man.

Jurriaan Klink, the resort's operations manager, said it is all designed to make people comfortable, not to make fun: "We say 'oversize,' 'plus size,' 'full-figured' -- but never 'fat.'

The resort's general manager, Julio Cesar Rincon, who came up with the idea while working at a hotel in Cancun, said the resort's market has been hiding in plain sight: "When we were developing this, I thought: Is it possible that nobody has thought of this -- it's so obvious."

Sixty-four percent of adult Americans are overweight, and more than 30 percent are obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Klink, from the Netherlands, said the numbers are growing sharply in Europe and Mexico. All that creates what advocacy groups for the overweight call a powerful and growing economic bloc.

To create Freedom Paradise, Rincon and a group of Cancun investors leased two adjacent hotels that had gone bankrupt and spent $2 million on a "size-friendly" renovation. They ripped out door frames and installed super-sized doors. They tore out walls to make entrances to walk-in shower stalls larger. There are no confining bathtubs anywhere in the resort. Instead, many showers have wooden benches and removable showerheads on hoses, making it possible to wash sitting down.

The resort's four pools have wide, easy stairs; no flimsy aluminum pool ladders or diving boards here. Wooden tables at the poolside bars have wide, thick benches with tree stumps for legs. Some barstools are swings hanging from the ceiling; many could easily accommodate two average-size adults. Almost all rooms have king-size beds. Dining is buffet-style and entrees are heavy on creams and sauces, with a wide selection of desserts.

Guests don't get a mint on their pillow, they get six in a dish.

The resort's main dining room has sturdy wooden chairs with no arms to squeeze oversized guests. Every table has one or two chairs with padded seats about twice as wide as normal.

Martha Riofrio Bueno, the resort's human resources director and a psychologist, trains all new employees on how to treat overweight people with respect.

She shows the film "Beauty and the Beast" to stress that no one should be judged solely on their appearance.

"The people we've had here who are really obese arrive here feeling that they are not accepted, like they have been rejected by everyone," Riofrio said. "We accept them here."

Sandra Polley, 33, a Web designer from Illinois who describes herself as obese, sat in the hotel's main dining room and talked about the difficulties of finding a hotel that caters to people her size. She scans hotel Web sites and checks two things: the size of the lounge chairs and whether the pool has ladders or steps.

Polley said she remembered a horrible experience years ago at a hotel in Cancun, where she jumped into a pool before realizing the only way out was an aluminum ladder. "My choices were to struggle up the ladder, or throw myself over the edge like a beached whale," she said.

But Polley, one of the hotel's first guests, said she liked what she found here. "The people who work here have had sensitivity training, and it shows," said Polley, who has found hotel owners in Europe and Asia much more accepting of her size than those in the United States.

"I would never go to a resort in the United States, because of the ridicule, shame and embarrassment," she said.

Travel agents have been visiting the resort to assess the new concept. Jimmy Bautista, who runs Jimmy's Travel Service on Long Island, N.Y., visited recently and said he was planning to include it in his advertising. "It's a new market and it's a unique place, so we'll see," Bautista said.

In the meantime, e-mail reservations have been flowing in. An American couple said they wanted to book for their honeymoon. They were married five months ago, but they were too self-conscious to take a trip to an ordinary beach resort.

A woman in Florida sent a message saying she weighed 300 pounds and hadn't been on the beach in 10 years. She said she wanted to take her 7-year-old daughter, but she couldn't because of "the loud, rude and crude people who pick on me there."

"I don't want to be humiliated like that in front of my young child," she wrote. "The world is a cruel place for big people. But thanks to your resort, large clients can live the good life, at least for a while."