For individuals who are larger in stature, the New York City Center is doing something to make guests’ experience a little more comfortable.

It is ripping out all the seats and replacing them with wider ones and giving guests more leg room.

Upon completion guests at the performing-arts center will enjoy more spacious seats ranging from 19 to 22 inches in width — an increase from 17 to 20 inches — and 33 to 48 inches in leg room compared to 32 inches.

One study by the Theater Projects Consultants, a theater-development firm, found that the average standard width of seats in performing-arts theaters has expanded from 21 to 22 inches over the last 2 decades, “primarily due” to the concurrent rise in obesity.

While petite guests may worry that taller seats might be uncomfortable for them, John Coyne, the director of Design at Theatre Projects USA, says this upgrade is needed.

“We worked on over 1,200 theatre buildings, live performing arts centers and we’ve noticed that over the last several years that there has been a trend of demand for seating getting bigger so we decided to take a more studied look at it,” he said.

In theatres across the country, some built over 100 years ago, including some on Broadway, the seating has gotten bigger, Coyne says.

“And looking at that, we noticed that over that course of time, the length of people has obviously increased and so the row space has increased as well,” he said.

And as the guests are growing, so are their expectations.

“I think people have a lot more choices when they go out for entertainment so when you compare it to sports arenas or movie theatres they expect to have similar kind of accommodations that they find there and they pay a lot more for theatre and music performance tickets and so they therefore expect more there as well,” Coyne said.

Nutritionist Cynthia Sass says this raises a red flag.

“In my opinion, you can’t expect to fit into a smaller seat when you consider that the whole environment is set up to support obesity,” Sass said.

Twenty years ago, a movie theatre popcorn was five cups for under 300 calories, Sass said. Now, a large tub is 16 to 20 cups, ranging from 1,000 to 1,200 calories.

“I think we really need to look at how we are upsizing everything not just seats but portions and calories as a whole and that’s really the root of the problem,” she said.

“Over 2/3rds of the states in the U.S. have over 25 percent of the population as obese,”  and that’s a problem, Sass says.

“Over 65 percent of the American public fall into the obese category, but I thnk that increasing the size of seats on airplanes and movie theatres is really a bandaid,” she said.

“It’s really not fixing the root of the problem which is that our whole environment teaches us to overeat whether it be for social reasons or emotional reasons. We eat when we are bored, we eat when we want to celebrate, we eat when we’ve had a bad day,” sais Sass. “I think we really need to look at what are we doing in our environment and our culture in terms of how it supports this problem.”

Fox News’ Julie Banderas contributed to this report.