Strange Maps has another good one – the percentage of obese Americans:
The South tends to be the fattest. Colorado is the leanest. Indiana tends toward the fatter side of the chart.
Masson's Blog
Strange Maps has another good one – the percentage of obese Americans:
The South tends to be the fattest. Colorado is the leanest. Indiana tends toward the fatter side of the chart.
I was certainly much thinner when I lived in Colorado.
That’s it! Now, I can erase my own personal responsibility for gaining weight and just blame it on living in Indiana. Maybe we can sue the State?
Somebody needs to get sued anyway.
Nice one, VG.
Having just been in Colorado four days ago, I can attest to a great sense of being more active than here. Of course, with the mountains, streams, and such general natural beauty, I can understand a greater interest in outdoorsy attitudes.
Even with Colorado busting the curve, we’re still a pretty fat nation.
Seems to be a direct correlation to the fatter states and the states with the larger sales in pork products (including fried rinds).
Imagine that.
Now I wonder who eats more of those anyway?
;)
B.G.
Not me. Blech. Pork rinds.
Okay I’m doing my part to get Indiana in shape. I’m 6’0″ and in January weighed around 250. For the last three years I had slowly migrated from 190 to about 220 last August. Then fall was a stress fest and I ate very wrongly. Anyway, the last time I weighed myself was around New Year’s and it was 250. At the end of January, switched my eating habits and hit the gym again. I’m now at 182; shooting for 170-175; a weight I haven’t seen since around 23. I’ve already had to buy a new belt, and the pants I have on today are cinched around my waist; they have a good four inches to spare! My wife has also lost about 55 pounds in that same time period.
So we’re doing our part! What about the rest of you?
When I was 16 and got my first license, I was about 6″ and weighed about 117 pounds. By the time I was 21, I had made it to about 6’1″ and about 130 lbs. Now I’m about the same height and weigh about about 150 lbs.
My weight seems to have little correlation to what I eat or how much I exercise — it’s mostly beyond my power to move the needle up or down significantly.
My metabolism has been described as “irate.”
So, I guess I’m helping to bring down the curve, but mostly through genetics and not through any particular virtue.
15 and learer’s permit-5’4″ and maybe 100.
Driver’s license (10 months later)-5’10’ and maybe 105.
Graduation-6’0″ and 125.
20-same height and 140.
21 (when I got home after spring semester)-same height and 176 (lots of beer and pizza).
End of summer- 155.
23-165-170, which I maintained until early 30’s.
Metabolism was great until 20; since then not so hot. Just had to finally learn I’m not 20 anymore!
I think Mike makes a good point about how none of the states are really doing great – Colo. leads the pack, but about 2 in 10 of its citizens are still obese (not just overweight, but obese). By contrast, in Miss, the number is 3 in 10. Clearly worse – and yet the difference between Miss. and Colo. is not profound.
I looked for some international comparisons – in France and Italy you find 1 in 10 obese people (11% and 9.5%, respectively). Germany is the fattest country in Europe, with 2 in 10 (22%).
I’m sure it’s a mix of things, but I wonder what the primary reasons for the difference between the U.S. and Europe are. Are their jobs more physically demanding on average? Do they eat less? Eat “better”? Exercise more in their free time? Have more free time? Less availability of more fattening foods?
I think our portions are way out of control. I mean even if you order a realtively healthy meal in a restaurant, there is often enough food there to feed two people.
Growing up, my parents made the typical mid-western fried foods with two starches meals. As I said earlier, I didn’t gain weight because of metabolism. But my parents were never overweight because they ate normal portions.
It’s easy to explain really.
Americans eat way too much meat.
Partially Marty, actually we eat too many maize by-products.
It is the real “Moctezuma’s Revenge”. Starches and sugars derived from maize abound in our diets, knowingly and unknowingly. We’re just fattening ourselves up just like we do to the hogs and cows we eat (or at least the non-vegetarians).
Well said varangianguard…I like that phrase, ‘the real Moctezuma’s Revenge’.
You guys are/ were a bunch of pencil neck geeks!
Seriously, 6’1 and 150? Damn. I thought I was bad at 6’2 and 165.
And that was almost 20 years ago. Now I’m 205 on a good day.
I swear to god that I’m going to start excercising when the baby is a little older and we’re getting a little more sleep. Really. I mean it.
In the recent past, with dieting and running, I’ve been as good as 190. But that’s really pushing it.
I really wouldn’t WANT to be skinnier than that. I’m geeky enough as it is.
We all need to take up smoking. A couple of packs a day will take off all the weight we could ever want.
Too bad you can’t even smoke in your office anymore. Make it kind of hard to smoke that much.
Doug and I were talking about this about ten years ago after driving from the Boulder area back to Indiana. One moment we’re watching all these people biking up mountains in 90 degree weather, and then a couple of gas stops later, we’re at a quickie mart outside St. Louis watching about a 400 lb. middle-aged woman make the slow transition from van to motorized scooter just to go in the store. Granted, some disability may have befallen her prior to her obesity. But for us it was a strong signal that we had been driving east all day and left Colorado far behind.
So what’s the deal with the Pacific Northwest? Seems to me their mountains and streams are wilder, with no shortage of outdoor activities. Their diets should be rich in seafood. They ought to blow Colorado away. Yet their numbers aren’t much better than ours.
On a personal note, I’m glad the government’s booster-seat requirements didn’t exist when I was growing up. I’m pretty sure I was sub-90 lb. (and about 5-0 tall) starting high school and would have probably been in a booster seat in middle school. Had to eat six meals/day and slouch on my Army physical to make minimum weight-to-height requirements since I was about a 5-11, sub-110 lb. senior. I now know the appropriate diagnosis would have been “Constitutional Delay in Growth”, where I was about 90th percentile in height and weight until about age two, then rapidly plunged to about the 1st percentile for both, along with delayed puberty, where I remained until I shot up to about 75th for height over about an 18 month period at age 17-18. The weight shot up a couple of years later. It was definitely a relief when I finally grew.
Having been underweight my whole life, gaining about forty lb. between ages 30-32 (topping out at 180) was pretty unpleasant and really was messing up my life. I suddenly had reflux requiring twice the recommended dose of Prevacid plus trips to the fridge for icewater or tums during the night, symptoms of sleep apnea with poor sleep, constant fatigue, daytime somnolence that I fought with more calories, and knee pains. Plus I still was basically thin, just with a new slab of fat hanging off the front which made buying clothes difficult (do you pull the pants up over the flab, bisect the flab with the belt, or sling it underneath?)
My own experience with weight gain and loss has been that they both have been positive feedback situations. The more I gained, the more I had to eat to feel “normal”. I had to snack up until lunch to maintain a feeling of awareness, even though I was fatigued anyway. So the weight gain accelerated. The sleep disturbances and fatigue caused a decrease in energy, which resulted in less exercise, and further weight gain.
When first trying to lose weight, it was difficult starting with that baseline fatigue. So the first week or so was hard where I basically crash dieted and plowed through so really unpleasant gym work. Then the feedback kicked in the other direction, with my appetite decreasing and my energy increasing, such that I overshot my goal by about 10 lb. (a fifty mile hike in the White Mountains being the final goodbye to the flab). Now my body seems to like 144 lbs. A few lb. less and I feel weak/undernourished, a few more and I start to get the sluggish feeling again, and start heading to the snack machine before lunch.
It’s now ridiculously easy to maintain that weight (now X 3 years). But I also remember how easy it was to gain six inches in the waist, because weight gain creates the conditions for further, accelerated weight gain.
Buzzcut makes a good point. Yes, we’re pencil-necked geeks. But from my own brief trip up and down the scale, I’ve realized that everyone has an optimum weight where they feel best, are healthiest, etc. Doug has at times looked flat-out scary when he’s skipped a meal or two and not gotten enough sun. Same here. But my frame just refuses to grow bulky muscle. Infantry basic training couldn’t do it. A decade or so moving furniture during the summers couldn’t do it. We’re just long, thin bastards who look like we were weaned a bit early. I can make the scale go up, but can’t get big, other than to have a fat belly.
Put me up to 210 and I don’t know how I would get out of bed in the morning.
Yeah, and I got the genes to where I can actually put on muscle weight. I’ve actually got a bit of a chest now, some arm muscles, and like the way my thighs and calves look. (I was all knees as a teen. There are some pictures of me at a family reunion in ’86 where I look like a refugee!)(Vain pastor!) But that didn’t happen until my 30’s. That’s why I know I’ll never get below 170-and probably realistically need to look at 175-180 as a maintainable weight.
I still have a tiny flap of fat that has been with me since my 20’s. I’m not expecting it to go away quickly. But with 40 approaching fastly, I would like to be in 32 waist pants by February-I’m geussing I’m at 34 right now, but am waiting to shop for new pants for about a month.
And T-250 was like that for me. That’s the other thing I forgot. I badly injured my right ankle last May. My mobility was down. As the weight came on, the pain in it and my bad right knee got worse. I caught myself limping more than once up and down the stairs to the altar. I was needing about 9 hours in bed; probably because of sleep apnea-and still didn’t feel rested. Now the pain isn’t gone in my knee-it never has been in the 21 years since I injured it. But it is manageable again. And the ankle has almost healed in the past few months.
I have a woman in my congregation who is in her early 70’s and weighs over 400 pounds. (I know because when she was in the hospital they had her weight on the board in kilograms. It wasn’t tough to do the conversion.) She uses her motorized scooter to get around everywhere. She has so many medical problems due to obeisity, that I need a scorecard to keep up with all the Dr.’s names she tells me about. The last two times I’ve seen her she is now on oxygen outside of the home. And the sad thing is, she feels it is too late to change. She’s given up on ever being healthy again.
Last night we took the kids to a free concert at the library-a couple of guys on hammered dulcimer and another guy on guitar. They were good! Anyway before they started into one of their songs, the lead guy asked if there were any vegetarians in the audience. One woman raised her hand. She was well over 350. I had bad thoughts go through my mind at that moment.
I think that there are several different reasons why Europeans tend not to have US levels of obesity.
1. Smaller portions in general. In some parts of Italy, they do eat pasta frequently – but the amount you get on your plate is something like 1/2 cup to 1 cup. Similarly, pizza in Italy tends to be about 8-10″ in diameter, with (I’m guessing) – 3 Tbls of sauce, 3 Tbs of cheese, and a *small* amount of toppings (i.e., 1 or 2 Tbls of something).
I don’t think the answer is as simple as that they eat less meat – they eat less of everything.
2. An intact food culture. By this, I mean that what Europeans eat, when they eat it, and how they eat it is – within each country or region – more uniform (even though there is a wide variation among countries). There are too many different system to describe in detail (i.e., Germans eat 5 meals a day, but 4 of them are quite small; the Spanish eat long meals, etc.). Generalizing, the effect is that Europeans spend more time eating, but eat less.
The US used to have an intact food culture, too – think about how people used to eat from 1900 through the 1960’s. You would have oatmeal or bacon and eggs for breakfast (changing later in the century to cold cereal in many cases); a sandwich for lunch (not a subway meatball sub, either), plus maybe an apple, and a dinner consisting of meat, one or two veggies, and a starch when you got home. That worked, too.
But when you just kind of make things up as you go along (as I certainly to), the effect is that you eat more food (even as you spend less time doing it).
Ignoring the fact that various national cuisines are part of a system is where a lot of American based eating advice goes horribly wrong. I.e. – the 80’s: the Japanese are thing and healthy and their diet contains little fat – so we can eat *anything* we want, in whatever amount we want, as long as it has no fat; the 90’s: as above, but we can also eat as much olive oil as we want; the 00’s: carbs are bad, so we can eat as much meat as we want and as much fat as we want as long as we eat no carbs.
3. Europeans are more physically active in their day-to-day life, on average. Not in a specifically exercise-y way, but: (1) their day-to-day life involves more walking or bicycling; and (2) their leisure activities also involve more walking or bicycling.
For day to day activities, it’s probably no more than 20 minutes/day or so that you spend walking or bicycling to the store, to work, etc. – but it seems to be enough to make some difference. (And, actually, if you look around Manhattan you won’t see many obese people either; a lot of that must have to do with the need to walk).
You don’t see nearly as many people doing deliberate exercise, though.
Here’s an interesting link concerning bicycling: http://tinyurl.com/6ho6o5
I can attest (and Doug can verify) that exercising alone doesn’t do it for everyone, unfortunately. The number of miles I pound out when training for a half-marathon should be enough to make me drop a few pounds, but it rarely does. Of course, if a man were to run the number of miles in a week that I run, they’d be super skinny in no time. Me, I have to stop eating to lose weight.
Can’t do anything about the genetics.
Oh, and for Europeans – public transportation. If you have to walk to get to a bus/train station on a regular basis, you burn more calories.
Amy, (fatrunner or fatjogger? My wife loved that bit)
You’re right about the men vs women part of it. My wife and I started our weight loss at the same time, and she has had far less results from MUCH more effort than me. This is both from the amount that she would eat better and how much more she would work out.
As for weight, Buzz is right, you guys are lightweights! I’m DOWN to 226, and feeling pretty darn good about it. 325 sucked. Actually, I’ve never been this light since I reached my adult height, so I have no idea what my true goal weight should be. BMI is BS.
Jason-It depends upon how tall you are and your body type.
Like I said earlier, I know what my ideal weight would be, based on what makes me look thin and feel healthy and can be maintained. But on the BMI scale and ideal weight scale, I’ll still be on the heavy side of normal for my height-maybe even slightly over it. The scale says my ideal weight should be around 155 or so. To do that I’d have to stop eating, never lift another weight again, and run at least 13 miles a day. In other words, it won’t happen!
I think those scales need to be revamped a bit.
BTW congrats on losing 100 lbs. How long did it take?
Jason–
If your body is in proper shape to do what you want it to do, and you’re at a weight where your blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar are optimized, I wouldn’t worry about BMI or an “ideal” weight THAT much. Life’s short either way.
Despite my low weight, BP of about 100/50, resting heart rate in the high 50’s, and LDL (bad cholesterol) of 71 (triglycerides 31), my “good cholesterol” (HDL) was 30, which is an independent risk factor for heart disease. Both the trouble-free low LDL and the more worrisome low HDL are thanks in large part to genetics. So there’s probably always going to be something that you can work on. Exercise brought the HDL up to an acceptable 45, so I’ve done what I can. If I had those same numbers at 195 lb., and felt good, it would be hard to argue in favor of losing weight.
On mountains now, I move faster, do better scrambling, and carry more pack weight better. The knees no longer hurt. But I do have to eat pretty constantly compared to before because I don’t really have much reserve. When the calorie intake stops, so do I.
Probably the most practical way to know your “best weight” (assuming cholesterol and BP numbers are equal for argument) is to lose another few pounds and see if you feel faster or slower, stronger or weaker, after having done so. And then consider whether the improvement was worth the trouble. But if you’ve already lost 100 lbs., the most important priority is first to not gain that weight back. Additional loss is bonus.
Thanks for the advice.
I’ve stayed in the 220’s for a year now, but I wasn’t trying very hard over the winter. NIFS has a “bod pod” that measures fat very well. It said (when I was 280) that my body fat % would be around 10% if I got to 225. However, I know I have lost muscle since I’m not carrying all the extra weight around. My guess is that I should be around 200 based on how much is around my gut now.
That brings up another point. While I stayed below 230 over the winter, my lack of riding certainly drained the power out of my legs. I’m fairly certian that while my “weight” didn’t backslide, I was trading muscle for fat all winter long. Then, as I’ve been riding, I notice my belt going in a few notches but my weight still staying the same. Trading fat for muscle. Amy, that could be why you don’t see the weight loss as well.
What we need is a dependable way to measure body fat % at home. Those little hand-held things don’t work, and it seems that right now the only good way is to measure the volume of the body, either with air like NIFS does, or with water.
If we could enable everyone to know their body fat percent and then say “You should be between 6% and 16% for men and 15% to 22% for women” (or whatever the right ones are). I think because everyone knows BMI is flawed in terms of personal measurement, many people ignore it. However, body fat % doesn’t care how tall you are or if you’re “big boned”. The rules could apply for everyone.
It would also allow people to see progress and not be discouraged. I think I have an idea about why the scale isn’t changing for me, so I don’t give up when it doesn’t move but I know I’m getting better. However, someone who is just starting may be making improvements but not see them on the scale, and then quit.
Oh, Rev, to answer your question, about 18 months.
High school grad: 6’0″, 130 lbs
age 19, near death experience: 114 lbs
age 20, resolving never to waste away again, 195 lbs
age 25-30: a little more sensible, 175 lbs
age 30-36: a little less sensible, but into weight training, 195 lbs again
age 37-38: very not-sensible indeed, running for office, 168 lbs
current: 195 again
I’m lucky in that I have a high metabolism, and all it takes for me to lose weight is some regular exercise, or regular high stress. Run for statewide office in earnest. You’ll lose the weight, no matter how many rubber chicken dinners you attend.
I’m playing hockey again and am planning to get back into weight training again along with regular low-impact cardio. (Can’t run. The knees are shot. Hockey is no problem, oddly enough.) The weight will dip to 185-190 for a while, but then will get back up to 195-200 if I stick with the training.
The thing that might shift my numbers a bit is my recent swearing off of high fructose corn syrup. It’s everywhere, and I’m just learning that, but the junk goes straight to your belly. Pure poison.