Why can't Americans lose weight? Obesity rate projections?

Here are a few:

1) Busy lifestyles. Long commutes to work, long workdays. No time for exercise.

2) Lousy diets. No time to cook at home so people eat out. McDs is convenient.

3) Food costs. In the USA it is cheaper to eat fried meals at places like Popeye's than to cook healthy at home. Go price a salad from Whole Foods vs a Big mac Value meal.

4) White collar work means asses are parked in chairs and not on an assembly line or on the farm doing physical labor.

5) Feeling of invincability. Advanced health care will fix me up if I have a heart attack, so why be thin.

6) It's easy to gain weight and 20X more difficult to get it off. Losing even a pound a week can be tough but gaining a pound a week is easy: just eat a lot of very tasty, fatty, comfort food and drink some cold beer or Pepsi with it.

7) Most Americans have a comfortable lifestyle in front of the television and let's face it there are lots of very good American produced shows to watch. Ditto for electronic games for kids to play. You never have to get off your ass to have fun in America.

By no means are these reasons restricted to the USA. Canada and the UK are in the same gravy boat. In Canada though we watch American and British television when we lounge on the coach. Canadian tv sucks.

I walked into a Starbucks at 6 a.m. over the weekend while my family was still sleeping after a big xc meet. I hardly ever go there but really needed some coffee. The woman in front of me orders a 20 ounce abomination, something like 'caramel macchiato', huge sugary looking thing. The clerk asks, 'With whipped cream and extra chocolate chips?' Lady: 'Oh, absolutely!' That, along with some sugary pastry thing. I'm betting over 1k calories right there and maybe that was just a snack before breakfast??? I swear, it made me nauseated. If this is what most Americans are doing, there's no wonder they're all fat. I went to a college xc race the same weekend and the back 50% of the women's pack all were lard asses with cellulite. Just amazing.

Fat Americans are symbolic of a deeper malaise.

When America was lean and hungry, she built up a great country, the richest, most powerful in the world, reaching its apex, the height of its power and glory, round about WW2 and the decade or so after.

But ‘decline and fall’ - rather swifter than previous empires it seems.

Just as fatties, overindulge, gorge themselves, lack the necessary will-power and the moral fibre to stay healthy, they’re simply reflecting their nation’s new morals, ethics, standards, call them what you will.

Take buggary as an example.

Back in my early days, homosexuality was a criminal offence.

Few were actually ever charged with the offence, but at least the law kept the perverts underground - not open flaunting themselves as they do these days.

And when we’ve reached the stage when the actually get married and adopt children - no wonder countries end up going to the dogs.

One could take a graph and measure the rise in obesity and other distasteful behaviour and as that rises - so America has gone from being by far the world’s greatest creditor nation - to being by far, the world’s greatest debtor nation.

The government is obsessed with getting food to the masses in a safe and cost-effective manner. This focus on low-cost distribution/delivery of food is the problem. If it's low cost, it will be very process, high in kcals, etc. Government, in my opinion, needs to take the majority of the blame.

All these fatties are horrid.

Aftermath of adenovirus 36 infection.

Americans are fat because of gays? Nice. What else? Kids don't do well in science because parents stopped giving them beatings for talking out of line? The US auto industry started on the road to bankruptcy when it became legal for coloreds and whites to intermarry? Manufacturing jobs went to China when sodomy laws were taken off the books? Or did everything start going to pot when we let the black Irish into the US?

Gay people are less obese than the average american.

Well only in America can the stereotype of a poor person be a huge fat person. Think of the irony?

Get ride of welfare and hand outs.. we'll be skinny again.

Also we have a very diverse population and certain ethic groups are more prone to being over weight than others (just like infant mortality, high blood pressure, cardio pulmanary issues, etc..) If we were more homogeneous you could more easily pin point the issue down to one or two causes.

Obesity is a multilevel problem in the West. Apart from the ridiculous trolling going on in this thread, as was to be expected, the problems of obesity throughout the Western world, and now moving into the Eastern world as well(http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-01-08-chinese-obesity_x.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3737162.stm

) is a result of greater prosperity and food going from a scarcity to a surplus faster than we can adapt our culture to it.

The problem is that all of this is based on energy prices remaining relatively low. Modern agriculture relies on cheap petroleum to power the machinery, make the fertilizer and ship the produce. If energy prices were to spike faster than the economy could match it we would all be up a creek.

That being said, I have thoroughly sidetracked the conversation. The obesity problem is so multifaceted that it goes to the very core of modernity. I shudder when I watch shows like The Biggest Loser, because despite the apparent honesty of the participants they are unintentionally fueling the unhealthy attitude we have to food and exercise. What that show portrays is that in order to be healthy you have to fight, you have buy a gym membership, you have to hate eating, you need a intervention and personal trainer… essentially you need an expert to control your cravings. As long as people buy into this dangerous myth nutrition and healthy living will continually be a mystery for our society.

I apologize for the rambling nature of this post… there are just so many issues to address.

because it's hard.

All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing,

For instance, since 2001, America has lost 42,200 factories.

Roughly 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 workers.

You are witnessing the deindustrialization of America, tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone.

Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period.

In fact, the nation has lost 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since 2000. That puts the number of American workers in the manufacturing sector at under 12 million for the first time since 1941.

That is nearly the same amount of people who are employed at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies. From 1999 to 2008, foreign affiliates increased their employment 30 percent to 10.1 million.

Part of the reason behind America’s industrial decline is the fact that the nation’s economy is too reliant on consumption. And the vast majority of things Americans consume are not made by Americans.

Of the 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2008, not a single one was manufactured in the U.S.

And despite the fact that more people around the world own computers than ever before, U.S. employment in the manufacturing of personal computers is lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined,

Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world.

America’s largest export today is waste paper, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us.

Without a vibrant manufacturing base, the U.S. can hardly consider itself a great nation.

That is why every single American should be deeply concerned about the plight of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country, but sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.

WTC wrote:

Take buggary as an example.

If you insist on going to such lengths to play a character on this thread, at least spell your obscure British English words correctly -- it's "buggery".

so, so far we have gotten answers on who to blame for the obesity epidemic such as:

blame gays

blame the gov't

blame the black lady in the white house.

Excellent. The right wing nut-cases never disappoint on here.

I was in CVS this morning (9:30 am) and I witnessed a woman purchasing her obese ~10-year-old child one of those candies that is shaped like a baby bottle but is full of extra-sour sugar powder.

The check-out clerk asked the kid why they weren't at school and the mom said she was home sick with a cold.

So not only are parents buying their fat kids candy, but they are buying them candy at 9:30 in the morning when they are sick. WTF?

Ive noticed that almost every biker I see nowadays completely overweight I think its becoming socially acceptable to wear tight biking clothes and be fat as hell. They also talk about how far they rode and are completely confident that they are athletes.

This is an intelligent and thoughtful answer. It is a disgrace and does not belong on LetsRun

Nice points Lobster Chowdah but I disagree with number 5. You dont know when a heart attack's coming and it's not like Americans think about the consequences. You may be right in a sense with the cholesterol lowering drugs for Americans who claim "diet and exercise weren't enough." That's actually true for some people but not true for a whole lot.

Diet is the key, too much fat and junk food. As long as junk food is cheap and available then Americans will be fat and out of shape. It's the same everywhere else. Look at the kenyans, a super low fat diet and zero junk, they also appreciate the value of hard work. It's not genetics that make them so thin and strong, that's how a healthy human looks.