It takes no genius to know that the United States has long been in the throes of an obesity epidemic. We’ve all probably heard that about one-third of all adults in this country are obese. And that’s just “obese” people–people whose Body Mass Indices are at or over 30. By that point, it’s already gone far beyond the comfort zone. I was once a member of that bloated group and am fortunate to have worked my way out. If you were to include people who were also classified as “overweight,” that number climbs up to about 63% of the US adult population. But in full disclosure, Europe’s not that much better–about half the population of the European Union is either overweight or obese. I wouldn’t find much solace in that, though. It just makes things worse. (Even so, the first thing I noticed when I came back to the US after a semester abroad in Madrid was how starkly fatter everyone seemed. It made me marvel even more over how Spaniards managed to eat dinner so late at night yet remain relatively slim.)
A visual restatement of the obvious. (Maybe Colorado is better because people ski and hike and stuff.)
I’m afraid to say that our problems don’t just end with lots of overweight people. We can all learn to live with the wave of obesity if we’re not going to have any success trying to reverse the trend. Plenty of people can technically be overweight and still look like they are well-built and proportional. Our big problem now is that those proportions are becoming less and less common.
An increasing number of people have fat bodies but skinny ankles.
On the other hand, it's not just overweight people who can suffer this fate.
It’s one of the really fascinating anatomical features of modern-day Americans. If you saw a parade of Americans walking behind a curtain that was shortened so that you could see people’s legs from the knees down, you’d think that only a small handful of people were overweight. But raise that curtain all the way and you’ll see lots of people who look really mismatched from top to bottom, as if they were large fruits with forks jammed in for legs.
I think it has to be a symptom of our American workplace and sedentary way of life. Most of us tend to gain weight around the stomach. That’s simple enough. But add to that the fact that we hardly walk unless we live in a city. Our leg muscles slowly wither away and are left with little meat on the bones. Then when a person with slender legs and substantial body does try to walk or jog a fair distance, the pain and discomfort catches up quickly. It becomes a vicious cycle where pain leads to no movement, which leads to more weight and thinner legs, which leads back to pain. That solves the not-so-difficult riddle of why people often putter around supermarkets in those motorized carts even though they don’t look handicapped. (I’m not callous enough to say that I can visually tell what people are or aren’t handicapped, but I’ll willingly bet money that not everyone who rides around in those carts really needs to.)
It’s one thing to have extra meat on your bones. It’s another to have little more than bones for your legs, both of which can hardly withstand your weight. It’s something that I hope our society can somehow address before it becomes a widely accepted physiological trait of the average American. That kind of body shape inevitably leads me to think about one individual.
He's like a bowling ball balanced on two wooden dowels.
Fortunately, very few people are anywhere as unappealing as The Penguin or Danny DeVito. But unfortunately, The Penguin probably walks more in Batman Returns than the average American does in a week. Not so sure about Danny DeVito, though.
I draw sometimes. 