The prevalence of obesity was 39.8% and affected about 93.3 million of US adults in 2015~2016. [Read CDC National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer that are some of the leading causes of preventable, premature death.
The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was $147 billion in 2008 US dollars; the medical cost for people who have obesity was $1,429 higher than those of normal weight.
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
Why do you think with all the fad diets and exercise gyms and equipment out there that Americans are so overweight? I was a little surprised it was as high as 39.8% of us are obese.
Obesity certainly is a problem although to be honest I think part of the problem is just what is considered "obese".
I'm about 6'4 and at my heaviest I weighed a little over 280. That gave me a BMI of slightly under 35. I don't dispute that I was fat. Saying I was obese might be medically accepted due to having a BMI over 30 but frankly damaged the credibility (in my eyes at least) of the person saying it. Calling me borderline morbidly obese (technically true, since my BMI was close to 35) would mean the speaker might as well stop talking because I'd probably have stopped listening. Although my weight was higher than ideal - I'm currently taking aim at a weight closer to 220-230 with a view to then deciding whether to aim at 200-210 - BMI is such a crude tool I'm amazed people still take it seriously. According to BMI figures I think my ideal weight is somewhere under 200 which I suspect would leave me looking like a stick.
Just one issue with BMI is that it doesn't consider body composition at all. Jonny Wilkinson, one-time rugby player for the England national team, was reported to have had a BMI of 29.8 which means he is technically borderline obese. Of course not all of us have muscles like an international rugby player but an example like this shows that BMI is only useful as a guide rather than as an absolute determinant. For someone like me, I'm carrying more fat than is ideal around my middle but because I like to walk in the mountains my leg muscles are particularly bulky simply because it takes power to carry my weight up a big hill.
As for why Americans are so overweight, I think it's a simple matter of too much food going in and not enough calories being burned paired with a notion that all fat people need is some pills so they can carry on shoveling junk into their mouths and not moving around at all. The widespread availability of mobility scooters simply means that the people who most need to move around don't even need to do that - they can let the machine move them while they continue to eat their own body weight in ice cream and candy.
Of course there are people out there who are overweight as a result of impaired mobility. I loosely know a guy in his 20s who has steadily gained a lot of weight over the last couple of years. He is a quadriplegic due to a horrendous accident he wasn't expected to survive, so naturally it's hard for him to take very much exercise. But then I see people at fairs wobbling around on mobility scooters eating the superjumbo sized ice creams and deep fried Oreos and caramel popcorn and whatever else is loaded with enough calories to see an average person through the week. I can't tell whether the weight gain caused the mobility issues or the reverse, but can tell that eating supersized portions of ice cream while not burning any calories at all is unlikely to help the situation.
At the park I go to hike it's disappointing to see many trails, including trails very close to the park that aren't even very long, getting overgrown with grasses and ferns. As the park manager said, that's the kind of vegetation that would be restrained if there were just more people walking the trails because they would trample it so it couldn't take over. I hiked one such trail as part of my loop today - it's half a mile and loops from the parking lot back to the parking lot. It's overgrown through lack of use. The park gets used, but it seems people don't want to walk half a mile through the woods. The longer trails are maintained by clubs and curiously are used more - it seems the long trails are used by serious hikers who may incidentally use one or more of the local trails as links to get from one to another, while the local trails get ignored. The fact resources are available to exercise doesn't mean the people who need exercise will make use of them. One of the sad ironies is that once people get to a certain weight it becomes ever-harder to start shifting it because it's so easy to assume that gyms are there for people with better bodies, and feel very self-conscious wobbling on a treadmill at 2mph panting and puffing while the person next to you has run 10 miles and hasn't even broken a sweat yet.
Another thing that really doesn't help is the prevalence of things that show calorie burn rates that are hugely unrealistic. When I was more into cycling than now I used to figure that moving my then 240-odd pound frame on a bike at around 15mph average burned in the region of 40 calories per mile, assuming I was pedaling the entire time. On a longer ride I usually worked on the basis of 30 calories per mile, since I'd freewheel for more of the time and didn't push as hard to conserve my energy. Now I have a power meter on a stationary bicycle that tells me exactly how much power I'm putting down and it seems those figures are reasonably accurate, if maybe marginally on the high side. A friend posted a "workout log" from some phone app or another that showed something like 8 miles covered in 50 minutes and a total calorie burn of something like 985 calories. For that workout at that speed my friend would have actually burned more like 160-200 calories. Had she believed she had burned nearly 1000 calories and taken on 400 to replace some of them she would have thought she was down 600 calories when really she was up 200. Had she mentally cut the calorie burn in half figuring it might be high and taken on 250 calories she'd have taken on every single one she burned and then some, while still thinking she was ahead of the game. In a situation like that it would appear she was doing everything right so it would be entirely understandable that she'd wonder why cycling wasn't resulting in weight loss.
And then that feeds back into the issue of the definition of obesity. When I started cycling I lost four inches from my waistline before the scale showed I had shed any discernible weight at all. What had happened was that I'd lost fat and gained muscle, so my body was getting smaller and its composition was changing, despite the fact my BMI hadn't moved at all because it has no way of measuring such things. So based on BMI alone I appeared to have achieved nothing despite being visibly slimmer and much fitter and, as a result, being healthier.
