Turn on the TV or the radio and wait five minutes.
Chances are you will see or hear an advertisement for food. Usually food that’s calorie-dense and not that good for you.
If advertisements didn’t work, businesses wouldn’t waste money on them.
(my bold)
Geez, how do people who use wheelchairs manage to deal with NYC? It sounds dreadful. 
Yes. Only Manhattan is notably lower than the rest of the state.
Well from measuring on Google Maps it is 0.41 miles from the tube station to my office, so if I get the train instead of cycling then that’s four fifths of a mile a day, not counting walking along the platforms and up the stairs. Then it’s 0.18 miles to where I normally get lunch, so there’s another third of a mile plus. One tenth of a mile to a bus stop I would barely even count as a walk.
Maybe the same situation applies in London as in NYC - you have to walk and climb stairs a lot more than if you worked in some out-of-town business park where you can drive right in almost door to door.
It amazes me that people wouldn’t get out and take long walks at the weekend though. If I haven’t been able to get out and exercise all week I feel sluggish and cabin-fevers and need to stretch my legs with a good couple of hours walking by Saturday.
Evolution has wired our physiology to create fat stores when food is abundant and to dip into those stores only when we are starving. This works well for hunter gatherers.
Physiologically, we crave dense-calorie foods over “nutritional” ones. This works (reasonably) well when nutrition is a (relatively) natural consequence of omnivores getting food from multiple sources and dense-calorie foods are a small percentage of overall diet.
We will eat nearly unlimited sweet fat above all other foods if we do not add a layer of intellect to control our eating.
Our food supply is essentially unlimited, and as food is considered a primary greatest good in all societies, production and delivery mechanisms are created to give the masses what they crave most.
We eat too many calories relative to what we burn. We binge-starve (create artificial starvation periods) by “dieting,” during which our bodies burn muscle since the body treats muscle like a checking account and fat like an IRA. Over time our baseline metabolic needs drop because there is less muscle burning calories. This makes it even more difficult to binge-exercise.
It’s a very simple explanation, which is actually well understood.
Yes, it’s “HFCS.” Yes, it’s “lack of exercise.” Yes, it’s “too many calories.”
But the summary is, “Evolution coupled with a change in the original circumstances that created the genes.”
I’m in my mid 30s. When I was a kid the food pyramid was heavily promoted in public school as part of basic education. Then it was featured in various health/pe/science classes throughout middle and high school. So if you grew up when/where I did and do not know the food pyramid, you are probably one of those people who just doesn’t know or remember much of anything.
But people who live in the other boroughs also take the subway a lot. And the subway stations there are farther apart, so they walk even farther home from the station to their house than a resident of Manhatten walks to his apartment.
I have a pulled-from-my-ass theory about why Manhatten residents are thinner: it’s self-selecting, based on social status.
Manhatten is expensive, and/or ultra-cool. The only reason people pay so much to live there is that they have good,yuppie-type jobs, or they have cool, artsy-type jobs.
Yuppies and theater people take good care of their bodies, go to the gym a lot, and care a lot about looking good on the job. Most of them are single, and want to look good for dating.
So there are very few “people of Walmart”* in Manhattan.
- (google it!)
Slightly tangentially…
It might seem ludicrously obvious to observe that overweight people eat more than slim people. We’ve all seen it - generally speaking, the bigger someone is, the more they eat (exceptions notwithstanding…)
If you think about it for a second, though, that would mean that these same overweight people would not just be maintaining their weight, they would be continuously getting fatter. If that were true, though, then most obese people would explode by their mid-twenties.
How is it that someone who weighs 60kg might consume 2000cal per day and maintain their weight, yet a 100kg person might take in twice that and also maintain their weight?
Could it be that larger people are simply heavier, and so they burn more calories simply by existing and doing everyday things like opening the fridge? Do they just poo out the ‘extra’ calories?
Both. The person you’re calling “larger” is heavier than he’d be if he was thinner and therefore uses more energy to move around, but they also do “poo the extra calories”. For many people there is a direct relationship between bad dietary choices (of which amount is a factor*) and gastrointestinal health. * For example, people who are lactose intolerant but in a small degree, who will suffer no consequences if they have a small amount of lactose but anything from a bit of burping to explosive diarrhea if they have too much; the same thing happens for many people and their heartburn triggers. If your two sunny-side-ups, large order of fries and half-a-cake are edible only if accompanied by three Tums… your body is telling you “nooooo!” and you’re refusing to listen.
It’s the Evil Carbohydrates. We didn’t used to have Evil Carbohydrates until the Food Lobby invented them.
Wait…I thought the “Food Lobby” invented Carbohydrates, and the Food Police made them Evil.
I get so confused.
Because “Wendy’s T-Rex Burger Has 9 Patties Of Beefy Goodness”
I totally agree and I don’t care what the supposed experts say. When you quit smoking and start eating you get heavy and that’s the beginning and the end of it. I smoked for 40 years then quit about 6 years ago. I’d never go back to it, but I easily gained 25 pounds because I started eating instead.
Your average suburbanite white-collar North American probably doesn’t walk that much. For them there’s generally no meaningful place to walk to. Even in more urbanized areas, people do tend to drive everywhere. In my own high-density urban neighborhood, I often walk to any of several stores and other amenities within easy reach of my building. I enjoy getting outdoors for the time it takes to do that, but I suspect I’m an exception even around here.
I’m rather skeptical of household gadgets and appliances as major causes of obesity. If you think of people like hotel chambermaids or professional house cleaners, they seem just as likely to be overweight as the the rest of us, and they’re on their feet all day and moving around as they do their work.
But they also tend to be poor. Poor people eat more calorie-dense foods than wealthier people. Probably because of a combination of these foods being cheaper, they were brought up eating these foods, and they lead more stressful lives.
Maybe stress explains everyone else’s bellies too. I don’t know if we are more stressed than we used to be “back in the day”. But couple stress with an environment rife with convenience foods designed to be addictive along with a more sedentary lifestyle, and why wouldn’t you have an obese populace?
IMHO the really perplexing question is “Why aren’t most people fat?”
We have lots of independent systems in our bodies to signal hunger. )That’s why it’s so hard to make a good appetite suppresant.) The evolutionary reasons for this are obvious, and pointed out above. We crave sweet, fatty, yummy stuff – the stuff we’re told not to eat!
Food is cheap and practically limitless, for most of us. So why aren’t we all fat?
The differences over time have been pointed out above:
- typical portion size (God bless capitalism! I say sheepishly, as a staunch capitalist …)
- food mrfs learning how to tickle our hunger bone (oops capitalism again)
- even more sedentary lifestyle
- food is a lower portion of our budget than ever, so fewer people have financial food limits (that’s just a sign of a good economy – should happen for any effective economy, right?)
- HFCF makes it cheaper to load up food with calories, and yum we love it
Air conditioning? Maybe, but if so, we’d see a higher growth in obesity in southern climes than northern ones, where AC is less needed. In Michigan, we only needed AC about 15 days of the year. Here in NC, more like 100 or 150. Is there that much more obesity here?
But wow, what a difference in portion sizes since the 60’s and 70’s. Back then, a “doggy bag” was rarely needed. Today, I typically have a decent sized portion left over, at a restaurant. I doubt I eat less now than I did then.
My 2¢:
“I’m big-boned”
No, a brontosaurus is big-boned.
Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How
Stop fuckin’ eating!
Thank you, I’ll be here all week!
I live in a white collar suburban neighborhood. There’s a little corner minimall within walking distance. That place has two convenience stores (and yes, both seem to do pretty good business)/gas stations, a donut shop, a cell phone store, and a couple of empty storefronts. There’s a Mexican chain restaurant on the other corner. So, only one place to walk to that doesn’t sell food, and I don’t really want to go hang out at the cell phone store that often. There’s nothing else around, unless I want to cross a couple of VERY busy freeway interchanges, and I’m not even sure if it’s legal.
I make sure to go to Target or another big store or a book store a couple of times a week, just to browse in air conditioning. I don’t go very fast, but I do get a lot of walking in.
I don’t live in America, so I have that advantage, but there are plenty of fat folks here in the UK too. I think a big part of it is just down to personal variance. I simply don’t like the sensation of feeling over full. The idea of a 9-patty burger, as mentioned above, fills me with nauseous horror. Gorging myself would just make me feel ill.
Maybe my stomach is physically smaller than average, but I do notice that in group situations I tend to eat less, and more slowly, than most people. I also have less of a belly than most people. These two facts are possibly not unrelated.
In which case I am quite fortunate that my “full” signal switches on earlier than most. Of course, I lived in the famine-stricken past I’d probably have been one of the first to starve to death… 
Me too. I was very underweight most of my life (BMI of 15 or less). Like you, I don’t care for a burger with more than 1/3 lbs of beef, I hate being overfull, and I feel full when I am full, not 20 minutes later – usually. Also, I tend to skip a lot of meals, esp breakfast and lunch. Around age 40 I gained 40 lbs in 3 years, thank goodness, and today I remind myself to stop eating when I could still enjoy eating more to avoid going over 180 lbs. I have no moral high ground to stand on and chide those who are overweight; being skinny was a curse (albeit a mild one) not a blessing, and today it’s still easy to maintain, even if I pig out on fatty foods now and then.
When you’re underweight it’s hard to put on pounds. One reason is when others are comfortable, you feel cold! I think I used a lot of calories shivering. Even after 15 years, I still tend to put on more clothing than I need for the weather; lifelong habits are hard to break.
But regarding personal variance, that doesn’t answer why the population is getting more obese in general, over time. Maybe we can blame it all on computers. 