What do you think of the obesity epidemic in the U.S.?

My home state of Kentucky is one of the "ground zero" states for the obesity epidemic.

Lots of fried foods, a distaste for vegetables that aren't fried or loaded with salt, and gallons of soda and sweet tea help us tip the scale among the heaviest states in the union.

We're also kings in cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

If I were 30 years younger I'd be scared sh*tless that an increasing chunk of my paycheck would be paying for my-- and everyone else's -- health care.

I moved to Florida from Colorado last fall. When we first got here, we stayed with my in laws while we looked for a house. The school that my daughter went to for the first month was in the free breakfast/lunch program, and like 75% of the kids at the school were on the plan. The options they had were HORRIBLE. Pop tarts, sugary cereals, bagels loaded with flavored cream cheese.... and it wasn't one thing they could pick, but 3!!! The kids would line up every morning and get all this food and nobody would be there to tell them that it was enough. Sadly, I think I is way cheaper to eat horribly than to eat well, so I think the obesity epidemic goes hand in hand with our economic problems. The drive through line at mcds wraps around the block on Tuesdays and Thursdays when happy meals are cheaper. If we want to change things, we need to make healthy food more readily available and educate people about what they are eating/ feeding their children!

I notice this stuff too all the time. I play a game as I am driving and count how many overweight ppl I see vs how many healthy people. Nearly everyone you see is overweight.

However, when you go to places like San Diego CA it is the opposite. Nearly everyone IS in shape. My bf and I played a game to see if we could find an overweight person. It took us about an hour and we only saw ONE. Everyone was walking, biking, skateboarding. I guess where it is warmer, there is more of an opportunity to "get out and move". In colder states we would freeze many days in the winters if we tried to walk. The ice, snow and freezing rain are also a factor. Lack of sun is yet another factor as the sun (vit D) can speed metabolism.

When I visit my home state of Nebraska I notice that there are more heavy people there (by an alarming rate) than there is in my current state in the south.

The children are what scare me the most. For the first time in the history of the world, our children's life expectancy as adults is less than ours. It has always been that each generation was expected to live to an older age than their parents due to modern medicine, etc. Now that has changed, it's due to lifestyle and the poisons in foods (video games, Internet, texting, McDonald's on every corner).

As a school teacher, I remember looking at the children lined up to go out for recess and nearly every one of them had an electronic game in their hand. They were wanting to go out and sit under a tree and play their games. I made each one of them put them up. They asked, "what are we going to do?". . .I said "grab a ball", you'll figure it out. They were 'BORED!'

In the cafeteria at school, the children in some schools don't have to eat their lunch, before allowed to purchase countless cookies. Yet in a different state where I taught, sweets are not allowed in schools, even if it is a birthday or Halloween, etc. Everyone must bring a healthy snack. We can't take recess away for punishment according to our new laws, so instead we made them walk outside as punishment.

My feelings about obesity are that it is a sad phenomenon. My thinking about it is that there are many factors involved. One of the foremost is STRESS. Not just the hormonal consequences of it (which are profoundly disturbing), but the behavioral as well.

The frantic pace at which we live is not conducive to really relaxing and enjoying food, and so many of us just "shovel" it in as we run. We also have an abundance of mass produced, highly processed, genetically altered, readily available foods which we do not have to physically labor over to bring to table.

I do what I can do instill healthy eating and exercise values and habits to my kids so they don't become on of the stats too. I can't control what anyone else does, other than try to set a good example.

The USA is ranked #1 and eating itself into economic abyss.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity

I do think it's sad but I don't think that it's just something that hit us out of nowhere and it's not something that is just hitting the United States. The whole world is going through the same thing on some level.

If you think back to how much food has changed and the way we deal with it on a daily basis. Food is all over the place all the time. There is no place where there isn't food or we don't eat.

Also you have to take into consideration how much LESS physical activity we do that 50/100 years ago. Technology does everything for us now. There are machines that fix machines.

There is also a lack of nutritional information out there. Admittedly I have fallen for a lot of the fad diets over time but look at our own food pyramid. How many times has that changed since it came out? There is a lot of old information that people hold onto as the written word and in the next ten years imagine what they'll come out with.

I realize that there are a lot of programs in place to try to help people but it's going to take a long time to fix this. It's easy to not care about your health and it takes planning and dedication to eat well and exercise. It takes will power and an inner strength on the days where you just don't want to and most people like the path of least resistance. I know, I was one of them!

I'm actually shocked to be put in the obese category recently. I'm one of those people who never had a weight problem - I ran nearly every day and was at least somewhat conscious about what I ate. I wasn't OCD about it nor did I weight my food, but I definitely made sure to get at least half my body weight in grams of protein everyday. I was fine until I stopped most activity in 2008. I went from about 170 lbs up over 200lbs. I was shocked when health professionals weighed me at work one day.

My problem seemed to be that I was socializing more and that meant beers and fried appetizers like boneless wings. We also might do a thick pizza one night a week. I basically stopped watching what I was doing and wasn't exercising. I think that other people have the same problem - too many choices out there and it takes time to either prepare food, plan the day's meals or research what they are shoveling into their bodies. There also seems to be a "i'll fix it later" attitude, I know I certainly was guilty of that. What kills me now is that the work and effort required to lose the fat and get out of the obese range is much harder than just making some basic daily choices and 30 minutes of exercise/day. I know people who've never actually been inside a gym before and they are pushing middle age.

You know, it's sad that so many people don't enjoy an active lifestyle anymore.

That said, i'd feel so ****ing fat knowing that people are looking at me and "counting" me as some kind of lined up cow.

Seeing me for a few seconds in a mall, you'd not know that I've worked hard and busted my *kitten* to lose 65 pounds. Maybe half of them just started eating right in the Jan. 1st crowd.

This is actually one of the reasons I make sure my kids see me work out. So they know it's healthy. And normal. I grew up with fried food, soda, and koolaid, and thanks to metabolism, I did NOT have a weight problem. I should have....I ate crap, hardly any veggies, no water. I do have junk in my house, and we all enjoy it in moderation. But that is also balanced with lots of healthy stuff throughout the day. We really have to set the foundation and the groundwork for these kids.