Does your region affect your attitude toward weight/health?

Heh. My state is 37th on that list. We're also the second poorest in the nation. Thank goodness for Mississippi. You're always there to make us feel better about ourselves.

I suppose I've been on the outside looking in all my life and I've never paid much mind to what other people are thinking or doing. At least if I have, (because I am still human) I don't let other's observations change my goals. I pretty much put the blame squarely on my own shoulders and either change or remain miserable.

I don't talk much about what I'm doing to lose weight and not many people ask. When they do, thankfully their eyes glaze over and we talk about something else.

Here skinny minny (or however it gets written) always seems like a compliment, at least in my social circles (I am sure within the city there are big differences). Thin is good, period.

This is a very interesting discussion. I live in Vancouver, which is considered affluent compared to most of the rest of Canada. It's also easy to remain active all year round, given our mild climate. I've noticed that people in general seem to be a healthier weight here as compared to when I travel throughout Canada and the U.S. but never though much of it. At the beginning of this year we had an employee transfer from our Toronto office to Vancouver and one of the first things he mentioned is how our office seems to be a very healthy group of people. In an office of 35 staff, there are only 3 people who I would consider overweight, and none I would say are obese.

So yes, I definitely think where you live affects your attitude towards health.

I've never heard anyone use "Skinny Minnie" to mean anything except a compliment. A neighbor called me "Skinny Minnie" yesterday.. I think that's the first time I've heard anyone apply the name to me and I laughed out loud.

I live in MN but have lived in WA, TX, CA, & ND, for what it's worth.

Incidentally, "Minnie" is a woman's nickname. I had a great-grandmother with that name. It's a diminuitive for "Wilhelmina" and all of that name's many variants (as is the more gothic-sounding "Mina" of Brahm Stoker fame). The most famous Minnie of all:

I live in the mountains, where there are a lot of skiers and mountain bikers, and a lot of obese people.

No, not for me. I've never needed support or some sort of example from my peers, this has always been purely about me in my mind. I live in the North East of England by the way, which pretty much finishes near the top of every terrible league table for poor quality of life going and has seems to have more branches of Greggs (a sort of cross between McDonalds and a bakery) than their are people. If anything, the higher than average number of people who are in less than healthy state is more of a motivator because to me it's an easy opportunity to rise above what is accepted by many. I'm going to sound arrogant here, but as someone who has one hell of an inferiority complex, doing something where I can be better than most is too good an opportunity to pass up.

DancingDarl wrote: »

I see worn out haggered women all the time going way over top because of eating out. I just prefer not to exercize just so i can eat more..

I thought you were supposed to be a dancer, at least that is what I assume from what you have chosen to call yourself, and the several times I have seen you post about ballet. Now you say that your only activities are housekeeping. Very interesting. Generally when 25-year-olds identify as dancers they are in the studio several times a week, working en pointe, and are ballerina-ripped with lean muscle that take hours and hours of extremely challenging work to maintain.

EvgeniZyntx wrote: »

I'm curious about this: "I don't believe in overexerting myself and aging myself too much"

Do you believe that exercise "ages" you? How?

That could be an interesting new thread.

Most people I know who exercised hard in their youth are now showing the cost. A lot of arthritis, soft tissue injuries and pain. The people who would not have been considered athletes in their teens to 30s seem to be in better condition (meaning fewer wear and tear problems) than the rest of us.

sawyeram wrote: »

I've had exposure to two completely different regions. I'm born and raised in the south and 5 years ago moved to the Midwest.

The South - Food is love and family. Food is a reason for people to gather. There's no low fat, low sugar, low calorie option when it comes to Southern food and that is the very reason why it tastes so good. We enjoy it and savor it but there is a balance of food with activity. In the South you go outside to hike, camp, swim, play sports, play with your cousins, build a treehouse, ride your bike, hunt, run, walk, etc . . . Southerners are active and while they may not be at the correct medical weight on the BMI scale they have the strength and the endurance to rival any athlete. Southerners tend to be larger people overall but you have to be to wrestle a bull or tip a cow.

The Midwest - Food is also a priority here but it's not the whole foods that I was used to (like fresh from the garden veggies). People use instant potatoes rather than real potatoes (ugh, the horror). Kids aren't taught to eat a variety of veggies . . . or any veggies for that matter. People don't cook homemade meals here they eat out or eat from a box. Here's a couple examples: For my daughters 10th birthday party I rented a room at a hotel with an indoor pool (I always choose a location where the kids can be active and have a lot of fun). We swam first for 3 hours and then took a break to eat. I had purchased a Subway sandwich platter with half turkey half ham sandwiches with lettuce and tomato only. Seven out of ten girls removed the veggies from the sandwich and one informed me that she doesn't eat salad. I told her it wasn't salad it was lettuce. She didn't even know the name of lettuce!!!!! my other example. I'm driving my son (15) and his friend (16) to the skating rink and I hear them talking about food. I hear the friend say that he doesn't like eggs. I'm surprised because being teenage boys they scarf down breakfast like they're starving. I told him I though he liked them since he eats them when he's at our house. He agrees he does like them, at our house but that because his parents can't cook very well. He informs me that he eats everything at our house because "ya'll can cook!" We cook 90% of our meals at home and rarely eat out, other people here don't do that. The people here also have one of the most sedentary lifestyles I've ever seen. No one goes outside, the athletes at my sons school are out of shape and the ones that aren't overweight are skinny fat (no muscles). He's a freshman and is stronger than all the seniors. In gym class, my daughters gym teacher wanted them to do crunches ... no one (other than my daughter) knew what it was. What is going on here???

I think it depends on your particular milieu, both in the South and up North...to counter one anecdote with another, I just hosted a birthday party for a mass of 10 year old girls and was heartened to notice plates piled up with lots of fresh veggies and dip, in addition to all the birthday goodies. We had an overnight and they ate me out of fruit the next morning, although they did equal justice to the waffles. I can only think of one or two somewhat-overweight kids in my daughter's grade at a parochial school; probably 75% of the moms are annoyingly skinny, fit and trim; I am starting to get there at 25% BMI but if you split the moms into a 50/50 group I would probably fall close to the dividing line. It might be a different story for the public school system.

Our old historic-register neighborhood in the city is anchored by another parochial school, so we have a ton of families around, and I can testify that the neighborhood kids as a whole are extremely active and outside, day and night, running around screaming, taking shortcuts through our yard, shutting down the street to play baseball, etc. Most of the people in the neighborhood are thin to just slightly overweight. We go to the lake nearly every weekend in the summer, and up there our two kids live outside all day long, with their lake friends, until they are forced in at night. Interestingly, despite being Northerners, my children also love to go crazy playing with their cousins outside, and they love to climb trees, camp, hike, ride bikes, and "hunt" morel mushrooms and paw paws. Much to their chagrin, they have not yet build a treehouse (they need to develop load-bearing carpentry skills first, unless having dad do it counts), but they erect elaborate tent cities with sheets and stakes in the yard nearly every warm weekend.

Although it has never occurred to me to expect my daughter to know what crunches are (or to fit them in when her primary job at school is to learn the finer points of floor hockey, v-ball and flag football, and at home is to run amok at the playground, along with conditioning for x-country and learning to barrel race horses), I know she does sit ups, push ups and pull ups in gym because she then does them at home. Next to me. Faster than I can do them. She sees me doing assorted crunches, planks, other core conditioning, and a variety of lifts, but mostly tunes me out, even though I try to show her, "This is a clean....this is a snatch...this is a deadlift.....look at my Bulgarian split squats!" If I asked her in the next hour what any move was, she probably wouldn't be able to remember.

That all being said, I cannot argue with you on Southern cuisine, from barbeque to bourbon to boiled peanuts to jambalaya on the Bayou, because Southern foods are the crown jewel of *real* American cuisine, and I am heartened to see the renaissance in traditional foodways. Reading between the lines, I am guessing that you are terribly homesick and have to deal with a raft of really crappy and unfair stereotypes. I get homesick every time I go down South, and have never even lived there.

HappyCampr1 wrote: »

I'm in North Florida and the people I know all go out to eat in a restaurant to get together with friends. All get togethers involve food and drinks.

Family comes to visit...which restaurant? (My mother-in-law will call to say she's coming in from another city (two hours away) and ask if we want to meet at such & such restaurant. She doesn't even stop by the house...she just wants to see us when she's here). We socialize and catch up on things at the restaurant.

Friends in from out of town...which restaurant?

Neighbors want to get together for Friday night...Are you cooking or are we going out to eat?

There's never a question that food will be involved and most seem to think that it's an imposition on the host for them to cook...so restaurants it is. The attitude is that by going to a restaurant, you're saving people from having to work just because you wanted to spend time together.

I'm sure this is not the norm in other places. It's just been my experience here.

I live in WA (38th ranked), but all of my family and a lot of my friends live back in the Midwest, in the 7th and 12th fattest states. This is exactly how it is. They live to eat at (usually chain) restaurants. It is a status thing to some extent and they will all spend dumb amounts of money eating out. If not on that, it is on overprocessed convenience foods. There is also a push to make everything as fattening as possible in huge portions because that is what Real Food Is(TM). Like they are all photocopies of Guy Fieri when it comes to discriminating food tastes. All of my family and most of my friends back there are overweight to supermorbidly obese. I was just on the cusp of supermorbid obesity until I came out here and straightened myself out.

It helps though that WA is a state with unending outdoor possibilities and you should be in decent shape to take part in exploring a lot of it. That was part of the motivation for me to continue losing weight. WA also has better public transit in general, more bike lanes, etc. The weather here is also pretty nice most of the year. At least it is not -20 an blowing snow in the winter or 110 with 100% humidity in the summer. You can just toss on a raincoat on and go out in the winter and in the summer, it is just perfect, sunny, low humidity outdoor weather. No one comes out and straight up fitnessnazis you into doing anything, but there is a subtle pressure to be active and/or eat better.

The area I work in is very highly educated and diet/fitness is an obvious priority. Lots of people at my job bike to work or use the gym or have active outdoor lives outside of work. They make an effort to eat right and watch their weight. It is sort of reversed at my workplace from the general population that most people are normal BMI with maybe 30% overweight+. However, I can easily go outside this bubble...for instance, take a trip to Winco, and things are drastically different. Not only are most of the adults shopping there obese to supermorbidly obese, so are their children. I love shopping there for the bulk section and prices, but man, it can be depressing to see some 8 year old there that probably weighs more than I do.

sawyeram wrote: »

The Midwest - Food is also a priority here but it's not the whole foods that I was used to (like fresh from the garden veggies). People use instant potatoes rather than real potatoes (ugh, the horror). Kids aren't taught to eat a variety of veggies . . . or any veggies for that matter. People don't cook homemade meals here they eat out or eat from a box.

This is 100% not my experience of the midwest. We always ate fresh food and vegetables when I was growing up (however, we ate canned when we lived in AK for a while, for obvious reasons). My grandparents in IA had a huge, lovely garden, and their idea of a perfect snack was home-dried fruit or, for special occasions, fruit pie, made at home. Birthday cakes and so on were normally homemade. Sure, we ate meat and potatoes (and a veg), and not the fried and delicious specialties that the South is known for -- but fresh and wholesome, yes. Going out to eat was rare, and my mother would have thought she'd be judged harshly if we didn't eat our vegetables or didn't have a home cooked meal (even though she now admits she dislikes cooking).

Today, I see similar things among my friends, including those with kids and in my neighborhood (which has a very low rate of obesity), except that the potatoes aren't as prominent, the vegetables are more exotic on average, and people eat out somewhat more, but not fast food normally, more likely local spots and a lot more ethnic cuisine (when I was a kid people ate "American" or "Chinese" or "Italian").

I live in Chicago, which is certainly the midwest, and specifically on the north side. There are communities and neighborhoods with serious obesity issues here, although on average the ones most likely to have close and recent connections to the South (and also problems like food deserts and poverty).

Environment impacts your health and weight. As well as the company you keep.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

Yes. I was born in the deep south and grew up there. Since then I've lived in several US states and Western Europe. I live in Colorado now. Being in a place where so many people are always up for a ride, hike, run and eat healthy is a great environment. Yes, its on you to find the answers you seek to make yourself live healthily, however, environment is a factor.