An Observation About Obesity

According to what I’ve read, obesity is becoming more and more of a problem in the United States. What I find interesting however is that there also seems to be more and more people out running and biking. Especially biking. In the past ten years I’ve noticed a steady increase in traffic on the bike paths. If I hadn’t read about this problem with obesity, I would have guessed that the opposite was happening.

It seems to me that there may be two conflicting trends. More people are becoming obese while, at the same time, more people are getting in shape. If this is the case, that means that the real trend is that there are now less people are in the middle.

In the introduction on this blog, I mentioned that I grew up skinny started gaining weight in my 30’s. Since I had never dealt with being overweight before, I was oddly happy to NOT be skinny. Fortunately, a seemingly unsuspecting string of events occurred that made me aware of how warped my thinking was so I could change it.

My theory is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to avoid becoming overweight when they reach a certain age. This is causing an increase in the number of people becoming obese. There are also more people now fighting this trend than before.

With all of our modern day conveniences, it’s not a big surprise that obesity would become an issue. It’s also not a surprise that more people are fighting it.  Unfortunately, at the moment we are just not keeping up.