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Why We're Getting Fat
Overweight, plump, voluptuous, heavy-set, or (if you're not feeling politically correct), fat. No matter how you decide to talk about it, it needs to be discussed: every year, the average weight of much of the world goes up. More and more people are overweight. And finding a way to reverse this trend is a huge health concern.
About 100 years ago, the average weight of an 18-20 year old American male was just over 130 pounds, and a female of the same age weighed just over 120. By 2000, that weight had shot up to almost 170 for men, and nearly 145 for women. In fact, a full two-thirds of Americans today weigh more than they should. And unfortunately, the small increase in average height since 1900 just can't account for the change. What does account for it? Our eating habits, of course.
And those eating habits are getting worse all over the world. According to the World Health Organization, there are more than a billion adults in the world who are classified as overweight or obese. In Canada, the percentage of the overweight population has increased from 40% in 1970 to 50% in 1998. And those numbers have simply continued to rise until today. In fact, due to overeating, the newest generation of kids in North America and in some of Europe may be the first to have a shorter life expectancy than the generation before.
But what about our eating habits has really changed for the worse? Why are our waistlines expanding and our health deteriorating?
We're programmed to pig out. It can be easy to forget, sometimes, that humans are animals like any other. And that we haven't always lived in a world where food was easily accessible (at least, it is to many of us). In mankind's youth, finding food was difficult and infrequent. To survive, our genes are programmed to tell us to gorge on what food we do find. Our bodies are made to want food high in calories, and as much of it as we can get just in case a famine comes along.
Getting food is too easy. Finding, killing, and preparing food used to be a lot of work, and great calorie expenditure was required just to have a meal. Today, obtaining food requires little or no effort at all; most of us don't even walk to the grocery store, but drive there.
Food companies want to sell, sell, sell. And the way they do this best? To increase portion sizes. Because companies want to be seen as providing more value for the money spent, portion sizes only continue to grow. It's more cost-effective for restaurants to give customers extra food than it is for them to reduce the prices of that food. And when a burger is over 1,000 calories and your average frozen coffee drink more than 500, it becomes harder and harder to stay within a reasonable calorie range.
What's worse, when the portion sizes that we see when we eat out grow, the portions we serve at home tend to expand, too. Used to seeing a certain amount of food on the plate, we also get used to serving up that much in the kitchen. Over time, the perception of a serving size has changed dramatically across the board.
It's too easy to be sedentary. Think about what you do for entertainment during your average day. You get on the computer and surf through internet dating sites. You play your XBox. You watch television (and most people watch hours and hours a day). You relax. With so much being pumped into our homes, it's far too easy to spend an entire day doing little or no physical activity. Far more people today live a sedentary lifestyle than did 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Even physical activity in kids has been hugely reduced; in the early 90's, 42% of high-school aged kids had daily physical education. Today, less than 25% do.
We don't work out at work. Chances are, you work in front of a computer screen all day. But things haven't always been that way. Especially before the middle of the 20th century, most jobs meant hard work; heavy lifting, being outside, working up a sweat. Living in the city generally meant walking from place to place instead of driving. And people got moving a heck of a lot more.
It's true that we're getting heavier and heavier. Fortunately, understanding why you make the choices you do is the first step in learning to make better ones. There's no excuse for neglecting your health; even though there are obstacles to a healthy lifestyle, it's your responsibility to overcome those obstacles and live the healthiest life you can. You may not always make the right choices, but being aware of what influences your decisions is a great way to make improvements-- if only little by little.
About the Author This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where we always offer free internet dating. Datepad has a massive directory of informative free dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on our dating blog.
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