That's shockingly large to me. I knew Americans were obese, but wow.
Specifically, the media rarely shows fat people. Not the truly fat ones, with the exception of the freakshow genre of TV specifically about extremely fat people. In recent years they've started to show more and more fat people, but not nearly fat enough to give you an accurate impression of average Americans. Just fat enough to give token representation of fatness.
Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV aren't on freakshow TV because they're freakishly fat. People that fat are common, you can see them yourself any day at walmart. The people on those shows are freaks because they have freakishly little shame and agree to be on TV.
Not really. Truth is, the hugely fat people on freakshow TV are pretty rare even in America; if they were at all common then there wouldn't be much of a market for such shows in the US ("you're just gonna show me ordinary people like me? yawn.") You might see one or two hugely fat people at Wal-Mart, but they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are plump but otherwise mobile, and they'll be surrounded by dozens of people who are fit by European standards.
Have you been to Ohio? That ratio is flipped. "Plump" is merely overweight but not obese. In states like Ohio, plump seems athletic because the massively obese are very common. You can easily see several 500lb people a day, fat enough for any TV freakshow.
Yes. Have you? Because no, that ratio is not "flipped". It ain't even flipped in Texas - and everything is bigger in Texas.
> several 500lb people a day
Yes, "several" meaning single digits. The average Wal-Mart has anywhere from double to triple digits of people in it at any one time. All but the tiniest of US towns have quadruple or quintuple digits of people in them.
Thus, even by your own accidental admission, people in the 500lb range are an extreme rarity. This really shouldn't be surprising; the human body can only take in so much nutrients and can only reduce its energy expenditure by so little, so at some point even an entirely sedentary lifestyle with an entirely unhealthy diet will result in a stopping point far short of 500lb. The people you see on TV are that fat because they are outliers, not the norm. That's also - again - what makes them interesting enough to be worth televising to an audience that's already disproportionately obese.
Put differently: if 500lb+ people were the norm, then Wal-Mart would sell clothes that actually fit them instead of them having to be limited to overstretched sweatpants. The fact that Wal-Mart does not should make it patently obvious that they are far too small of a market segment to be worth catering to, even in the very store in which you seem to disproportionately see them.
This is my point. If you can see several 500lb people a day going about your everyday errands around town, then the people on the 500lb TV freakshow are not freaks for being 500lbs, they're freaks for agreeing to be on the TV show. And how often are such massive people on TV shows that aren't specifically about 500lb people? Almost never.
If you judged America just by the TV shows, you'd think that 500lb people are very uncommon. But in reality you can see them every single day without even trying.
Compared to how many people you see total going about your everyday errands? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? That is my point: you're deliberately ignoring the overwhelmingly vast majority of the people you encounter in favor of a very tiny minority solely for the sake of asserting that tiny minority to be far more common than they actually are.
> And how often are such massive people on TV shows that aren't specifically about 500lb people? Almost never.
Exactly. Shows have to go way out of their way to find 500lb people, because they are exceedingly rare. If they were anywhere near as common as you assert, then they would be far more prevalent on American TV.
In attempting to refute my point you've accidentally proven it, twice in the same comment. I rest my case.
DC-proper and Arlington VA usually rank highly on most fitness rankings. I'm a bit west of there, but generally a pretty fit area, I guess.
Traveling around to various cities, you see this variation city-to-city, too. Some cities are just fitter (and, in some cases, way "hotter" all around—like you gotta re-calibrate your "10" scale, to use a crude but illustrative example, or you won't see anyone under a back-home "8" your whole visit) than my home city. Others are even fatter (largely in the deep South). Though in all cases you have to take into account that you may only be seeing their equivalent of the "hot" part of town and that may be skewing your overall impression.
Then again, I'm an American male (who wears size 44 pants), so needless to say my perspective might be skewed.
Do you have any better model to recommend?
You could probably get closer to an accurate model by identifying the fixed weight of an adult's skin/bones/organs. Going from critically emaciated to fit would mostly entail adding muscle, which is denser than fat.
From there, the proportion of added muscle v. added fat when increasing waist circumference would be the deciding factor in accurately estimating weight; that proportion is highly dependent on the individual and one's level of daily activity.
At my current 150lbs and 5'7", I have a <30" waist. When I was 180lbs (got fat in college) it was near 38". That 30lb difference took me from athletic to obese. Granted, I'm male, but I'd think that on a 5'4" women, that 38" waist was visibly even larger.
Even if there's an unexpected distribution, that's no way around there being a massive number of very obese women to pull the average to 38".
I thought my wife was pretty normal/average-ish at 5'4" and size 6/8, which is a full 10" smaller waist than the web is claiming as the average.
1. lower control forces
2. shorter legs
3. shorter bodies (need to see over the dash)
With the lower control forces, Boeing was concerned that men would then overcontrol the aircraft, but as far as I know this hasn't turned out to be a problem.
Women were not strong enough to handle the control forces in WW2 aircraft under emergency conditions. Those airplanes were designed around the limit of a man's strength.
> In 2016 in the US, adult women averaged a weight of 170.3 lb. The median adult woman weighed 161.3 lb.
> For men in the United States 18 or older in 2016, average weight was 197.1 lb. Men had a median weight of 189.4 lb.
I guess it makes sense that even the median weight would lead to an overweight BMI (assuming average height), since 74% of the US is overweight or obese.
[1] https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
So it's a bit surprising to see that in these official US numbers, men are indeed around that, but women are somewhat above it.