I visit family in other states and I get comments like “I can’t believe you are so thin.” For context I am a healthy weight and I eat what I consider a reasonable diet. I sit and smile while I watch them drink soda and eat pure sugar and salt. I don’t care about your life choices but don’t act surprised by someone that’s a normal weight.
How did CO do that? Free lunch in school? This does not seem to be something you can do by having more virtuous people.
I’m wondering what bias there may be for people from a place versus moving to a place. Many have noted the culture of activity in Colorado, and that may be pulling non-obese people from other states to Colorado. Not that it would sway the numbers that much, but as an anecdote, everyone I know in Colorado moved there from a different state and fit, and moved there for activities.
I live in Colorado, and one day I stepped on the scale and noticed that I hit a milestone, did the math and realized that per my BMI I just hit the obese line (check yours, it’s probably lower than you think).
I decided that I was not going to be the guy fucking up this map for my fellow Coloradans, so I started eating more vegetables, fewer carbs, and fewer calories overall, and lost 25 pounds.
So, I’d say peer pressure helps.
Get out and go for a hike. That will help immensely.
Coloradans typically live a very active lifestyle. Outdoor recreation is a huge part of people’s lives. Therefore they’re moving a lot more and typically thinner
Ok, but what makes them this way. All of their neighbors have above average obesity.
The outside be nice and shit.
Also decent accessibility and cycling (compared to the deep red states)
This guy went there and asked everyone the same question: https://youtu.be/2rb198Hgllk
Basically just social pressure driving everyone to be skinny, or be shunned. Lots of eating disorders.
Eating like a normal person doesn’t mean eating disorders. I just don’t eat a lot of sugar and I make fresh food.
I physically feel bad when I eat to much junk. Healthy food makes you feel better as it doesn’t spike your sugar.
Plus sugar and salt make exercise unpleasant
High elevation makes the body work harder because there’s less oxygen. Elite athletes train in the high country for the effects.
Only for a short period of time. You adapt and the effects go away since your body creates more red blood cells.
But then those athletes go down to sea level for a competition and have an advantage
Yup. Go to high elevations, and until you acclimate you’ll feel a little off. Go to low elevations, and for the equal but opposite reasons you can run a marathon and outdrink anyone.
For a few days as your body recycles the extra red blood cells
Altitude is an appetite suppressant.
The trend of altitude being inversely correlated with obesity rates is really obvious from county-level data. That trend persists across multiple countries, but the specific correlation varies from country to country, in a way that suggests that rich countries have a stronger inverse correlation between altitude and obesity.
Today I learned….
Haha. What’s interesting is there’s other high country in the US but it’s not green in this map. Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Idaho…
And with the exception of vermont and a small part of NY, most of the yellow in the northeast is low lying areas not very high above sea level. California has mountains too.
That’s why the county level data makes the trend that much more obvious, because the states tend to clump big groups together. Here’s an example.
There, you can see that Colorado is special in that its rural counties tend to be low obesity, compared to even its neighbors in the Rockies. You also see a sliver of green following the Appalachian Mountains.
And obviously it isn’t the only factor. Poverty is really important, as are lifestyles (and the intentional and unintentional features of any given community in incentivizing or disincentivizing things like walking, regular exercise, eating healthy, etc.).
Oh yeah, it near perfectly captures where the mountains are. The green areas are mountains and cities. NH is interesting, the darkest part is where the ski areas are, the lighter part is the more populated area.
Are you sure it is not the other way around? Maybe the driven people who are physically fit are moving to higher elevation. If someone is obese they probably aren’t going to move to rual mountains
Culture of healthy thinking plus a lot of athletics