Discussion: I've seen this map recently...

Is it still Colorado?

I would have picked either Alaska or Hawaii - not sure which extreme to go for.

But surely in the cold clime of Alaska you need blubber to stay warm, hence the consumption of lots of Baked Alaska.

Colorado is the winner - Alabama is the loser

US Obesity Rates by State (1985-2008) (On the animated map, you can click stop and then page forward and backward manually.)

Pretty shocking. (Although when I see numbers that change this much, I'd like to read further. For example, they mention confidence intervals, but they don't seem to show any. And in the maps, white means "No data", so the first year with data for all 50 states is 1994. It would be interesting to see this data correlated with income or some "access to health care" metric.)

I learn about the weirdest stuff on attackpoint...

I'm not hugely surprised by the results for the southeastern states - certainly didn't see a lot of healthy food on offer travelling the backroads of Georgia last January (and visiting an all-you-can-eat establishment in Tallahassee was definitely an interesting cultural experience - at least I could say that I was going to run it all off on a 30km run the next morning, which wouldn't have applied to too many of the others present).

I've often thought about this...supposing someone put on 1kg in a year, they'd hardly notice. But if the next year there's another 1kg, and the next (und so weiter), 20 years down the track they'll be 20kg overweight and wondering how it happened.

Also I've read somewhere that compared to the 1950s, the energy no longer expended by women on a day's housework is equivalent to the consumption of an extra large choc-chip cookie each day. Now that's an idea: using choc chip cookies as an incentive for myself to do housework...

My favourite culinary memory of Nevada truck stops was breakfast... a stack of 5 pancakes, with 3 or 4 rashers of bacon on top, an egg sunny side up and then smothered with a large wallop of fake maple syrup.

On the east coast the wake up call was ordering a medium choc fudge sunday. It came with 4 scoops of ice cream. I asked what was small and large.. the answer was 2 and 8.

And jennycas, they then want to lose 20 year's worth of accumulation "in time for summer!".