American Idle
Much of the focus on our struggles with weight has centered on food intake. But lately, researchers have begun to look at other factors affecting the weight-gain equation: our low levels of physical activity, for instance. If our food environment makes it hard for us to eat well, maybe there’s something about our physical environment that makes it hard for us to get sufficient physical activity.
Whether or not we’re active is certainly determined in part by personal factors: our own propensity for exercise, for instance, and our willingness to make time for it. Genes affect how exercise makes us feel; social networks can exert pressure for or against regular exercise. We’re learning now that our physical surroundings may also influence whether we lead active lives: Our jobs, homes, even the design of our communities can either encourage or hinder physical activity as a part of daily life.
When Barbara McCann was a journalist working in Atlanta in the 1990s, she wanted to ride her bicycle to the office. The city, however, was “not a very good place to do that,” she recalls. Like Martha Peterson, she found Atlanta an environment somewhat hostile to healthy living. Streets had no bike lanes and there was little interest in creating them, which made biking hazardous and unpleasant. “The way the city approached transportation was extremely traditional, very automobile oriented,” says Barbara. Unfortunately, Barbara’s experience in Atlanta is all too common. Many of our communities have been engineered in ways that discourage biking, walking, and other kinds of routine physical activities.
The Physical Guidelines for Americans recommends getting 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity over the week to maintain health. Almost all Americans fall short of this goal. Children are the most active, but still only 10 percent or less meet the guidelines. With each decade of age, the percentage diminishes. Most active are highly educated people, as well as those who live in western states such as Washington, Colorado, and Oregon; least active are those who reside in southern states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A quarter of Americans report being completely inactive during their leisure time.
These statistics are distressing, but they’re not new. Levels of reported exercise haven’t changed much in decades. What’s different now is that we’re getting less physical activity in the course of our daily routines. We’re not moving as much in our jobs, in taking care of our homes, in commuting or running errands, or just going from place to place. An example of the decline in daily movement was revealed in a poll not long ago in which seven in ten Americans said they walked or rode a bike to school when they were children. Today, only one in ten school-aged children do so.
SHIFT HAPPENS
There’s no question that environmental factors play a part in inhibiting healthy eating and active living in this country. Our food supply produces cheap calories in great abundance—at steep cost to our waistlines and our health. Our jobs, our new technologies, our ways of commuting, even the design of our communities have “engineered” natural daily movement out of our lives, making it harder to stay fit.
Until we can create change in the larger environment, for the moment, it falls to individuals to make the personal change they need to transform their lives, just as Martha and Deanne did.
When Deanne made her life transition, she started small. To revise her “horrible” eating habits, she joined Weight Watchers, which helped her structure her eating and taught her not just what to eat but how to eat. “When people ask me how I did this,” she says, “I tell them that I started with small steps and was incredibly persistent. When I first decided I was ready to lose weight I was huge, 125 pounds overweight. I told myself, ‘Well, I have to start somewhere—I’ll just try to lose a little weight, any amount.’”
Deanne began by changing what she put into her personal environment. She examined the portion sizes she was eating. “They were so distorted,” she recalls. “They were based on what I had grown up with. Whatever was put in front of me, I ate.
“I started to measure out my food. I prepared portions ahead of time—e.g., chicken cut into 6-ounce portions. When I made meals, I pulled out only what I needed to eat for a single portion for a single meal, so there was no temptation to go back for seconds.
“That first week, I lost four pounds, and I realized I didn’t have to starve myself to death. I could do this. That small success really fueled itself. When I was drawn to food, I learned to ask myself, ‘Are you hungry?’ More often than not, the answer was, ‘No, just bored.’ So I would just turn away from the food instead of eating, waiting for the wave of ‘hunger’ to pass.” She began a regular program of walking on a treadmill, building up to a half-hour a day. She bought my first book, Strong Women Stay Young, and began lifting—at first with cans of beans and later with real weights. From February to November of 2000, she lost 60 pounds. Then she joined a gym and began jogging on the treadmill and exercising on an elliptical. She also found a new social circle. “I still maintain my old friendships,” she says, “but now I have a whole new group of friends; we train together and run races together.” Just five years later, by age 39, she had lost 120 pounds.
These days, Deanne weighs 145 pounds and wears a size 8. More important, each week she runs 25 miles and bikes 75 to 100 miles; she swims three times a week and can dead-lift more than 100 pounds. She races in triathalons and marathons. Still, even after all of these years, Deanne admits that she has to make conscious decisions every single day to eat well and go to the gym. “I just take it day by day,” she says. “I ask myself: Am I going to the gym today? Am I going to eat properly? Am I going to consume that doughnut or bagel sitting on the office counter, which I don’t need because I just ate a healthy breakfast a half hour ago? When I make a mistake, I never beat myself up. If I eat badly at one meal, I don’t batter myself and say, ‘Well, there goes the day.’ I try to get back on track as soon as I can.”
Deanne has maintained her weight for more than eleven years. She says that she has never been happier.
You see now that a complicated web of forces in your environment shapes what you eat and how you move. But what forces have shaped the environment? Before we can make the change we want to see in ourselves and in our world, we need to understand how our environment came to be what it is today.
Chapter 2. Living Large
As long ago as 1949, the late nutrition scientist Ancel Keys speculated that our social and economic circumstances might produce an epidemic of obesity. He predicted that overeating and expending less energy would become an issue, leading to problems with weight control. “While our calorie intake goes up our output goes down,” he wrote. “The wonderful advances of technology do not merely free us from back-breaking toil; they make it almost impossible to get a decent amount of calorie-using exercise.”
Keys was right. Over the past half century or so, potent forces have molded our food supply and our built surroundings, creating an environment that sabotages our efforts at healthful eating and physical activity. How? What is going on here?
My research at Tufts University and my work on two government committees offer some answers. In 2008, I was asked to be a member of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to help the government develop the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. For two years, I joined twelve other leading nutrition scientists in delving into the newest science on nutrition and health. This was an incredible experience. It was also challenging. This committee has a long tradition of taking conservative, politicized positions on the question of the American diet. The challenge for me was to try to move it in a new direction. Fueled by concern about the current obesity epidemic, I was particularly interested in understanding what Americans actually eat. What
