It's also very suburban here. We probably have about 50,000 people on the entire island, tops, who live their daily lives without a car. I remember reading somewhere that buying a house in the suburbs versus the core equals a 10-pound increase in weight.
But there's hope, at least. In my little bubble in the core, you see lots of people with a few extra pounds but very few who are alarmingly obese. It's still a shock even for us, for example, visiting the United States.
Newfoundland Chocolate Company posted a picture yesterday that made me think of this. It's a good representation of the norm here. Slightly overweight as youth, overweight in middle age, obese by old age. You see very few obese young people in town, and very few fit older ones.
If it wasn't so cruel, I'd film the students being dropped at Waterford Valley High (amalgamation of former schools, mostly in poor suburban neighbourhoods) compared to the ones going into Holy Heart of Mary (poor, middle class, and upper middle class core neighbourhoods). They're like different species.
I'm hoping that this represents a generational shift rather than age demographics. However, our childhood obesity rates are high, and the unfortunate thing is that can't be brushed off as the visible, obvious difference between urban/rural because there are so few kids left in rural areas, those are mostly urban numbers to begin with.
So I think there it just comes down to class. There are still lots of poor families with pizza nights and no fresh vegetables in the house, for whom our traditional cuisine is the default food and not a treat a few times per week or month.
We'll see in a generation.
My friends and I are at the point now where, if we followed our parents' generation, we should be cresting 220 lbs any day.
I'm also suspicious that our genetics somehow put us at a disadvantage. We're generally shorter and blockier than the average I saw living on the mainland. We're also almost all, genetically, from either Waterford (about 37% of the population) or Bristol (about 40% of the population) so there's no big diversity of genes here. So if one person is a certain way, a significant percentage of our population may also be exactly that way. I am not ripped at all, no big muscles, but I'm also not fat:
(I know it's a flattering angle, I don't keep any pictures that aren't, lol, but come on. Even if it was completely smoke and mirrors, which it's not, if I was obese it should still be impossible to fake that well).
Yet, technically, I am obese:
I have quite a few friends the same way, even slender female friends whose weight seems to be 20-30 lbs heavier than Health Canada thinks they should be. Maybe we just have really dense bones?
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