Health-and-Fitness online information.

EIGHT YEARS AGO, WHEN WE DECIDED TO PUBLISH OUR FIRST annual ranking of fit and fat metropolises, we could have just hit a few shopping malls with scales and fat calipers, scribbled some numbers on a clipboard, and called it a day. But we wanted to get people talking about what really causes obesity in America--and we wanted to get people doing something about it. So we spent months analyzing the things that affect Americans most. We looked for patterns in the amount of exercise we get, what kind of food we eat, the amount of TV we watch, and the sports we play. We read weather reports, counted pizza parlors, and pestered park departments. We even put some pressure on your local elected officials. After amassing a super-size collection of data and crunching some numbers, we released our findings that detailed the fittest and fattest--and we've been doing it ever since.

But a funny thing happened along the way. We noticed something interesting: Instead of maintaining the conventional view of obesity as a problem of individual overindulgence, a growing number of medical experts started looking at America's fat epidemic as a public-health problem, exploring connections between people's waistlines and things like the environment they live in. Eight years later, open any public-health journal or visit any research conference today and you'll find a growing body of evidence that the causes of obesity are all around us, from limited recreational opportunities to air pollution, TV watching, zoning that allows too many drive-thrus, and an epidemic of less and less time to exercise. It proved to us that the MF message is getting through. But change is hard.

As anybody who's spent enough time in the gym to tell a deltoid from a dumbbell knows, making progress means changing your routine every once in a while. And while cities have responded to our survey over the years by increasing public space and promoting civic change, there's still a lot of work to be done.

So this year, in order to provide the most complete and thorough examination of the state of fitness in America in 2006, we decided to add a couple of new dimensions to our rankings. In addition to the factors we'd been measuring all along, we decided to look at things like motivation: Were people exercising when the weather was lousy, or were they lazing around even when they were surrounded by an exercise-friendly climate? How crowded--and safe--were the local running trails? How often were people using their gym memberships?

And most important this year, we decided it was time to really examine civic legislation and leadership. After all, if obesity is an epidemic--a public-health emergency--shouldn't we expect our city leaders to do something about it, such as require developers to build open spaces and trails (instead of jammed-in housing tracts and drive-thru-laden strip malls) or create fitness- and health-education events? In examining these factors, we awarded points to cities that have enacted anti-obesity and fitness-promoting initiatives. We also selected three of the fittest mayors in America--leaders who put the health of their citizens above all else while also doing their best to lead a fit lifestyle outside the office. Which mayors made the cut? And more important, just how fit or fat is your hometown? Read on to find out.

# posted by Medical Information : 2:27 AM