I am not posting this to negate the importance of size acceptance. If we can’t accept and love ourselves as we are, we do not have the power we need to change ourselves into who we want ourselves to be at our very best. That said, there’s a problem afoot in the United States, brought on by more factors than any one organization can possibly negotiate. There’s a lot of factors involved in being overweight, and the increasing disparity in size between the large and small can’t possibly be pinned down to just one of those factors. All eating and metabolic disorders are a storm of circumstance, culture, psyche, habit, and genetics. There isn’t just one thing making America fat, just like there isn’t just one thing making American girls cut themselves or US-based models bulimic. And those single things don’t happen the same way to everyone.

That said, I do think that acceptance over denial is our first step to learning how to live in our bodies as though we love them. I’ve spent some time thinking about this, so I’ve tried to narrow down a few reasons why the average weight of men and women in the United States has risen over the past two decades:

Why I Think There Is an Obesity Epidemic:

• Technology is leading to a less physically active lifestyle

In the last twenty years technology has provided loads of consuming activities that keep us on our butts. It’s all too easy to sit for hours, often adding absent-minded munching to the activity. That said, I think our technology creatives recognize what they’ve done and are taking steps to correct that, through the introduction of games like Dance, Dance Revolution, the Wii, and bicycle-powered televisions.

• Public education’s approach to physical education makes exercise suck and furthers the entire concept of public    humiliation.

I distinctly remember gym in elementary school: it involved a lot of running of laps, and being graded for not being able to do things without having a chance to develop the form and skills needed to do them well.  For instance, my gym teacher was fond of making us run for most of the gym period. After endless circles around the gym, I was bored, sweaty, and angry. Her approach to calisthenics was also outdated and terrifying – I learned more about doing situps and crunches properly following Gilad’s Bodies in Motion than I ever did from her low-thought approach to activity; I thought it was telling how much my back hurt from gym class situps, and how much it was strengthened from the television physical education.

• The poverty-food choice connection

In Nickel and Dimed, the author details how, on a minimum-wage salary, she was essentially forced into expensive food choices because of their short-term affordability.  The short-term affordable foods are all fast foods, high in fat content and low in a lot of the nutrients the body needs in order to lose weight. On top of it, should finances change, it’s all too easy to become trapped in a taste cycle: it’s difficult to get used to food that isn’t rich with greases and oils once you’ve had it too much, too often.

• As a group, Americans do not know how to cook vegetables so they taste good

I’ve recently started my own culinary adventure based on this. Most of my exposure to vegetables has been as a necessary evil, a point of negotiation on my plate that I had to pay to get to the food that I really wanted to eat. There’s a certain skill and artistry to cooking vegetables that requires a mastery of timing, spices, and flavor combinations that don’t translate into the boil it and dump it on a plate approach I see all the time in American cuisine.

• Transportation choices and the availability of public transportation

Driving everywhere makes us fat – again, it’s a matter of making exercise incidental to our lives. In most US communities, this can’t be helped. Between a tendency towards urban sprawl, and a recognition that the stranglehold of the auto industry on our economy is dying, public transportation will become more common (I hope) and more people will abandon cars as status symbols as it becomes higher status to demonstrably support environmental protection.

•     Malnutrition – eating the wrong amount of food, or eating the wrong foods, thus causing the body to store what it can’t digest

Despite the best efforts of health classes, we’ve been getting it wrong for years, as evidenced by the recent changes in the FDA food pyramid. While we have an excess of food available to us relatively cheaply, we also tend to choose out of ignorance or laziness the wrong foods, and short ourselves of much needed nutrients no vitamin pill can supply.

• A prevailing attitude that cookie-cutter formulas will help

Everyone’s biology is somewhat unique, and this is especially true in the United States. One inevitable result of the “melting pot” is that nearly all of us have interracial family trees, and this means that the diet type optimal for each of us takes some work to figure out. You can’t just dump on Atkins or Weight Watchers or any other diet trend – you almost have to see a professional to research your metabolism and find out what will really work for you.

• We are a society of individuals with increasingly screwed-up senses of self-esteem

I point to reality shows as my evidence. those shows are NOT healthy, and they’re pretty symptomatic of what’s wrong with all of us. It’s part of why I can’t bring myself to watch the Biggest Loser.