The Fattest City
11 January 2003, 12:09 AM

Men's Fitness Magazine named Houston Texas the fattest city in the U.S. for the third year in a row. And again, I find their findings suspect because of the criteria used. If they continue to use the same criteria Houston will *NEVER* come out of that top spot.

I'm serious. The count things like the *heat* and the *humidity*. Add things like commute time (everybody in Texas drives long distances) the air quality (sure that promotes bad health, but not necessarily *obesity*) and a shortage of outdoor recreation (never mind that it's TOO FUCKING HOT AND HUMID to recreate outdoors in the bad air, and never mind that much of Houston's athleticism occurs *indoors*, indoor rock climbing, aerobics, swimming, yadda, yadda, yadda).

For crying out loud, there's no other place in the U.S. that's going to have that combination of factors that it can't control. (Except for the air quality).

What makes me even *more* suspicious is the number of Texas cities that made it onto the list. Almost EVERY SINGLE large city in this state made that list. Dallas was 9th, San Antonio was 13th, Forth Worth was 16th and El Paso 17th. Only Austin made the "fit" list coming in at 13. The telling factor is that Austin is the only city in Texas with even some similarity to the geography, climate and and temperatures as most of the other cities on the fit list.

Add to the fact that they did not distinguish healthy "fast food" restaurants to the non-healthy fast-food restaurants. When I go to Houston I can eat out every day and still have incredibly healthy, low fat or vegetarian meals of all kinds. There's a difference between the "Soup and Salad" or "Sweet Tomatoes" chains and "McDonalds", which is rapidly vanishing from many Houston areas.