The Shape of U.S. Shapes

Here, just in time for the next swimsuit season, comes a new view of the American body, that thing we all live in and sometimes care for. Bottom line: It’s changing.

Unless you’ve been working out at the gym for the last six years with the mute button on, you have heard that many parts of Americans in most parts are getting larger and, to be candid, fatter. Because it’s more convenient and comfortable to blame food producers than individual food choosers, chewers and swallowers, much of this enlarging America has been blamed on the industry called fast food.

Fast is deemed good in modern America -- fast cars, times, feet, hands, minds, work. Slow today is generally considered bad or, worse, old. E-mail replies taking 30 minutes are an affront. Zero to 60 in 16 seconds is bad.

So fast food would seem like a good thing for Americans. However, although these tidbits are cooked and served fast and downed even faster, their fatty residues stick around a long time in various body areas.

Using tape measures in 1941, federal officials quietly gauged thousands of Americans to determine average military uniform sizes. Using a light-pulsing 3-D body scanner, SizeUSA, a coalition of universities, military branches and clothing and textile companies, has just measured 240 parts on more than 10,000 Americans in 13 cities. The results bump the average female size from a standard 8 to 12, and the average male well beyond the old 40 regular, especially in the body’s tropical region. Though average heights (men, 5 feet 9; women, 5 feet 4) stayed steady over the last decade, average weights jumped to 180 pounds for males and 148 for females, an increase of 16 quarter-pounders in 10 years.

Fast food is convenient but presents problems. Resulting health concerns are obvious, especially obesity. Hopeless dieting has become a big industry and passion for many, who dwell more often on what they could not resist than what they forsook. Working out while watching fast-food ads on TV helps burn off the calories you couldn’t resist putting on after yesterday’s workout.

We’re downing more calories than our parents and past generations; more than, say, the Pilgrims munched before mooching from the Indians. More food in = more weight on. To accommodate bodies expanding faster than minds, kindly clothiers have unobtrusively enlarged what a size 8 or 40 is, meaning your average grandparents would be lost in both. In the SizeUSA study, 51% of men but only 38% of women described themselves as “about the right weight.” Only 10% of men but fully 21% of women admitted being “quite a bit overweight,” further proof that people change sizes more easily than self-image.