It's that time of the year when it feels right to set resolutions, to tell ourselves we'll do the things we've been wanting to do for a while but haven't got around to or haven't made time for. For a majority of Americans, that includes losing weight, according to a new Gallup survey.
A total of 55 percent of Americans aren't content with their weight and would like to slim down, Gallup found, with 43 percent saying they're overweight. However, less than a third are actively working towards that goal.
Why It Matters
According to a recent study published in The Lancet, nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are now overweight or obese—a condition that puts a heavy health and economic burden on the country.
The rate of obese and overweight people in the nation has grown considerably in the past three decades: in 1990, according to the study, just over half of U.S. adults were overweight or obese. Crucially, the number of young people being obese or overweight has risen significantly.
What's commonly referred to as the obesity epidemic in the U.S. is likely to get worse in the coming years, according to the researchers behind the study, who expect the number of obese and overweight people in the nation to rise to nearly 260 million people by 2050 without significant intervention.
The gap between the estimated number of overweight and obese people in the U.S. and the number of those who actually think they're overweight, as found by the Gallup survey, shows that there's an imbalance between the current situation in the country and Americans' perception of it.
What To Know
Crucially, for the first time since 1999, less than half of Americans (48 percent) described their weight as about right—a lower percentage than in 2023 (54 percent), 2021 (53 percent), and 2020 (51 percent).
Historically, since Gallup started tracking Americans' opinion of their weight in 1999, the rate of those who believed their weight to be about right surpassed that of those thinking they were overweight by an average 14 percentage points. This year's five-point gap is the narrowest since 1999, and the percentage of people who think they're overweight is near the highest recorded by Gallup.
While only 8 percent of Americans described themselves as underweight, this was also one of the highest rates ever measured by Gallup.
Women were more likely than men to find themselves overweight: a total of 49 percent of women said they were overweight, matching the record rate of 2001, while 38 percent of men said the same—about average.
Women were also more likely to say they wanted to lose weight, with 61 percent saying they wished to slim down against 48 percent of men saying the same, reflecting a historic trend that's been recorded by Gallup since it started collecting data on the topic. The current numbers are close to the 15-point gap recorded since 1951.
Age was also a significant factor: 49 percent of Americans aged between 35 and 54 wanted to lose weight, against 47 percent of those aged 55 and older and 26 percent of those aged between 18 and 34.
What People Are Saying
Gallup: "Gallup has tracked Americans' perceptions of their own weight almost every year since 1999. On average, those who believe their weight is about right have surpassed those who consider themselves overweight by 14 percentage points.
"The current five-point edge is the narrowest since 1999, as the percentage of people who consider themselves overweight is near its highest and the percentage of those who believe their weight is about right is near its lowest.
"As Americans' self-reported weight has increased over the past two decades, they have adjusted their views of what their ideal weight is, which accounts for the relative steadiness in the trend on this measure."
What's Next
The survey, which was conducted between November 6 and 20, also found that 30 percent of Americans have lost a significant amount of weight in the past two years, with 4 percent saying they did so thanks to prescription medication.
Weight-loss prescription medication has risen in popularity in the past few years, with the number of Ozempic prescriptions in the country growing by more than 5,000 percent since 2018 up to about 20 million last year, as reported by Health Prem.
While the growing use of Ozempic for weight loss has sparked several ethical challenges, the medication appears to be helping America solve its obesity crisis, with a recent study linking its increased use to a dip in the nation's body mass index (BMI) in 2023.
Last year, obesity levels in the country fell to 43.96 percent from 44.1 percent the year before—a small change, but also the first decline in a decade.
English (US) ·