| I grew up in Mississippi. I lived there for 26 years before moving to Portland, OR. The point the author makes about walking to the bus stop or to the local market is absolutely correct. I've always been really slim, but I rarely walked anywhere in MS unless it was to the mail box. This is not because I was lazy (played a lot of sports), but because there's nothing to walk to. Practically everything involved an automobile as a means for access. Exercise as a daily routine didn't exist for me. That's not to say I couldn't make a conscious effort to exercise, but a commitment to exercise as part of a routine is much harder to adhere to than a routine that involves exercise. In Portland, things are a completely different story. Almost nothing requires an automobile. My wife and I went 7 months on a single tank of gas when we moved to Portland. We walk practically everywhere. Exercise is built into our day to day life. We walk to the post office, bar, movie theater, coffee shop, grocery store, you name it. On the topic of eating healthy - The food choices where I grew up were not that great. We had one grocery store, one diner, no fast food restaurants (we eventually got a subway) and two gas stations. Unless you lived in the town center, you had to drive to and from this limited selection. Many of my family members hover just over the poverty line (although none of them consider themselves poor). Grocery shopping isn't an exercise in health, it's an exercise in conservative economics. Trips to the grocery store are usually prefixed with a question: "How can I get enough food so we can eat until the next paycheck and still have enough money left over for gas to get back and forth to work". It's a vicious cycle. |