I mean, he was on a university campus, so fit young people reading books isn't that much of a surprise. But I agree with you, US is a nation of extremes in some ways. There are places I've been in the US where quite literally every single person I saw was morbidly obese, including children.
To your question - Lots of them. I'm (relatively) wealthy and I don't want to diet. But I do it anyway because it's worth the short-term suffering for the long-term gain. It's a super obvious good mid and long term investment with a great RoR.
Parent commenter had the causality reversed. Being poor doesn't make you fat; high time preference makes you both poor and fat.
i.e. Someone poor with low time preference won't stay poor for long. The kind of person who stays poor in America for years and years is generally the kind who also has too high time preference to stop eating a full bag of chips every day.
Also, we do have more sedentary lifestyles then typical 1960 person. Just in terms of how much you walk during the day, we are already not moving.
There are exceptions. If you're a professional cyclist, for example, and able to output several hundreds of Watt for several hours, 6 days a week, you'll quickly lose weight through exercise. But that's not actionable advice for regular people with a full-time job and a family.
If you are overweight, if your concern is not purely temporary esthetic, focusing on calories control is receipt for long term failure.
Also, the exercise is not done only so that you immediately spend some calories. It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism. All these affects you calorie consumption long term.
High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.
> It is to build muscle, raise temperature, speed up your metabolism.
Those effects are negligible compared to eating, say, 20% less. In particular because exercise makes you hungry, and if you don't control your diet, you'll regain the lost energy through increased appetite afterwards. So again, yes, please exercise regularly, but that alone won't make you lose weight.
> High level competitive sport has nothing to do anything. It has zero to do with what average adult experiences.
Uh, yeah, that's exactly what I wrote: professional athletes are an exception, and their case doesn't apply to regular people.
Also, I said "influences both your shape and your health". I did not moved goalposts.
What percentage of the population had desk jobs before 1960? Standing/moving all day burns a lot of calories, I would assume enough so that you don't put on a few pounds each years which can lead to obesity in the 40s. Of course that's not all the population, some are obese before being teen. But I think that's still an important part. You can't outrun your stomach if you eat a surplus of 2000 calories each day, you can if you eat a surplus of 200.
So the baroque ideal of beauty was a contemporary fantasy?
Poorer people in India end up getting more exercise and being either undernourished or eating just about enough calories to not get fat. As a general rule, poorer people will not be using cars or other forms of mechanised transport for shorter trips and will be more into manual work than the richer people. Also, the average poor person in India can not afford junk food or aereated sugary drinks.
Edit: Poor people in India are thin and rich are fat, quite opposite, again due to diet. Indian poor can't afford fast food in chain restaurants daily, must cook which is cheaper.
But you can also be so poor that you can afford calories, alcohol and little more as an entertainment. It's easy to get obese then.
On the other hand stuff like coca cola is cheaper.
You see, a fair amount of poor folks get paid once a month, and since there aren't a lot of little grocery stores nearby, folks wind up buying food once and hoping it lasts the month.
Poor folks don't always have steady electricity nor a refrigeration, either: Living without a fridge makes your diet go to crap pretty quickly.
Time is another luxury poor folks have issues with, which also makes diets go awry.
> Poor folks don't always have steady electricity nor a refrigeration, either: Living without a fridge makes your diet go to crap pretty quickly.
Differences between access to steady refrigeration is extremely slim for people in the US for all but the poorest of the poor (basically homeless)
> Time is another luxury poor folks have issues with, which also makes diets go awry.
In the US poor people have more free time, on average, than wealthy people: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...
There are other studies that suggest the causality is the opposite: obese people are more likely to become poor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/
That study is definitely not broadly convincing in my opinion, but just want to point out that there is a ton of baseless speculation in this thread trying to explain the obesity/wealth relationship.
"Everyone" in midtown was fit. Cross the border to the adjacent neighborhood (don't recall the name but it's a lot more residential and just barely still accessible by foot from down/midtown due to how far away everything in Atlanta is) and more than half the people you see are obese.
Oh and the homeless people are a lot less scary than in San Francisco. I felt safe asking a homeless man for directions in Atlanta (didn't realize he was homeless until he pointed at the tent he lives in & asked me for a dollar after we spoke) & I would probably not dare do that in downtown SF (I probably wouldn't do that in Berlin either for that matter, even though homeless people aren't as aggressive here).
Another difference is the police - in Germany, Austria & Israel (countries I've lived in so far) it's not unusual to ask a police officer who happens to pass near by for stuff like directions but when I asked a policeman (who wasn't obviously doing anything) in Atlanta where something is he very obviously didn't want to talk to me, just answered my question with "not here" and didn't even look at me while doing so. This was in broad daylight at a "nice"/central part of town so I don't think it was because I was interrupting some police action?
If the officer in a bigger area isn't a beat cop or stopping for a break, it isn't unreasonable that he was actually busy. Or, he was just a jerk and, like all humans, you'll find those in varying degrees anywhere you go.