It's been a long time since I could really be thought of as skinny. I've recently put a fair amount of effort into losing about 15 pounds (the end of beer-drinking season, a/k/a Euro 2008, helped a lot), and I've managed to come down from "overweight" to "normal weight" on the BMI scale - albeit near the upper end of "normal weight". Still, in order to be "obese" on the BMI scale, I'd need to put on an extra 60 pounds from where I am now. That's a lot of Hefeweizen.

Which helps, for me, to put this map into perspective. Only one of the 50 states in the union has fewer than one in five obese people; the fattest state, Mississippi, has almost one in three. Overall, more than a quarter of Americans are obese, which makes the USA the fattest nation in the world.