[saef]

Absolutely.

But I insist on not using broadly geographic terms -- I think in smaller terms, and here I have to use the word "community."

By that I mean where you live & the circle of people you move in, and what standards that community holds & what other communities influence it.

I live near NY City, but I grew up in Upstate NY, a five-hour-drive northwest of here, and have just come back from a week-long visit there. (Literally. My suitcase still needs to be unpacked & there's that damn laundry problem ... )The cultural differences in my current community and my former community are very fresh in my mind.

In the two communities, of course weight is different, because eating is different, exercising is different, standards of personal maintenance for women are different.

When I'm Upstate, attending clam bakes, chicken barbeques, at the movie theater, or even walking in the mall near my community, I'm one of the slenderest women in my general age group. Anyone thinner is liable to be at least 10 years younger.

When I'm back "home," near NY, I'm just average, shading to the slightly heavier side, and there are many women my age & older who are much thinner than me in my community. (It's all that tennis. [Kidding. Slightly.] And the idea of the "yummy mummy" being pretty current here.)

My old hometown Upstate was gym-less for years. Then there was a "box" gym that had an adjacent tattoo parlor. During my first weight loss, in the early 1990s, I took one look at this place through the window & then backed out quickly. Not a woman in sight. (I later learned through a male friend that the place had only one female member at that time.) I think they would have sneered if I'd asked about step aerobics classes, which were my main interest at the time. I had to make a half-hour drive -- often in the incredible snowfalls of Upstate NY -- to get to a more woman-friendly gym.

While I was away, making my fortune downstate ;-), that changed, and a Curves came to town, and then a large gym frequented by all ages & genders opened up about seven years ago. It's been having some financial difficulty. (I use it daily when I'm visiting, with day passes.) Even now, I tend to be the only woman in the free-weight area, though many other women of different ages use the machines.

Where I live now, downstate, my gym is two blocks away (and there's a personal trainer's storefront one block away) & there are four others I could drive to in about 10 minutes. There is a very large yoga studio offering multiple classes daily in the next town over. There is a runner's store four blocks away. And that's just the beginning of it ... I can't even list the resources for yoga, Pilates, kickboxing, whatever within a 10-mile radius of my village.

And oh yes, the eating thing. How do I put it nicely? It is harder to make healthy choices upstate when dining out. I spent the day with an old college friend who'd flown in from the West Coast for her class reunion & a family memorial service. First thing she said, after we hugged & agreed we wanted to have lunch, was: "Please tell me you know of a place where we can get a salad for lunch ... and where they **won't** serve us iceberg lettuce." (She had been suffering from an overdose of plain country cooking.)

In fact, I did know of just such a place. But we had to make a 45-minute drive north from her small farming town, to a quaint lakeside village place that lives mostly off tourist dollars -- just to get the kind of lunch that, at home, downstate, I could find in **six different** little casual places within three blocks of my front door.

So these are the cultural shoals that I have to negotiate every time I go back to where I grew up.

My parents wanted me to be more educated & to have more opportunities than they did, but I'm not sure that they understood that the price of this was some degree of alienation from where I came from -- if not outright alienation, at least self-consciousness, at not quite fitting in anymore, and frustration, on occasion, regarding the lack of choice of lettuce & wanting the fish NOT to be breaded & fried & melodramatic relief at finding that yes, the local grocery DID CARRY Fage 0%.

But I swear this is definitely community-based, not completely geographic. By this, I mean, a low-income woman in Syracuse is more analogous to a low-income woman in the Bronx; and a wealthy woman in Skaneateles (a relatively affluent village in Upstate NY) is more analogous to a wealthy woman in Scarsdale.

[dragonwoman64]

Originally Posted by thesame7lbs

I think there is definitely a difference by region. There are also racial and socio-economic factors. I found this information from the Office of the Surgeon General. I think it describes pretty accurately what I see around here.

yes, I think so too. In my neighborhood here in Brooklyn, I can walk out the door of my apartment building and find three gyms less than a block away. There are 2 Y facilities if I walk a few blocks further. There's a huge park where people bike, run, skate, rollerblade, play baseball, soccer, frisbee, etc.; a smaller park with basketball, handball and soccer courts. It's made up of many youngish, middle class couples (there's also a blue collar and ethnic element here, largely hispanic) and being thin and fit is pretty much the norm. or at least thinner people working on being more fit, ha. At 300 lbs, I definitely stood out. At my size now, I am still bigger than a lot of women I see.

that said, I feel more accepted and comfortable here with the size of my body than I did in northern california where I grew up.

[GonnaTurnHeads]

Moving from Pittsburgh PA to Southern California was a huge shock for me. I would see people outside here, running, carrying bottles of water... People in the grocery store checking labels, people clearly walking around after having just gone to the gym... In Pittsburgh it was "do you work out?" Here it is "Which gym do you go to?" - because people ALWAYS have SOMEWHERE that they are working on their fitness.

When I go back to visit Pittsburgh, I feel more put together than most of the people I run into after having been gone for so long and adopting new habits - but when I am out in Southern California - I'm still not where I everyone else is and end up feeling frumpy all the time.

[ShelBl]

Here in Utah, people seem to either be proportional, or VERY overweight. I went to the casting call for Biggest Loser last weekend, and at 260 was one of the smallest people there. Not much middle ground, as far as I've seen.

LOTS of breast augmentations here, too, which is kind of weird. Also, I'm a freak here because I'm in my late 30s and have no kids.