I stand in my school's cafeteria and look around. Students are all sitting at long, grey tables shoveling greasy food into their mouths. I notice that over half of the kids in my grade could stand to lose a little weight. How is it that so many people don’t know how to eat healthy and exercise? If they don't change their bad habits now they will carry them over into adulthood. It is imperative that we understand that Americans have a weight problem and we must fix it.


Each year more and more Americans eat fast food on a regular basis. Is it the greasy food and lovely dining areas that entice them to eat there? No, one of the main reasons that people eat fast food is because that it's cheap. According to recent studies, each meal costs an average of six dollars per person. This sounds like a great deal for the huge portion of food you get. This may be true but no one ever stops to think about how unhealthy the food they ordered was. Fast food may be cheap but it isn't healthy. Another reason Americans have such a love of fast food is that it's fast, hence the name fast food. I know this is very true for my family. Every Wednesday night we always stop and pick up Zaxby's for dinner. We say that it's to late to make dinner and we don't want to cook to try and justify the fact that we are eating fast food. If more Americans could try and limit their fast food intake to once a week, we could be on the road to fixing our weight problem. In the end, it won’t matter how cheap and quickly made the food we ate was. What will matter is how healthy you are.


Today, in the age of video games and computers, more people are choosing to stay inside rather than going out and being active. If you ask most Americans why they don't exercise, the most frequent answer you will hear is that they don't because they don't have enough time. In a recent study, sixty percent of Americans get no regular form of exercise. That seems like a lot of people who do not have a lot of time on their hands. The truth is, that is just an excuse. There are twenty-four hours in a day and you can spare just thirty minutes of it a day to go exercise. People can make time to exercise. They just choose not to. This one statistic shows that Americans are lazy and like to make excuses. Another reason Americans don’t exercise is because they were never told to when they were children. My mother told me that when she was a little kid she was hefty because her parents never made her go exercise. If parents could encourage their kids to have healthy exercising habits now, this will carry over into their adulthood. This way we can stop this generation of kids from being overweight. Exercising plays a huge role in having good health. If we can all put our best foot forward and try to exercise, we can fix America's weight problem once and for all.


Habits carry over from childhood to adulthood. Bad health habits children have now will carry over into their adulthood unless they are corrected. One place we can thank for teaching children unhealthy habits is school. Schools do not offer enough healthy choices for children at lunch. Also, the food they do serve isn’t fresh because it is all packaged. In the movie Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock goes into a public school and interviews the lunch ladies who work there. They explain to him how they don’t even make the food. They just reheat it and then serve it. This is not healthy at all. If schools don't start teaching to eat healthy when they're kids, they'll eat just as bad when they're adults. Another thing we have schools thank for is not teaching kids to be active. Recent research shows sixty-four percent of schools no longer have daily physical education. Children are not being taught to be active now so they will remain the same way throughout adulthood. It is important to note that even though schools tell kids they must be active to be healthy, they cut PE class. Schools are one of the reasons why America has a weight problem.


Some people might disagree with this point of view because they think that people should have the right to eat what they want and exercise however and whenever they want. Although I can somewhat see why people may think this, I disagree. If we let people eat what they want and exercise when and however they want, America will remain an obese country. The fate of this country rests in the hands of our generation and our children's generation. If they all get fat and die our country will fall apart. Another reason why America should be healthy is because being overweight leaves you at a higher risk for cancer and many other illnesses. This is why we must realize that Americans do have a weight problem, and we must stop it.


On a crisp, white hospital bed lies a loved one. With a various assortment of tubes sticking out of them, they whisper one last thing to you. “Don’t make my mistake,” they croak, their breathing heavy, “Eat right and exercise so that you won't end up like me and dying because you are obese.” With those last words they are gone forever. Imagine that this is someone from your family. They could have saved themself if they had lived a healthy life. In order to stop deaths from obesity from happening, we must encourage Americans to live healthy lives. I believe that if everyone played just a small part in encouraging Americans to be healthy again, our problems with being an overweight nation would disappear completely.