The fat city that declared war on obesity

Oklahoma has lost a million pounds of fat. Ian Birrell meets the mayor who piled on the pounds then launched a healthy living crusade and changed his city’s infrastructure. But can even this defeat our century’s biggest health curse?

When Velveth Monterroso arrived in the USA from her hometown in Guatemala, she weighed exactly 10 stone. But after a decade of living in Oklahoma, she was more than five stone heavier and fighting diabetes at the age of 34. This friendly woman, a mother of two children, is a living embodiment of the obesity culture cursing the world’s wealthiest country. “In Guatemala it is rare to see people who are very overweight, but it could not be more different here,” she said. “I saw this when I came here.”

As soon as she arrived in the USA she started piling on pounds – an average of half a stone each year. In Guatemala she ate lots of vegetables because meat was expensive. But working from eight in the morning until eleven at night as a cook in an Oklahoma City diner, she would skip breakfast and lunch while snacking all day on bits of burger and pizza. Driving home she would often resort to fast food because she was hungry and exhausted after a 15-hour day slaving over a hot grill. If she and her husband Diego – also a cook – made it back without stopping, they would often gorge on whatever was available rather than wait to cook a decent meal.

Her lifestyle was no healthier when she stopped working after having her second child eight months ago. She was tired and her family encouraged her to drink lots of atole – a heavily sweetened corn-based drink popular in central America – to aid the breastfeeding of her new daughter, Susie. Sugar levels in her body soared, and on top of her obesity she became pre-diabetic.

Velveth’s life was changed – and probably ultimately saved – when she took Susie for a medical check-up and was enrolled on a programme to curb obesity. Now she eats fast food just once a week, cooks more vegetables, has cut down the number of tortillas consumed at meals and exercises daily by walking up and down stairs for 20 minutes. Although still overweight, in just four months she has lost 16 of those pounds gained in America. “All my friends are impressed,” she told me with a smile. “I feel like I have so much more energy now. I can do the shopping and laundry, bathe the baby, and I’m not nearly so tired as before.”

Velveth is one beneficiary of a remarkable attempt to tackle obesity. For Oklahoma City has declared war on fat. First the mayor – realising he had become clinically obese just as his hometown was identified by a magazine as one of America’s most overweight cities – challenged his citizens to collectively lose a million pounds. But hitting that target was just the start: this veteran Republican politician then took on the car culture that shaped his nation and asked citizens to back a tax rise to fund a redesign of the state capital around people.

Reference:

• Watch Mick Cornett’s TED talk on how an obese town lost a million pounds