You have to look long and hard to find one. People here are just NOT overweight. While appearance is important here and for the most part people dress pretty well, I don’t think the the lack of fat is due to Bogotanos trying to be thin. It probably has a lot more to do with just natural diet and lifestyle choices.
In the school where I teach, of almost 900 students, there are maybe three who are overwieght. Take a random 900 US students and what would that figure be? One difference between our students and most in the US is that in my school, kids get an hour of physical education or sports almost every day, and I know that in Palm Beach County, Florida, where I moved from, students get maybe 20-30 minutes of PE every week. So, that might account for part of it.
I’ve discussed this casually with a lot of other gringos (you will notice the lack of overweight people after being here about two weeks, probably), and have heard a couple theories. One is that people here are more active–in Bogota only about 25% of the population has as car, so people either walk or take buses places, and taking buses means you do a fair amount of walking to get to and from. That makes sense, but then you have to think that New Yorkers lead a similar lifestyle in that sense, and there are quite a few hefty sized folks there.
Another theory is that the diet here is just more natural. You can’t say that Bogotanos eat less fat, because there’s lots of bread, desserts all over the place (dessert is basically standard with every meal–at my school, they serve dessert AND a snack–some kind of candy or sweet–every day with lunch). But the food here is more natural, closer to the source, mostly, and probably WAY less loaded with chemicals. You can buy lots of food from small markets–vegetables, fruits, meat from the butcher, bread from the baker. But even if you buy all your food in a grocery store, it doesn’t come from some agribusiness thousands of miles away and hasn’t been sprayed, zapped and processed to make it look better and last longer for transport. And, even though you can buy frozen dinners and such here, they’re not nearly as common as in the US. When you go out to lunch in a typical Colombian place, nothing fancy, the entire meal is likely to be truly home cooked–soup made from scratch, vegetables actually peeled and cooked in the place, not from a can or package.
Once I was out in my neighborhood with a couple friends, and my friend James pointed out a pretty chunky woman, about 30-ish, in a sweat suit, having lunch on the patio of a restaurant. He has been here a few years so knows a couple people, and he siad, “That girl works at the US Embassy.” I asked if he knew her, and he said, “No, but you know she’s from the States because a Colombian woman probably wouldn’t be that overweight, and she CERTAINLY wouldn’t wear a sweat suit to a restaurant.”
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