If there’s one thing that Americans love it’s looking at rankings of themselves, which improves upon narcissistic reflection gazing by adding a quantitative element. Today’s Metblogging Love of Lists ongoing featurette series brings you the latest pecking order of the fattest U.S. Sates. Regardless of whether the count includes the overweight with the obese, our state can at least console itself with it’s placement in the bottom half of the heaviest list:

Washington ranked 29th in the U.S. in highest rate of adult obesity at 21.7 percent, according to F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America, 2005. It ranked 32nd in the U.S. in highest rate of obese and overweight adults combined at 58.6 percent. Mississippi ranks as the heaviest state, Colorado as the least heavy, and rates in Oregon remained the same. Over 25 percent of adults in 10 states are obese, including in Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana, and South Carolina. Seven of those 10 states are in the Southeastern U.S. [healthyamericans.org]

Isn’t it nice that the D.C. based policy group includes a summary for the geography-impaired by subtly pointing a finger at the pudgy lower right corner of the country?

For those who want to calculate their own body mass index without getting out calculators and conversion tables, there’s an online tool to tell you if you can put “HWP” in your personal ad without being deceptive. [cdc]

(via [bbc])