People in one local state could lose some weight -- Delaware came is the third-most obese state in the country.
A Gallup Well-Being poll released Tuesday found that 34.3 percent of Delaware’s population is obese -- coming in only behind West Virginia (34.4 percent) and Mississippi (35.4 percent) for being obese.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania wound up in the middle with 28.2 percent of Pennsylvanians very fat and 24.9 percent of New Jerseyans coming in as obese.
Overall, 27.1 percent of the 178,072 Americans taking part in the telephone survey were obese. The report took into account the respondents’ self-reported height and weight to determine obesity -- meaning those people have a body-mass index of 30 or higher.
The overall weight of Americans has gone up in recent years. According to Gallup, 25.5 percent of Americans were obese when the survey was first administered in 2008. That number rose to 26.6 percent in 2010 before dropping to 26.1 percent in 2011 then growing again to 26.2 percent in 2012.
Montana was the least obese state in 2013 with just 19.6 percent of people being obese with Colorado (20.4) and Nevada (21.1) rounding out the Top 3.
Interestingly the survey found that the amount of overweight Americans (having a BMI of 25 to 29.9) has steadily declined each year from 36.7 percent in 2008 to 35.7 percent last year.