"D. Stussy" wrote in message
...
"Dee Flint" wrote in message
. ..
"Jiggly" wrote in message
...
The hobby has lots of people who are morbidly obese.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbid_obesity for definition)

Sadly, many of them die from weight-related causes. We lose a lot of
nice people and good operators that way.


On 02 Jun 2008 13:44:56 GMT, Bert Hyman wrote:

In "D. Stussy"
wrote:

Considering that many "hams" are grossly overweight (at least in my
geographic area), are you certain?

It's pretty clear that you've picked the wrong hobby.

Good luck.

Doing some further web surfing:

Depending on what site you visit (here's the one I used:
http://www.nclnet.org/news/2007/obes...y_06192007.htm)

Approximately 66% of Americans are overweight to obese
Approximately half of that group (or 33%) of Americans are obese to
morbidly obese.

So it is not unique to hams. I think we see it more in hams simply
because
the average age is higher and the bad habits that lead to overweight and
obesity have had more time to do their work.

Too many people deceive themselves too with "I'm just big boned" and all
those arguments. Well the healthy BMI has sufficient range to
accommodate
the big boned. If you can't see your collar bone when you look in the
mirror nude, you are overweight.

That doesn't mean that there's not a higher percentage among amateur radio
operators than the general population.



Well without doing a proper statistical study, there's no way to be sure.

Just looking at people in the stores around here, it looks like the average
population is about the same as the hams (accounting for the age bracket
bias).

Of the people that I personally know that are over 50, I could count the
one's that are not overweight on the fingers of one hand.

Dee, N8UZE