This just in…Oklahoma City has been ranked the #2 Fattest city in America by Men’s Fitness.  That means amidst all of the dieting we have been doing, we have still managed to slide six spots in the rankings and are just a few burgers away from becoming #1.  A couple of the magazine’s comments that hit closest to home:

Basketball courts are practically nonexistent here, among the fewest per capita in our survey. There’s just one court here for every 12,162 residents; the national average is one court per 6,909 people.

Even recreational walking – about the easiest fitness activity anywhere – can’t attract participants in Oklahoma City, where people are 14 percent less likely than average to go for a walk, the 4th lowest rate of any city in our survey.

Hmm…are planning and public health related?  It appears so.  This does remind me that I need to get back to finishing the series on parks and public-space.  But until then, here is more info on the rankings…

OKLAHOMA CITY’S FITNESS REPORT CARD

• Fitness Centers & Sport Stores: C+
• Nutrition: F
• Sports Participation: C+
• TV Viewing: F+
• Overweight/Sedentary: F
• Junk Food: C-
• Air Quality: B-
• Geography: F+
• Commute: A
• Parks & Open Space: F+
• City Rec Facilities: D-
• Access to Healthcare: A-
• Motivation: F+
• Mayor & City Initiatives: C-
• State Obesity Initiatives: D+

They add:

Oklahoma City lost points in our Motivation category for poor participation rates in running, biking and walking despite high air quality.

Ouch Charlie! That hurts! And a F+ in parks and open space!  That really hurts and its still hurting.

ALL THE FATTEST CITIES

So who was number one?  Miami, yeh, who would have thought.  We are fitter than Miami!  Hooray, this is great news! I mean Miami has the sun, the ocean, and salsa music…and we still dominated them.  But other than that, all of the news for OKC is pretty dismal.  Here is the complete list of fattest cities:

1. Miami, FL
2. Oklahoma City, OK
3. San Antonio, TX
4. Las Vegas, NV
5. New York, NY
6. Houston, TX
7. El Paso, TX
8. Jacksonville, FL
9. Charlotte, NC
10. Louisville-Jefferson, KY
11. Memphis, TN
12. Detroit, MI
13. Chicago, IL
14. Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
15. San Jose, CA
16. Tulsa, OK
17. Baltimore, MD
18. Columbus, OH
19. Raleigh, NC
20. Philadelphia, PA
21. L.A.-Long Beach, CA
22. Phoenix-Mesa, AZ
23. Indianapolis, IN
24. San Diego, CA
25. Kansas City, MO

Obviously, Dallas and Houston are expected.  Also interesting to see Charlotte and Indianapolis, two cities we seem to want to emulate.  But maybe it has something to do with being in this part of the country…?

Perhaps.  It does seem to have some correlation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t overcome it.

AMERICA’S FITTEST CITIES

1. Salt Lake City, UT
2. Colorado Springs, CO
3. Minneapolis, MN
4. Denver, CO
5. Albuquerque, NM
6. Portland, OR
7. Honolulu, HI
8. Seattle, WA
9. Omaha, NE
10. Virginia Beach, VA
11. Milwaukee, WI
12. San Francisco, CA
13. Tucson, AZ
14. Boston, MA
15. Cleveland, OH
16. St. Louis, MO
17. Austin, TX
18. Washington, DC
19. Sacramento, CA
20. Oakland, CA
21. Atlanta, GA
22. Fresno, CA
23. Tampa, FL
24. Nashville-Davidson, TN
25. Pittsburgh, PA

Wait, why is Omaha in the top ten?  Surely we can be as fit as the people in Omaha.  I mean, we beat them in football.  Seriously though, there seems overall to be a very strong correlation between the type of urban form a city has and the fitness of its people.  Obviously there are a few anomalies that give us pause – like why is NYC on the fattest and Atlanta on the fittest – but there are a host of other factors that likely account for these discrepancies.  Variables such as climate, geography, age of population, ethnicity, and policy might all impact the fitness of a city.

Some cities are regulating eateries to help citizens make more informed, healthier eating decisions (click to enlarge).

Unfortunately, I don’t see anywhere that we got bonus points for our city-wide diet campaign, apparently the people conducting the test don’t know the inherent health benefits of Taco Bell’s fresco crunchy tacos!  There seems to be a higher priority placed on policies that affect measurable change.  So give credit to NYC for helping consumers make more informed eating decisions and for using its street infrastructure to encourage health and activity.  And to Boston for its city-wide ban on trans fat. And to Portland for their focus on providing first-class bike lane infrastructure.

As for OKC, we are talking the talk, but we are simply not walking anywhere.

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For more details on the rankings, click here.

CNNMoney.com has ranked Norman, Oklahoma as the #6 best place to live in their August 2008 rankings of America’s small cities. I really enjoyed living in Norman during my time at OU and my wife Maggie was born and raised there and still has lots of family there. We have a number of friends from college that decided to stay after graduating and they all seem really glad they did. This only backs up something the people living there already know – Norman can provide a great quality of life. This is good news not only for Norman, but for the entire metro and the state!

Here is the Top 10:

1. Plymouth, MN 70,100
2. Fort Collins, CO 129,400
3. Naperville, IL 142,900
4. Irvine, CA 193,900
5. Franklin Township, NJ 59,100
6. Norman, OK 102,800
7. Round Rock, TX 92,300
8. Columbia/Ellicott City, MD 158,800
9. Overland Park, KS 166,700
10. Fishers, IN 61,800

You can check out the complete rankings here: CNNMoney.com ‘Best Places to Live’

I love Oklahoma! I really do. I have not quite pinpointed why I love it so much. There are some truly terrific things about the state – many of which we need to do a better job of marketing – but there are also so many things that are just embarrassing. And yet, my love for Oklahoma is steadfast if for no other reason than that it is simply home. This affection for a place was perhaps most aptly described by C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves when he discusses what he defines as the first (and best) type of patriotism:

“First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells.”

- C.S. Lewis

This is what Oklahoma is to me and always will be. But what about everyone else? How do others feel about the State of Oklahoma? Also, which of the fifty states is the most loved and where does Oklahoma rank?

I decided to try and figure out which state was the most loved. After thinking through a number of fairly complex possibilities for measuring which states were loved the most, I decided on a simple solution suggested by my friend Frank Hebbert. Just Google it! Simply google the phrase “I love Oklahoma” and seeing how many results come back. It provides at least some insight as to how much the state is loved – or at least how often people express that love on the internet – and you can easily compare the results with those of different states.

Method of Data Collection Explained

So I put together a little php code to query Google for all 50 states using the search term “I love stateName” and return the number of results to a table (note: apparently Google frowns on people using their service for this type of “research” and will tag you as a spyware bot and block your service, but it’s not permanent). Here is what I got back. I found the results to be pretty interesting.

Overall Most Loved States





The data is not perfect, though I attempted to manually account for specific circumstances that caused the data to be skewed. For instance, with Indiana the numbers seemed high – initially some 37,900 – but upon further review I discovered that many these results were from the phrase “I love Indiana Jones” (my guess is that most of these were written prior to the release of the The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls!) Anyway, I subtracted these results as best I could using “-Jones” to end up at the numbers shown above. New York is particularly problematic because it is both the name of the State and a commonly used name for the City – a very large and apparently much beloved city. I added “-city” to the search term to try to account for some of this and also added “-vh1” in hopes of excluding many of the pages specific to the VH1 show that is actually titled, “I love New York”. As you can see – even with these modifications – New York had no trouble coming out on top. Not particularly surprising given the confusion of names b/w city and state and the fact that “I love New York” has been an active campaign to market tourism in the State for over 30 years now.

In addition to this, you could add precision by excluding results specific to a college or sport’s team (i.e. “I love Oklahoma football….a lot!”) or any other phrase that contains the “I love stateName” structure somewhere within the string. But I decided to keep it simple for now and only tackled the two very obvious outliers noted above.

Analyzing the Results

As for my Oklahoma, we finished a very respectable 29th. Not great, but not bad. And this is up against states with much bigger populations, providing a larger number of persons, each with the capacity to type “I love stateName” somewhere on the internet. In fact, Overall Most Loved is not the best measurement of how much a state is loved by its (or outside) residents, because larger states have a built in advantage. To account for this I adjusted the results to reflect the population by calculating the number of results per thousand residents.

Most Loved State per resident
(results per 1000 residents)





Unfortunately, this actually caused Oklahoma to slip to 30th. This is due to huge upward moves from lower population states that tend to attract vacationers, most notably:

• Wyoming – moving up 34 spots to 9th
• North Dakota – moving up 32 spots to 14th
• South Dakota – moving up 31 spots to 13th
• Delaware – moving up 30 spots to 15th
• And Vermont – moving up 28 spots to 7th

BUT Oklahoma is now one spot above Texas – which slipped to 31st place – so I am quite pleased with the results (Don’t Mess with Texas…ha!). Still, population is not the best measure as not every resident of say West Virginia has the same access to the internet as a resident of Massachusetts. I couldn’t find reliable data on internet connectivity, but I did find information on the number of households with computers which is at least a step closer to identifying the number of internet users. Here are the results when you adjust the data to reflect household computer ownership:

Most Loved State per household computer
(results per 1000 hh computers)





Finally we have a measure for the love for a state expressed on the internet per internet user (erhh…computer owner). Oklahoma comes in at a completely average 26th place – meaning we benefited by adjusting the numbers for computer ownership – which is not really a good thing. In fact, the states that moved up the most from the population adjusted list to the computer ownership adjusted list are all closely related geographically.

• Mississippi – moving up 9 spots to 26th
• Alabama – moving up 5 spots to 18th
• Oklahoma – moving up 4 spots to 26th
• Arkansas – moving up 3 spots to 45th
• Louisiana – moving up 3 spots to 38th

Show Oklahoma Some Love

Now, it is my hope that this post will begin a movement of people writing “I love Oklahoma” on every webpage, blog, message board, and bathroom stall they can find. You don’t have to be an Oklahoman to help, you don’t even have to have visited, all you have to do is write “I love Oklahoma” somewhere on the internet. I will rerun the numbers in a month or so and see if we have had any impact. I have been fairly liberal with my use of the phrase here in hopes of adding to the counts, but I can only do so much!

By the way, “I love Oklahoma City” as well, and sometime soon I intend to continue this series by exploring which cities people love the most – so stay tuned!

Till next time, you can look over the various state rankings listed below in alphabetical order. I have also provided a link at the bottom to the Google Spreadsheet containing all of the data used for the calculations. Or, make up your own test and let me know what you find out.


Alphabetical List of All States

Link to Google Spreadsheet containing all data used to produce rankings.

IloveOK Spreadsheet