Having served for 20 years, 1994-2014, the primary driver of all the fat bodies in the military is the military diet.

The military still does high carb low fat as official policy. The galleys onboard the carriers I served on served primarily carbs and sugars, every day, for every meal.

This is fine if you are an Olympic level athlete who needs to replace the glycogen in their muscles all the time, but most jobs in the Navy, at least, are not in the least hard physical jobs that see people burn copious amounts of energy all day. Lots of people who sit on their ass all day in front of a computer, or do minimal exertion doing maintenance on aircraft, or standing by a workbench fixing an avionics box.

As we now know, high carb/sugar diets hijack the body's insulin response, resulting in the body storing excess calories in fat cells.

This was something I constantly bitched about while I was in, because I was one of those people who rode the ragged edge of the body fat standards pretty much all the time. I never, in 20 years, made my max weigh in weight for my height. Boot camp included.

Then there was the fact that the military still uses BMI as a measure of personal fitness, when the creator of BMI as a concept expressly said it was never meant to be used as such. Even at 25% body fat I could still pass my run time. Weightlifters who measured in under 10% bodyfat with calipers measured in as obese using the tape measure system the military uses.

Only one service seems to get PT as an actual force readiness area, and that is the Marines. Everywhere in the Marine Corps on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should plan on no work getting done until 8030 at the earliest, because Marines are out doing unit PT. That kind of thing only happened in my Navy career on shore duty. On ships, or in the squadron, nope. No unit PT, at all.

I could rant for hours about this.

Having served for 20 years, 1994-2014, the primary driver of all the fat bodies in the military is the military diet.

The military still does high carb low fat as official policy. The galleys onboard the carriers I served on served primarily carbs and sugars, every day, for every meal.

This is fine if you are an Olympic level athlete who needs to replace the glycogen in their muscles all the time, but most jobs in the Navy, at least, are not in the least hard physical jobs that see people burn copious amounts of energy all day. Lots of people who sit on their ass all day in front of a computer, or do minimal exertion doing maintenance on aircraft, or standing by a workbench fixing am avionics box.

As we now know, high carb/sugar diets hijack the body's insulin response, resulting in the body storing excess calories in fat cells.

This was something I constantly bitched about while I was in, because I was one of those people who rode the ragged edge of the body fat standards pretty much all the time. I never, in 20 years, made my max weigh in weight for my height. Boot camp included.

Then there was the fact that the military still uses BMI as a measure of personal fitness, when the creator of BMI as a concept expressly said it was never meant to be used as such. Even at 25% body fat I could still pass my run time. Weightlifters who measured in under 10% bodyfat with calipers measured in as obese using the tape measure system the military uses.

Only one service seems to get PT as an actual force readiness area, and that is the Marines. Everywhere in the Marine Corps on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should plan on no work getting done until 8030 at the earliest, because Marines are out doing unit PT. That kind of thing only happened in my Navy career on shore duty. On ships, or in the squadron, nope. No unit PT, at all.

I could rant for hours about this.

Having served for 20 years, the primary driver of all the fat bodies in the military is the military diet.

The military still does high carb low fat as official policy. The galleys onboard the carriers I served on served primarily carbs and sugars, every day, for every meal.

This is fine if you are an Olympic level athlete who needs to replace the glycogen in their muscles all the time, but most jobs in the Navy, at least, are not in the least hard physical jobs that see people burn copious amounts of energy all day. Lots of people who sit on their ass all day in front of a computer, or do minimal exertion doing maintenance on aircraft, or standing by a workbench fixing am avionics box.

As we now know, high carb/sugar diets hijack the body's insulin response, resulting in the body storing excess calories in fat cells.

This was something I constantly bitched about while I was in, because I was one of those people who rode the ragged edge of the body fat standards pretty much all the time. I never, in 20 years, made my max weigh in weight for my height. Boot camp included.

Then there was the fact that the military still uses BMI as a measure of personal fitness, when the creator of BMI as a concept expressly said it was never meant to be used as such. Even at 25% body fat I could still pass my run time. Weightlifters who measured in under 10% bodyfat with calipers measured in as obese using the tape measure system the military uses.

Only one service seems to get PT as an actual force readiness area, and that is the Marines. Everywhere in the Marine Corps on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should plan on no work getting done until 8030 at the earliest, because Marines are out doing unit PT. That kind of thing only happened in my Navy career on shore duty. On ships, or in the squadron, nope. No unit PT, at all.

I could rant for hours about this.