Yes, the average American is overweight. When you combine the most recent federal data, about 72% of U.S. adults aged 20 and older fall into either the overweight or obese category. The average American man weighs 199 pounds at 5 feet 9 inches tall, giving him a BMI of 29.4, just under the obesity threshold. The average American woman weighs 172 pounds at 5 feet 4 inches, with a BMI of 29.5. Both figures land squarely in the overweight range and sit right at the edge of obesity.
What the Numbers Actually Look Like
The CDC classifies adult weight using BMI: 18.5 to 24.9 is healthy weight, 25 to 29.9 is overweight, and 30 or above is obese. Based on physical measurements collected from 2021 through 2023, 31.7% of American adults are overweight and 40.3% have obesity, including 9.7% with severe obesity (a BMI of 40 or higher). That leaves only about 28% of adults at a healthy weight or below.
Put differently, if you gathered 10 random American adults in a room, roughly three would be overweight, four would be obese, and only about three would be at a healthy weight. The “average” American isn’t just slightly over the line. They’re carrying enough extra weight to nearly qualify as obese.
How the U.S. Got Here
This wasn’t always the case. In the early 1960s, only 13.4% of American adults had obesity and 31.5% were overweight. The overweight percentage has stayed remarkably stable over six decades, hovering in the low 30s. What changed dramatically is how many people crossed the line from overweight into obese.
Obesity rates nearly tripled between the early 1960s and today. The steepest jump happened between the late 1980s and early 2000s, when obesity prevalence surged from 23.2% to over 30% in roughly a decade. Severe obesity tells an even more striking story: it went from under 1% of the population in 1960 to 10.2% in the most recent survey period. That means one in ten American adults now has a BMI of 40 or higher, which for a person of average height translates to carrying roughly 100 or more extra pounds.
Children Are Following the Same Pattern
The trend isn’t limited to adults. Among American children and adolescents aged 2 to 19, 21.1% have obesity and another 15.1% are overweight. That means more than one in three young people in the U.S. are above a healthy weight. Severe obesity affects 7% of kids and teens, a figure that was negligible a few decades ago.
For children, the classifications work differently than for adults. Instead of fixed BMI cutoffs, kids are measured against growth charts for their age and sex. A child at or above the 85th percentile is considered overweight, and at or above the 95th percentile is considered obese. These benchmarks were set using data from earlier generations, so when over a third of today’s kids exceed them, it reflects a genuine population-level shift in body weight.
Why It Matters for Health
Carrying extra weight raises the risk of several major chronic diseases, and those risks start climbing in the overweight range, not just at obesity. The three most significant are type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
The connection to type 2 diabetes is especially strong: nearly 9 in 10 people with the condition have overweight or obesity. Excess body fat interferes with how cells respond to insulin, making it progressively harder for the body to regulate blood sugar. High blood pressure is another common consequence because a larger body requires the heart to pump harder to circulate blood to all tissues, and excess fat can also damage the kidneys, which play a key role in blood pressure regulation.
Heart disease risk rises through multiple pathways at once. Higher body weight is linked to elevated blood pressure, higher cholesterol, and higher blood sugar, each of which independently contributes to cardiovascular problems. Together, they compound the risk. Given that the average American sits at a BMI just under 30, the population as a whole is exposed to meaningfully elevated risk for all three conditions.
What BMI Does and Doesn’t Tell You
BMI is a simple formula based on height and weight. It’s useful for tracking population trends, which is exactly how the CDC uses it, but it has real limitations for individuals. It can’t distinguish between muscle and fat, so a heavily muscled person might register as overweight despite having low body fat. It also doesn’t account for where fat is stored, and fat around the midsection carries more health risk than fat elsewhere.
That said, waist circumference data supports the same conclusion BMI does. The average American man has a waist measurement of 40.6 inches, and the average woman measures 38.5 inches. Health risk increases significantly above 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women, so the average American woman exceeds her threshold and the average man is right at his. By any common measure of body composition, the typical American carries more weight than is considered healthy.