According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a whopping two-thirds of Australian adults (12.5 million people) are overweight.
The ABS's National Health Survey of 2017-18 found that of those people who were overweight, a staggering five million are obese.
A greater proportion of men (74 per cent) are overweight or obese than women (59 per cent) according to the 2016 Australian census.
And one quarter of all Australian children (aged 5-17) were overweight or obese.
Being obese means that your Body Mass Index (calculated using your weight and height) is 30.0 kg/m2 or more. To be overweight your BMI is between 25 and 29.9.
You can calculate your BMI at the Heart Foundation.
As Ajay notes, being obese or overweight might not necessarily make you unhappy, but regardless of the way a person looks or their attitude toward their own bodies, obesity is extremely dangerous to a person's health.
Obesity is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, type-2 diabetes and some cancers.
What's more, if you have any of these conditions, being obese hampers your ability to combat and manage the affliction.
The most obese Australian state, according to the 2016 Australian census, is South Australia, where 65 per cent of people are overweight or obese.
Sports-mad Victoria has the lightest Australians, but it still comes in alarmingly high at 63.3 per cent.
People living in remote areas are more likely to be obese than city dwellers.
Most shockingly, the stats reveal that more Australians are getting fatter.
In 1995, 19 per cent of Australians were obese. Now it is a third of all adult Australians.
And many are going to extreme lengths to combat their predicament. In 2015, 22,700 people went under the knife for weight loss surgery.
So how are we combating our national weight gain? Not very well according to the Collective For Action on Obesity. The group says that no effective and enduring action has been implemented to fight obesity in the country.
“As a result, Australia has gone backward at an alarming rate,” said the group in a statement.
ABS projections predict that within the next decade, 40 per cent of Australians will be obese (8.9 million people), which would be more than in the US as it currently stands (36 per cent). The most obese country in the world is American Samoa with 74 per cent of citizens chronically overweight.
Australia is “fast heading down the road the United States has traveled and they have discovered exactly how much it costs in terms of health and taxpayers dollars,” Annette Schmiede, executive leader of Bupa Health Foundation told Fairfax.
Indeed, obesity reportedly costs the economy a staggering $11.8 billion annually.
For help with obesity, go to Health Direct.
