At a few different points in my life, I thought about joining the Canadian Armed Forces. Once as a summer job to earn money for college, and twice as a viable means of using what I had learned in College to make some money, but I have been overweight longer than I can remember, and the skinniest points in my life have been while training to get into the Military, and even then I was overweight.

I ran across an interesting article on Slate, which talks about the US Army’s stance on overweight recruits.

Because of increasing obesity rates in the United States, the Army’s standards now disqualify a large percentage of the population. A study conducted by Army researchers found that 27.1 percent of the 18-year-olds who applied to join the military in 2006 were overweight—up from 22.8 percent in 1993. Weight is by far the most common medical reason why potential recruits are rejected from serving. And while prospective enlistees can try to make weight before their official screening—often with the support of eager recruiters—the pool of eligible young adults remains smaller than the Army would like.

In the end, it looks like the Army is allowing overweight recruits in based on their ability to do important jobs, but then sometimes filter them out based on their inability to get to the ideal weight.

It is an interesting issue, and one that will become more pressing as the fighting age men and women of the highly developed countries get fatter and fatter.

Sometimes, I do wish I had taken on the military lifestyle in part because it might have helped me kick my weight issue, but I don’t think I was ready at that time to be a soldier or to be skinny, and one thing that people don’t realize is that weight loss is definitely a mindset. You can’t be rushed into wanting to lose weight, nor will you be consistently successful if you aren’t in the right frame of mind.