States with the Highest Obesity Rates

About 4 in 10 adults in West Virginia (41.4%) are obese — the highest rate in the country, and far above the 25.0% in Colorado, which ranks last. That's a 16-point spread between first and last, and unlike depression or asthma, the states at the top here form one of the tightest, most legible regions on any of our maps.

The top of this ranking is almost entirely the Deep South and Appalachia. West Virginia leads, with Mississippi (40.4%), Louisiana (39.2%), Alabama (38.9%), and Arkansas (38.9%) filling out the next four spots, and Indiana (38.4%) and Tennessee (37.6%) close behind. There's no scattering of high-income coastal states breaking up the pattern the way there is on some of our other health maps — the obesity belt is a contiguous block running across the Gulf states and up into the Ohio Valley. At the other end sit Colorado (25.0%), Massachusetts (27.0%), and Hawaii (27.0%), and even there the "lowest" obesity rate in America is one in four adults — a reminder that this is a nationwide condition, not a regional one. The gap between states is real, but the floor is already high.

Unlike some of our maps, the metric here is fairly direct. This is self-reported height and weight from the CDC's survey, converted to a body-mass-index threshold (BMI of 30 or higher). Self-reporting tends to *understate* obesity — people round their weight down and their height up — so the true rates are likely a bit higher than every number on this map, fairly uniformly across states. That makes the *ranking* trustworthy even if the absolute levels run conservative: the ordering of states is on solid ground, and the regional pattern isn't an artifact of who gets diagnosed, the way it can be for conditions that require a doctor's visit.

What's striking is how often the same names recur. West Virginia isn't only #1 for obesity — across our other CDC maps it's also #1 for adult smokers (20.78%), #1 for arthritis (41.22%), #1 for diabetes (18.36%), #1 for depression (30.22%), and #1 for the worst self-rated health (26.31%). And the inactivity map tells a closely related story: Mississippi is #1 for inactive adults (30.6%) — and it sits at #2 here — while Colorado ranks #50 (15.6%), the very same state that anchors the bottom of this map at #50. Obesity, inactivity, and chronic disease cluster together state by state, and a small group of Appalachian and Deep South states keeps landing at the top of ranking after ranking.

A note on method: every state here comes from the same CDC survey (BRFSS), one year (2024), one definition, so the 50-state comparison is apples-to-apples. The one exception is Tennessee, shown with its 2023 value (37.6%), because CDC hadn't released a 2024 figure for it; it's flagged on the map. The numbers are CDC's; the ranking and analysis are ours.