An obese woman in St. Louis frowns as she tries to read her bathroom scales, barely able to see the dial below the huge curve of her outstretched stomach. A man in London struggles to pull up the zipper on his pants, they're a larger size which he bought less than a month ago and yet they're already much too tight for his rapidly expanding waistline. A roly-poly child playing with her friends in Cairo is forced to take time out to sit down and catch her breath, she's way too fat to run with the others and thinks instead about the huge meal she'll eat when she gets home. All these people are part of a 1.1 billion-person trend called 'globesity', a term coined by the World Health Organization to describe the recent massive increase in global obesity.

Which is the fattest country?

Since 1995 the number of obese adults in the world has doubled to an incredible 300 million last year. Some cities are now so fat that over 25% of the population are obese and 60% classed as overweight. The proliferation of fast food joints, gross over-eating and over-indulgence, plus a lack of exercise is rapidly fattening the worlds population. From Samoa to Kuwait, from Jamaica to Britain, the planet's citizens are gaining weight and slowing down. America is leading the way in the race to fatten up where over 30% of the population, or 60 million people, are now considered obese. Mexico comes second with 24%, the UK third with 22% and Australia forth with 21%. In America the number of obese people has doubled since 1980, however Americans are not just getting fatter, they are rapidly ballooning to extremely obese proportions. The number of extremely obese American adults -- those who are at least 100 pounds overweight -- has quadrupled since the 1980s to about 4 million. That works out to about 1 in every 50 adults.

Which is the fattest U.S. state?

America is getting fatter, and Mississippi is leading the way with each generation becoming heavier than the last. People rarely take any exercise, while fast-food and buffet-style restaurants are more popular than ever. The local cuisine is high in fat and high in sugar, and yet social gatherings tend to revolve around eating large amounts of food and portions are super-sized. Even the school system has begun to rely on revenues from soft drink and candy machines to infuse cash into the education system. In 2001 Mississippi had an obesity prevalence of over 25%, 29 states had prevalences of 20-24%, and 20 states had prevalences of 15-19%.

Which is the fattest U.S. city?

The nation's fattest city is now Detroit, according to a survey of 25 U.S. cities by Men's Fitness magazine. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick blamed cars and trucks for their rapidly bulging waistlines. "It's probably something to do with the culture," he told local journalists "We're not a walking city." Detroit has replaced Houston, Texas which has been judged the nation's fattest city for the past three years, although Texas still has five of the top 10, including Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Arlington. Men's Fitness uses 14 categories to determine the fattest cities, including the number of health clubs and sporting goods stores and the number of fast food and ice cream and doughnut shops per capita, air quality, climate, television viewing trends and availability of health care.