After gaining 30 pounds during the Covid-19 pandemic, US Army Staff Sgt. Daniel Murillo is finally getting back into fighting shape. Early pandemic lockdowns, endless hours on his laptop and heightened stress led Murillo, 27, to reach for cookies and chips in the barracks at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Gyms were closed, organised exercise was out and Murillo’s motivation to work out on his own was low. “I could notice it,” said Murillo, who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed as much as 192 pounds.
“The uniform was tighter.” Murillo wasn’t the only service member dealing with extra weight. New research found that obesity in the US military surged during the pandemic. In the Army alone, nearly 10,000 active duty soldiers developed obesity between February 2019 and June 2021, pushing the rate to nearly a quarter of the troops studied. Increases were seen in the US Navy and the Marines, too.
“The Army and the other services need to focus on how to bring the forces back to fitness,” said Tracey Perez Koehlmoos, director of the Center for Health Services Research at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research.
Overweight and obese troops are more likely to be injured and less likely to endure the physical demands of their profession. The military loses more than 650,000 workdays each year because of extra weight and obesity-related health costs exceed $1.5 billion annually for current and former service members and their families, federal research shows.
More recent data won’t be available until later this year, said Koehlmoos. But there’s no sign that the trend is ending, underscoring longstanding concerns about the readiness of America’s fighting forces. Military leaders have been warning about the impact of obesity on the US military for more than a decade, but the lingering pandemic effects highlight the need for urgent action, said retired Marine Corps Brigadier General Stephen Cheney, who co-authored a recent report on the problem. “The numbers have not gotten better,” Cheney said in a November webinar held by the American Security Project, a nonprofit think tank. “They are just getting worse and worse and worse.”