Several years ago I was on a date with a woman who mentioned that a doctor had advised her father to go for long walks to improve his health. However, he found this hard to do because he would be hassled by young thugs every time he tried to walk in his neighborhood. I suggested he try walking very early in the morning, presumably when the punks would still be asleep after a night of troublemaking. I don’t know if my advice proved helpful. Nevertheless, the incident suggests that poor people who also live in dangerous neighborhoods may be overweight or obese, in part, because they are denied the opportunity to engage in the simplest form of exercise: walking. (Though, if they have transportation, they could drive to a mall or other safe public area to do their walking.) And, of course, the danger isn’t just from people. A person living in my area, who was walking his dog, was attacked by a pit bull terrier somebody had let run loose.
Even 'nice' neighborhoods such as ours has its problems. In a two-day period, I turned left at 6am on a morning walk while unbeknownst to me if I had turned right I would have walked 2/3d of a block into a police operation that ended in the killing of full grown mountain lion. The next day sometime before I went on my morning walk, a killer walked down through the Avenues and through our neighborhood on his way to hide in the large city library, where he was later apprehended without incident.
