Fat and happy, apparently.

Forget 2012. If you want to lose sleep over a bad year, pick 2018. That's the year a study sponsored by the United Health Foundation, Partnership for Prevention, and American Public Health Association shows that obesity rates could skyrocket to 40% in the U.S.

That's obese, not just a little chubby -- as in you're 30 pounds overweight or more. From CBS News:

The $344 billion projection on obesity costs would amount to 21 percent of all money spent on health care by 2018, reports Glor. That's up from the 9 percent we spend today. An obese person would spend an average of more than $8,000 a year on medical bills - up nearly $2,500.

The answer as to why we're all super-sizing might come from another study out of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center that indicates one in ten obese people think their weight is just fine. From ABC:

To measure body perception, the participants were asked to choose a silhouette on the gender-specific Stunkard figure-rating scale that they thought best represented how they looked, and also to select one that represented how they would ideally like to look.

Of the 2,056 individuals with a body mass index of 30 kg/m2 or greater, 266 -- or 8 percent -- reported an ideal body size that was greater than or equal to perceived body size.

Half of the individuals with these misperceptions thought they were in better health than most for their age, compared with 32 percent of those who knew they needed to lose weight.

As a Fitness Nerd, I admit that I probably veer too much in the other direction. A day without cardio and 10 to 15 servings of fruits and veggies is a day half lived, but on the other hand, if you're content to be overweight, then you also need to be content getting type II diabetes and heart disease and not be oblivious about it.

I guess the upshot is that you get to eat things like this more often.

photo: Metro.co.uk