I just spent five days on a fellowship in Seattle. I noticed something that a lot of Midwesterners who attended the conference with me noticed: Everyone was skinny. The only other place I’d seen this sort of consistently skinny people was Boulder, Colo. But if you know Boulder, you know they don’t count.

Even the overweight people in Seattle were smaller than the overweight people in St. Louis.

While I didn’t make this a major project, I did look around to see what would spark a community of a half-million skinny people. First, a lot of people walked a lot. Sure, the traffic gridlocked every day on all of the urban streets. But the sidewalks were crowded too.

The downtown was alive and full of small businesses and major department stores. But an inordinate number of store fronts were restaurants. And they were full of skinny people. All of those walkers were eating out. Even sidewalk vendors selling sugar-breads and coffee had lines of skinny people buying snacks. Several blocks I saw had nothing but restaurants in the whole block. So it wasn’t a community of anorexics and nibble fanatics.

I did notice that in four nights and five days, I saw two fast-food restaurants. I’m sure there were more, but while getting around town, even to and from the airport, no burger or chicken joints in sight.

My tour guide was a former student who had taken three writing courses under me. Now he runs a  PR department in Microsoft. Maybe I should have taken my own classes. He was chubby when he left St. Louis. Now, he’s stocky, but on his way to skinny. He drove me to several areas of the city, including some nice neighborhoods. The neighborhoods had sidewalks and people walked on them, even this early Sunday when I was zig-zagging out of town. I found no empty part of the city. I’m sure there were; I just didn’t see them. And I looked.

On the way out of town, my friend took me to breakfast, a mom-and-pop place with all of the eggs, greasy meat, biscuits and gravy and pancakes. Skinny people waited in a line out to the sidewalk. When they got in, they ordered big, hearty Midwestern-style breakfasts. They ate the meat, the eggs, the fruit. But they’d slice less than half, sometimes a quarter of the enormous stack of thick  pancakes like a pie wedge and leave the rest. I saw enough unfinished carbs taken back to the kitchen to feed a starving country.

I’m not a social scientist. So I can only speculate. But from what I saw, Seattle had a mindset that didn’t include habits that would foster weight gain. It wasn’t that they had any sort of campaign to get and stay healthy. It’s just that the things they did and how they lived didn’t result in weight gain.

While I didn’t  see anyone making a big deal about healthy lifestyle, I didn’t see a lot of ads for unhealthy sandwiches, liquor, cigarettes, steaks or barbecue. The people walked more because there were places to walk to. All of menus in the restaurants were loaded with fish – which might have something to do with being next to the Pacific Ocean — including a lot of raw versions that weren’t sushi, and creatively prepared dishes, not just grilled or fried — like the tuna tar tar I had with ultrathin purple tortilla chips and some weird variety of onion.

The mindset at the breakfast restaurant was most telling. They just didn’t eat everything in front of them. And they weren’t afraid to not eat what was in front of them. They talked for a long time tasted from each others’ plates and disposed of 75 percent of the pancakes and biscuits. Yes, I saw some people take some really big bites, but then, they wouldn’t bite again.

I’m not one to say one city is better than the other. I wouldn’t swap St. Louis rents for Seattle’s.  But I will say there are things communities can learn from one another: One is that healthy living is the result of a healthy community governed by people-oriented urban planning and public policy, and a mindset where overeating and under exercising are not lifestyle options that take conscious effort to avoid.