Anne Saker and Jayne O'Donnell, USA TODAY Network

Corrections and clarifications: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the growth in men's waist sizes.

Americans have gotten heavier and thicker in the 21st century, with the numbers on the scale going up for men and women of all ages, according to a new federal report released Thursday.

Waistlines have ballooned, too, the National Center for Health Statistics said. In general, women’s waists grew more than 2 inches, from 36.3 in 1999-2000 to 38.6 inches in 2015-16. By comparison, men's middles increased just over an inch, from 39.0 to 40.2 inches during the same period.

The new report offers hard data for a phenomenon plainly visible on city streets, schoolyards and workplaces: In the past 30 years, obesity has risen to epidemic levels in the United States, but the nation still hasn’t been able to correct the problem. Being overweight can contribute to a cascade of other health problems, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Dana Duffie of Orlando, Florida, learned that firsthand. She had been comforting herself with food since she was little and then wound up with Type II diabetes after her daughter developed cancer in the 1990s. After her daughter died at 16 in 2002, stress eating became an even bigger problem. She hopes talking about it will encourage her to address it.

"My father was an alcoholic, and as an adult I had a light-bulb moment when I realized I had learned some unhealthy things from watching him: I was hiding empty family-size candy bags or empty Little Debbie boxes or even the wrapper of that second sub that was supposed to be tomorrow's lunch, all went underneath the other trash in the kitchen trash can after everyone else went to bed," Duffie says. "It's what got me where I am today, which is insulin dependent."

The report was based on data gathered through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which looked at weight, height, waist circumference and body-mass index in about 45,000 Americans 20 and older.

“It’s what your grandma would have told you, and hearing it from a professor now is no less important,” said Dr. Shailendra Patel, chairman of the division of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. “You need a varied diet, a balanced diet, with smaller portions. Your plate should look colorful, and you need to be exercising at least three times a week.”

Christine Rufkahr of St. Louis is just trying to do her own version of that, in a transition she describes as going from a "junk food vegan diet to a whole food plant-based diet." This diet has no meat, eggs or dairy but also eliminates most processed foods, added sugars or sweeteners and fats including olive oil.

Rufkahr believes many, like herself, "self medicate" for her mental health, which wouldn't happen "if people had access to effective treatment."

The waistline news is particularly grim for women.

In a March study in the Journal of the American Heart Association, women who carried more weight around their middles had a 10 to 20 percent greater risk of heart attack than women who were just heavier over all. This weight was measured by waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio. The study involved about 500,000 people (55 percent of them women), ages 40 to 69, in the United Kingdom. The researchers took body measurements of the participants and then kept track of who had heart attacks over the next seven years.

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The analysis showed that compared with body mass index (BMI) – a calculation of weight in relation to height – a waist-to-hip ratio was 18 percent stronger as a heart attack predictor in women compared to 6 percent stronger in men.

Roland Whitsell, a former business school professor in Gallatin, Tennessee, says excess weight crept up on him over the years as he would gain when he was experiencing depression but wouldn't lose it when he wasn't depressed. He says he's 5-foot-10 and weighed 233 pounds when he retired 10 years ago at age 70. He says he has finally lost 20 pounds by increasing both his protein intake and his exercise, especially through backpacking, which he took up a couple years after his retirement.

He's even still hoping to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in 2021. His last attempt was cut short.

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"I learn something each time that makes me better at backpacking," he says. "I am getting in better shape and working to have a lighter base weight."

Whitsell has also lost at least a half-inch since he got out of the Army in 1956. That's in line with what middle-aged men lost in height since 1999.

Dr. Malti Vij of the University of Cincinnati Health Weight Loss Center in West Chester, Ohi, said studies such as Thursday’s present the overall bad news about the nation’s weight problem. But “these kinds of surveys are helpful at least when they are dividing by race and by age group and gender. They tell us where to focus our efforts. Looking at the data, it looks like we have to focus everywhere.”

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