The federal government’s stimulus plan isn’t just for the fat cats of Wall Street. It’s also being aimed at reversing our country’s obesity epidemic.

The Obama administration is going to provide states and local governments with money to control obesity, which will include investing in public transportation to encourage more walking, says Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Sebelius says that the majority of the $1 billion stimulus plan appropriated by Congress for disease prevention would go to a CDC-planned initiative to fight obesity, heart disease and other chronic conditions.

While worries over the economy and the wars we are conducting around the world dominate our consciousness, we continue to lose a battle on a different front. American waistlines are continuing the dangerous trend of expansion.

Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and there’s no end in sight to this dangerous trend. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2007 25.6 percent of Americans were obese. But in 2008, it crept up to 26.1 percent.

The country is getting fatter, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is naming names. Well, not individual names, but towns. Burlington, Vermont was named the healthiest city in the U.S. The unhealthiest was Huntington, West Virginia.

There are a few similarities between the two. They’re both college towns of about 50,000 people; the populations are mostly white and of English, Irish and German decent; the names sound slightly alike… but that’s where the similarities end.

In fact, the differences may be a microcosm of what the demographics look like when comparing obese and fit groups.