TED Talk: OKC Mayor Mick Cornett on Designing a City for Fitness

I got to know Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett last year, when I interviewed him at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors. We talked about his realization that he and his constituents (generally speaking) were obese, and how he stood in front of the elephants at the zoo on New Year’s Eve six years ago and announced that the city was going on a diet. He set out to have the residents of Oklahoma City lose a million pounds — and the city achieved it.

In a TED talk taped in April and posted online last week, Cornett tells the story of how OKC went from being ranked by Men’s Fitness magazine among America’s fattest cities to being ranked as one of the fittest.

“I started examining my city — its culture, its infrastructure — trying to figure out why our city seemed to have a problem with obesity,” Cornett says. “And I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life if you happened to be a car. But if you happened to be a person, you were combating the car seemingly at every turn.”