Most of Canada’s Military Is Overweight or Obese. That’s a Problem.

Militaries have always reflected the societies from which they recruit. When a population becomes less physically active, more dependent on processed food, chronically sleep-deprived, and increasingly overweight, the armed forces drawing personnel from that population will eventually experience many of the same problems.

Uniforms do not provide immunity from national health trends, nor do they insulate against personal choices. Initial-entry training can mitigate some of that by improving fitness, military culture can encourage healthier behavior, and physical standards can remove some people who are unable to perform. But none of those mechanisms can completely separate a military from the society that sustains it.

That is part of what makes a recent report about the Canadian Armed Forces so concerning. According to reporting by David Pugliese in the Ottawa Citizen, Canadian military leaders were briefed in June 2024 that 72 percent of Canadian Armed Forces personnel were classified as either overweight or obese.

Seventy.

Two.

Percent.

The briefings reportedly placed 44 percent of the force in the overweight category and another 28 percent in the obese category. When I first heard those numbers I thought that those in the obese category were a subset of the overweight portion of the force. That would be bad enough on its own. But, nope. They’re additive. Folks, that’s a lot of fatties. And that’s a really big problem, for Canada, for NATO, and for the United States.

That said, while those numbers deserve attention, they also require context. The classifications are based on body mass index, an imperfect instrument that compares weight with height without distinguishing between fat and muscle. Anyone who has spent much time around combat-arms formations has known soldiers whose BMI placed them in an “overweight” category even though they were strong, fast, and plainly capable of doing their jobs. A 225-pound infantryman who can carry a machine gun through the mountains is not rendered unfit because a height-and-weight table dislikes him. I myself was “overweight” for much of my military career, because at 6’5″ tall, my weight was capped at something like 230 pounds. But I passed the fat test with no issues and usually had no problem whatsoever with our fitness tests. But it seems like a lot of the Canadian military can’t say the same.

That caveat is important because sensational statistics can encourage sloppy conclusions. It would probably be inaccurate and unfair to claim that 72 percent of Canadian troops are completely physically incapable of fighting. Canada’s own 2019 Armed Forces Health Survey found that 85.7 percent of Regular Force personnel had completed the FORCE Evaluation during the preceding year, and 99.4 percent of those tested passed. The same survey found that nearly 72 percent met Canadian physical-activity recommendations. The Canadian Armed Forces therefore remain substantially more active than the general population, and most members who take the military’s basic fitness assessment successfully complete it.

That does not mean the obesity statistics can be dismissed as a BMI problem. The same health survey found that higher BMI was associated with a greater burden of chronic disease. More than 10 percent of Regular Force personnel held medical exemptions from the FORCE Evaluation, and almost 28 percent reported that they had been unable to deploy at some point during the preceding two years. Musculoskeletal injuries were the leading reason, followed by mental-health conditions. Obesity in Canada, and indeed across the West, has been increasing gradually for years and is associated with additional sick days, medical releases, reduced productivity, and lower operational availability. Obesity does not explain all of those limitations, but it contributes to a broader readiness problem involving injury, illness, sleep, nutrition, recovery, and long-term health.

This distinction matters. Body composition is not identical to physical performance, but neither is it irrelevant. A service member can pass a minimum fitness test while still carrying enough excess body fat to increase the likelihood of hypertension, diabetes, sleep apnea, cardiovascular disease, joint deterioration, or heat injury. He may be deployable today but less likely to remain deployable five or ten years from now. She may complete the prescribed tasks under controlled conditions but face greater difficulty recovering from injury or sustaining performance during prolonged operations. A military interested only in whether someone can pass this year’s test may miss the accumulating health liability that will shape the force available for the next crisis.

Wartime physical demands also tend to exceed the conditions measured by annual fitness assessments. Combat does not occur on a clean gymnasium floor after a standardized warm-up. It involves carrying awkward loads, wearing body armor, working without adequate sleep, moving casualties, operating in extreme temperatures, and repeating demanding tasks for days or weeks. A person who can meet a minimum standard in peacetime may still struggle when fatigue, fear, hunger, weather, and accumulated stress are added to the equation.

This is, of course, not uniquely Canadian. The United States military has wrestled with the same problem for years; we’ve written about it right here in The Havok Journal. And many NATO countries have to recruit from populations in which obesity and sedentary lifestyles are increasingly common. Canada’s numbers are therefore not an invitation for Americans or Europeans to point north and laugh. They are a warning about a problem affecting much of the Western military enterprise.

It’s true that modern service members spend more of their working lives sitting in vehicles, offices, operations centers, aircraft, ships, and secure facilities. Technology has reduced some forms of physical labor while increasing dependence on screens, irregular schedules, and shift work. Food environments on military installations are often inconsistent with the healthy behavior leaders claim to encourage. Alcohol remains deeply embedded in portions of military culture, and chronic sleep deprivation is still too frequently treated as evidence of commitment.

The implications are especially serious because Canada is not confronting this health trend from a position of excess manpower. The Canadian Armed Forces have spent years trying to rebuild personnel strength, improve recruiting, reduce attrition, modernize equipment, and recover readiness. Canada’s own 2024–2025 Force Posture and Readiness directive acknowledged growing pressure to deploy personnel abroad while continuing to respond to historically high domestic demands. It described readiness as the core business of national defense and emphasized the urgency of force reconstitution and modernization.

A force struggling to fill its authorized ranks cannot afford to lose additional personnel unnecessarily to preventable disease, injury, and medical release. Every person unavailable for deployment places more demand on those who remain. Those remaining personnel deploy more frequently, spend more time away from their families, and have less opportunity to recover. That additional strain can produce further injuries, burnout, dissatisfaction, and attrition. A health problem becomes a personnel problem, the personnel problem becomes an operational-tempo problem, and the operational-tempo problem creates still more health problems.

This is how readiness erodes; not by things getting smaller, but by getting bigger. Usually, there is no single dramatic moment when a military becomes incapable of performing its mission. Instead, the margins gradually disappear. Units fill deployment rosters by drawing qualified people from elsewhere. Training is shortened or deferred because too few personnel are available. Experienced members carry multiple responsibilities because replacements have not arrived. Medical restrictions accumulate. Equipment maintenance competes with operational commitments. The force continues completing assigned missions, but it does so by consuming its institutional reserves.

Canada’s allies have a stake in whether that process continues. Canada is not a symbolic NATO member occupying a comfortable place on the alliance roster. It is a major Arctic nation, shares responsibility for the defense of North America through NORAD, contributes naval and air capabilities to allied operations, and leads NATO’s multinational brigade in Latvia. That formation includes personnel from 14 allied nations and serves as part of NATO’s deterrent posture on its eastern flank.

A Canadian readiness problem therefore does not remain inside Canada. It affects the credibility of deterrence in Europe, the security of the Arctic, the defense of North American airspace, and the alliance’s ability to generate forces during a prolonged crisis. NATO planning assumes that member states can produce trained, equipped, medically ready personnel when required. An alliance may possess sophisticated aircraft, ships, vehicles, and weapons, but those systems have little operational value without people capable of maintaining and employing them.

The consequences could become even more pronounced during a major war. Western militaries have spent decades optimizing relatively small professional forces for limited operations. That model depends heavily on the health, availability, and technical expertise of each individual. There is little excess capacity. A force with shallow personnel depth cannot easily replace large numbers of casualties, medical losses, or exhausted specialists. When much of the existing force already carries elevated health risk, the pool of personnel available for sustained combat becomes smaller still.

This should not be interpreted as an argument for humiliating or expelling every service member with a high BMI. Shame is a poor health policy and an even worse leadership philosophy. Military personnel are not abstractions on a spreadsheet. Some gained weight while recovering from service-related injuries. Others work rotating shifts, live with chronic pain, take medications affecting metabolism, or serve in environments offering few healthy food choices. Senior leaders who produce relentless schedules, tolerate inadequate sleep, and provide poor nutrition cannot reasonably treat resulting health problems as evidence of individual moral failure.

There is also a danger in pursuing weight reduction without understanding military performance. Poorly designed programs can encourage crash dieting, dehydration, disordered eating, and excessive training. A lighter service member is not necessarily a better service member. Strength, endurance, mobility, recovery, and occupational capability matter more than appearance. The objective should not be to make troops look thin in uniform. It should be to build and maintain bodies capable of performing military work over the course of a career.

That requires more than telling people to exercise. Canadian military health officials reportedly made this point in their briefings, noting that increased physical activity alone would not solve the problem. The Armed Forces already report higher activity levels than the general population. Effective intervention must also address nutrition, sleep, injury prevention, stress, alcohol consumption, recovery, access to medical care, and the conditions under which personnel live and work.

Commanders have a role in all of those areas. They control, or at least influence, daily schedules, training priorities, access to fitness facilities, meal periods, sleep opportunities, and organizational culture. A commander who says fitness is important but schedules meetings through physical-training time has communicated the real priority. A headquarters that celebrates exhaustion while ignoring recovery should not be surprised when injuries and health problems increase. A base offering abundant fast food but limited healthy options is not creating a neutral environment. It is making a choice.

The Canadian Armed Forces should also examine whether the FORCE Evaluation establishes an adequate floor for military readiness. A 99.4 percent pass rate may demonstrate a fit force, but it may also suggest that the minimum standard does little to distinguish between marginal and robust capacity. Minimum standards are necessary because militaries need a common measure of basic employability. They should not, however, become the final definition of fitness. Passing a test once each year is not the same as maintaining the strength, endurance, mobility, and body composition required for sustained operations.

Occupational standards matter as well. The physical demands placed on an infantry soldier, cyber operator, pilot, shipboard technician, and medical specialist are not identical. Every service member should possess a credible baseline capacity for common military tasks, while demanding occupations should maintain standards that reflect their actual wartime requirements. The answer is neither one low standard for everyone nor arbitrary standards based on aesthetics. It is a defensible system connecting fitness requirements to operational performance.

Leaders must also distinguish compassion from avoidance. Service members facing health problems deserve professional assistance, sufficient time, competent medical care, and a realistic opportunity to improve. But military service carries obligations that do not apply to most civilian employment. Governments maintain armed forces because they may need people to perform extraordinarily difficult tasks under dangerous conditions. If someone cannot meet the physical requirements of military service after reasonable intervention and rehabilitation, continued service may no longer be appropriate. That conclusion is not punishment. It is a consequence of the profession’s purpose.

The harder question concerns institutional accountability. It is easy to place every failure on the individual who gained weight. It is more difficult to ask whether recruiting shortages caused leaders to tolerate declining standards, whether high operational tempo prevented recovery, whether injury-management systems returned people to duty effectively, or whether senior officials avoided confronting a politically uncomfortable problem. The Ottawa Citizen report noted allegations that the Department of National Defence initially failed to locate relevant briefing documents requested through Canada’s access-to-information process. Whether that resulted from concealment, bureaucracy, or incompetence, military health data affecting readiness should not have to be dragged into public view.

Transparency matters because the Canadian people fund the military and depend on it. NATO allies plan around Canadian commitments. Service members themselves deserve to know whether the institution is honestly confronting conditions that affect their health and workload. Classifying or obscuring bad news does not protect readiness. It protects leaders from having to explain it.

There is an old tendency in military institutions to treat readiness as a problem of equipment and money. Governments announce new aircraft, submarines, vehicles, missiles, and defense budgets because those things are visible and politically useful. Human readiness is less dramatic. It is built through thousands of ordinary decisions involving recruiting, training, medical care, sleep, food, leadership, family support, and standards. No procurement announcement can compensate for a force that lacks enough healthy people to use the equipment being purchased.

Canada’s obesity problem is therefore not really about how its troops look. It is about how long they can serve, how often they can deploy, how well they can withstand operational stress, and how many will remain available during an extended war. It is about whether a force already struggling with personnel shortages can afford additional preventable losses. It is about whether NATO’s collective defense plans rest on formations with sufficient human endurance behind their flags and equipment.

Most importantly, it is not merely Canada’s problem. Western nations recruit from many of the same demographic and cultural conditions. They face similar obesity rates, aging populations, recruiting challenges, medical costs, and declining physical activity. Canada’s statistics may be unusually visible, but the underlying trend crosses borders.

Canada should confront it directly, without mockery, euphemism, or panic. It should measure more than BMI, demand more than minimal test performance, and support more than exercise alone. It should give troops the resources and command climate required to become healthier, while maintaining meaningful consequences for those who ultimately cannot meet the profession’s demands. Its allies should do the same. That’s because NATO’s deterrent power does not reside only in its defense budgets, weapons inventories, and communiqués. It resides in the bodies and minds of the people who may one day have to fight.

Those people need to be ready. And if the health epidemic in their ranks is any indication, right now, they’re just not.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.