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Americans didn't worry much about keeping fit 100 years ago. In those days 40% of the population was reaping and sowing, herding and mowing its way through life on preindustrial farms. In coastal cities, strong-shouldered stevedores were loading and unloading ships dawn to dusk without a container or stacking crane in sight. Builders, lumberjacks and railroad men drove nails or sawed wood with their muscles, not power tools. And for those doing the washing, cooking and scrubbing at home, life wasn't so dainty either. (Ever pick up one of those 8-lb. solid-metal weights that gave ironing its name?) In that bygone, sweat-drenched era, staying in shape just wasn't an issue. Indoor plumbing? Now that was an issue. Working out? Never heard of it. One can only imagine what time travelers from that strenuous era would make of modern-day Americans, sitting on their duffs most of the day—in the car, at the office, in school, on the sofa—eating like a stevedore and then driving to the fitness club to log a mile or so on a conveyer belt.

It just doesn't add up. Literally. The old energy-balance equation—calories in should equal calories out—is seriously out of whack, as the rising rates of obesity in the U.S. and other developed nations prove. For much of the past decade, public-health officials, doctors and the popular press (including this magazine) have focused on the intake side of the equation. We're eating too much fat, too many carbs, too much altogether.

But the problem is just as grave on the output side. We are not burning enough calories or moving our bodies enough to maintain good health. "We have two epidemics in this country. One is obesity, the other is physical inactivity," laments Dr. Tim Church, medical director of the Cooper Institute, a fitness research center in Dallas. "One is a topic of cocktail conversation and the focus of bestselling books. The other is ignored." In this 21-page special report on getting America fit, TIME aims to address that imbalance. Why should we be concerned about fitness? Because as bad as it is to be overweight, it may be just as bad to be inactive.

In fact, some health authorities believe it's worse. The health risks of obesity—diabetes, heart attack, high blood pressure and certain cancers, among others—are familiar to most Americans, but physical activity confers its own benefits "above and beyond what it can provide for weight control," says Harold Kohl, lead epidemiologist at the Physical Activity and Health Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). How does exercise help us? Kohl is happy to count the ways.

To begin with, exercise works wonders for the heart: improving the lipid profile, reducing the risk of heart disease and restoring function after a heart attack. "It helps tremendously in maintaining bone health whether you are young or an older adult," he notes. In addition, it helps moderate blood pressure in people with hypertension, can significantly relieve depression and anxiety and appears to help maintain cognitive function in old age. Studies show that physical activity may also help prevent cancers of the breast and prostate, probably by influencing hormone levels, and of the colon, probably by keeping wastes moving along. Exercise seems to be so beneficial to cancer patients that oncologists have begun advising them to do their best to get moving. A study released last week showed that breast-cancer patients who walked three to five hours a week or did an equivalent amount of another exercise lived about 50% longer than those who were inactive. Why then has obesity hogged the limelight that physical activity also deserves? It's partly because being overweight is a more conspicuous problem. You can see it with your eyes, you can measure it on a scale.

Fitness isn't so easy to size up. "Fitness is not a matter of being skinny," says Carlos Crespo, professor of social and preventive medicine at the University at Buffalo in New York. "It's a matter of being healthy." Experts like Crespo talk about seven components of fitness, a list that varies a bit from study to study but typically goes something like this: body composition, cardio-respiratory function, flexibility and range of motion, muscle strength, endurance, balance, and agility and coordination. How do Americans stack up on those measures? No one knows. Assessing them requires treadmills, calipers, piles of gym equipment—and lots of money. The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports used to conduct a national fitness survey of American schoolkids, but that hasn't happened since the mid-'80s. "No federal agency is interested in picking up the tab," says Russell Pate, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina. What we do know about American fitness comes mainly from measuring body weight and from large surveys of exercise habits. The signs aren't good. Not only are nearly a third of American adults obese, but a quarter of them—22% of men, 28% of women—admit that they spend virtually no leisure time getting exercise. The good news is that this is an improvement.

In 1990, 31% admitted to being hopeless couch potatoes. In recognition of the risks of rampant inactivity, this year the federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which have been issued every five years since 1980, included its most explicit recommendations to date on exercise. The scientists who wrote the guidelines struggled to boil down a complex array of research findings. The results, alas, were somewhat baffling. Americans were advised to get 30 min. per day of moderate-intensity physical activity "on most days of the week," 60 min. per day if they were trying to control their weight and up to 90 min. per day to maintain weight loss. Even a temperate government scientist like Kohl admits that "there's a need to clarify that." And there seems to be a consensus on what the clarification should be. "The rock-bottom message should be 30 minutes a day, five days a week," says Church. And while 30 uninterrupted minutes are preferable, three 10-min. bursts also do the trick. As for what moderate means, Kohl offers this guidance: "Walking at about 3 to 3.5 miles per hour is moderate. If you can't maintain a conversation and your heart is beating rapidly, then you've probably crossed into vigorous." How many Americans get a moderate 30 minutes at least five times a week?

In a TIME survey of more than 1,000 randomly selected American adults, 33% said they do. Federal surveys suggest that it's more like 26%, although if you include data on activities such as gardening and cleaning, as opposed to just recreational exercise, the figure jumps to about 45%. In short, somewhere from a quarter to half of Americans say they get the recommended dose of exercise, although the lower figure may be more trustworthy. People are notorious for lying about their exercise habits or, as the CDC puts it, for overreporting "socially desirable responses." Says Church, more succinctly: "My experience asking questions about exercise: they suck!" Church and many others believe there's a simple way for more Americans to get the activity their bodies need, and it doesn't require gym memberships or fancy equipment. The answer, they say, is walking. Unfortunately, most American communities were designed in the age of the automobile and aren't built for bipeds. "The U.S. probably has the lowest percentage of trips by biking and walking of any country," says psychologist Jim Sallis, director of the Active Living Research program at San Diego State University.

Between 1977 and 1995, trips Americans made by walking declined 40%, even though a quarter of those trips are a mile or less. During the same period, walking to school fell 60%. By 2001 only 13% of trips to school were made by foot or bicycle. Walking and physical motion have also been steadily drained from the workplace. Even a low-impact job like research librarian no longer involves much reaching, bending and pulling tomes from the stacks—not when you can let your fingers do the walking on a keyboard. To put modern society's lack of movement in context, researchers at the University of Tennessee's Department of Health and Exercise Science studied a group of Old Order Amish, a religious sect that shuns cars and other modern conveniences. Using pedometers, the researchers found that the average Amish man took 18,425 steps a day and the average Amish woman took 14,196 steps. A typical American, by contrast, takes about 5,000. Americans are not about to give up their beloved cars and conveniences, even if their lives depend on it, which they might. If anything, we will continue to eliminate physical effort.

"Companies like Procter & Gamble are working hard to stop all the drudgery of cleaning and scrubbing," jokes Sallis. And while a small percentage of the nation—mainly found among the best-educated and wealthiest classes—are committed gym rats, most folks cannot find the time, energy and will power to regularly work out. "People are really motivated to avoid activity," Sallis observes. Fitness experts increasingly believe that the solution lies in finding new ways to make physical movement an unavoidable part of everyday life.

Some of the best thinking along those lines has come from a new alliance of public-health experts, urban planners and architects nurtured by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That collaboration helped promote New Urbanism, a movement to build "walkable," mixed-use communities in which residences are a short distance from commercial centers. It also spurred efforts to retrofit cities and towns with what some call "complete streets"—thoroughfares that include sidewalks, bike paths and a protective strip of parked cars or vegetation to shield pedestrians from traffic. Reid Ewing, associate professor of urban studies at the University of Maryland, believes we may be seeing the first fruits of those efforts. After steadily declining for decades, the number of trips Americans made by walking showed a slight uptick in 2001, from 7% of all trips to 9%, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Meanwhile, shrewd employers like Sprint in Kansas City, Kans., and GlaxoSmithKline in London are devising ways to get their workers moving. Sprint banned cars from much of its 200-acre headquarters, forcing employees to park in garages a good distance from their offices. Many buildings are separated by walks of up to half a mile, and they feature intentionally sluggish elevators to encourage the use of attractive, well-lit stairways. While heartening to fitness advocates, such developments remain an exception in 21st century America. New subdivisions with no place to walk, new buildings without useable stairways and cash-strapped schools without adequate P.E. remain the rule. "This movement is like turning around a battleship," admits Ewing. But the search for a fitter lifestyle for the nation—and for each of us—has to start somewhere, and the best way to do that is to move forward one step at a time.

• Claudia Wallis