Twiggy… omg

[Newsenmum]

I knew she was skinny but I never knew how bad it was! Looking at those photos of her in the 60s is painful.Why do we do this to ourselves? Have we done this since time began?

I was just reading how in the Victorian times there was another skinny phase where women liked to look skinny and weak like they’d had TB. Awful!

Does anyone know if it’s ever been fashionable to be healthy?

I must have had the skinny gene then. I literally could eat anything I wanted and couldn’t gain an ounce. No eating disorders (I loved food and ate burgers, cakes, chocolate, everything that would be considered weight gaining).

I hated it and yearned to be a bit chubby so I wouldn’t get insulted all the time.

Well, if that’s your interpretation fair enough but that wasn’t what the study was about so whatever you want didn’t mean the ‘type’ of food only, it meant ‘whatever’ quantity and whatever type of food so unhealthy and healthy. When discussing ‘naturally thin’ people have wildly different interpretations of what that means - evidently!

5’3” is average according to the 2021 ONS stats. An increase in half an inch from 1998.

It sounds like it but that is why it is of interest as the study was trying to understand that 1% percent, there is nothing to discover when someone eats whatever healthy food they want, healthy quantities and exercise quite at length or walk thousands of steps a data and are skinny, I.e we all know that’s how you can be slim!

That is quite short but I suppose not for the UK. But at 5ft5 Twiggy wouldn’t be a model these days, she wouldn’t have been in the 90s either.

I think we've lost sight of what a 'healthy weight' human body looks like. 'Normal' is not the same thing as it's normal to be overweight and even obese people we would describe as average.

BMI at the bottom end of healthy eg 18.5 is by far more healthy than being overweight. It's perfectly possible to be a size 6 & be well within the healthy BMI category.

There's always been a pressure on women to conform to a narrow 'ideal' of beauty depending on fads & trends that tend to be unhealthy eg weight, Victorian corset, being excessively pale/tanned, pumped up lips etc.

Would be nice to see women allowed to be healthy & happy

This exchange came about because you seem to have a problem with people saying that they're naturally thin because only 1% of the population have the skinny gene.

Yes evidently. I'm not sure why you're so fixated on the skinny gene tbh and that that's the only way someone could be 'naturally thin'.

I'd say that if someone can eat a balanced diet and stay slim then they're naturally thin! They can go on holiday and the scales goes up and then they come home and go back to normal and the weight drops off because it didn't 'stick' as fat. For that cohort of people, it doesn't require any real effort to stay thin so I'd say that's natural. For you you seem to think that unless you can eat and eat and eat and stay thin then that means you're not 'naturally thin'.

Anyone saying naturally thin doesn't exist needs to STFU. People have natural dispositions for certain weights.

I went through the phase in my teens and early twenties of gorging on food to fatten up. Four scrambled eggs in one, a whole tin of beans and toast. Mash potato, beef, chicken, porridge. To the point where eating took over everything and cost loads. At a height of 5'11, I've never weighed more than 65kg.

Idiots who claim to care about eating disorders - you are the cause of disordered eating in other people when you insult natural bodies. This nonsense is why people risk their lives for BBLs just as much as why people restrict eating.

They do, they call them 'mighty.'

Edited to add, but I know what you mean, generally men's clothes are just sized and that's that.

I could literally eat anything that most people would avoid if they were watching their weight. People even used to say to me how can I eat so much and not gain weight. I was 5’6 and barely hit 7 stone on the scales. I hated it though, I didn’t want to be ‘thin as a rake’. Ironic that now I have to watch like a hawk what I eat, one sugary transgression and the weight piles on.

There was an outsize men’s shop called “High & Mighty”. A euphemism for “Tall & Fat”

I agree with you 100%. Anyone saying naturally thin doesn’t exist is showing ignorance and has most probably never been slim never mind skinny.

Naturally means without ‘special intervention’, sorry but all the stuff you describe are interventions, nothing natural about them. Healthy eating and exercise hardly a shocker for staying slim!

I don’t disagree with you it sounds like you are the 1 percent that have the skinny gene.

How on earth can it be considered a 'special intervention' for someone to just eat a balanced diet? Don't be so ridiculous.

That means that you're assuming that the normal and natural thing to do is to not eat a balanced diet.

And you also seem to be assuming that the normal and natural thing to do is to keep eating and drinking like you're on holiday all the time which it really isn't, because most people who did that would feel like shit even if they didn't gain weight. It's normal and natural for many to go back to your regular lifestyle after holidays etc. It's not a 'special intervention'.

Well you didn't eat lots before 1954 as sugar rationing didn't end until late 1953. I grew up in a poor innercity area and no way were parents handing out money for lots of sweets.

No flouride in the water was a big factor with tooth decay. Widespread adding flouride didn't start until well into the 60s. I moved from an area with flouride to an area without when my kids were little in the 70s and it made a difference.

Well tall and/or fat. My husband was tall, skinny with very long arms so we got his shirts from High and Mighty as their sleeves were long enough. He isn't skinny anymore.

Did you ever see the names for the plus size shops in Asia? 😳

Fat girls, fatty fat girl, love calories, moo moo, thai fat

I'm not sure about the culture and if people who shop there find the names offensive or not. Presumably many people don't or they wouldn't call the shops those names!

I actually said comparing her to other teenagers. She was in her 20s when she was in The Boyfriend so lots of skinny teenagers will have filled out a bit and others in the film might have been older than her. Doesn't alter the fact that she wasn't unusually thin as a teenager in the 60s.

I was a similar build to Twiggy, thin with a flat chest, and I also got called Twiggy. It wasn't an unusual nickname for a thin girl. Someone else on here has said the same.

yes watching the Olympics and wondering about the female weight lifters in China and Korea, how do the get on day to day in the land of mainly small slim people

I don't think you need the skinny gene to be slim. You just need to not have the gene variants that make you not get a high from exercise, predispose you to Diabetes 2, make you lay down white fat easily, and give you raised hunger hormones.

That gene combo makes it really hard to keep weight down, especially from middle age.

Had 😁

If that’s what ‘you’ think fair enough but it very much sounds like you are surprised that you can be thin by eating healthily nd exercising purposefully even though that is literally the mantra of every diet to lose weight out there! I really am finding it hard to understand your logic. Why does it matter to you so much? Do you feel it is somehow special to be referred to as naturally thin?

Well what 'you' think is extremely warped.

No i'm not surprised that people (who have never struggled with their weight) can be thin by eating healthily and exercising purposefully.

But what you seem to not understand or accept is that eating healthily isn't a special intervention, many want to eat healthy food a lot of the time and they eat crap when they want it also, they just don't want it all the time therefore they have a balanced diet and are naturally thin. Also plenty of thin people don't exercise purposefully or even at all.

It only matters to me so much because you keep fixating on the skinny gene and making out that unless you have that you can't be naturally thin and you say that any other thin person must be doing special interventions in order to stay that way.

I clearly don't feel like it's special to be referred to as naturally thin seeing as I'm saying that a lot more people than you think fit into that group, you're the one who is trying to make out that it's an exclusive club that only 1% of the population fit into if they have some special rare gene.

To some extent your bone structure comes into play though. Twiggy has tiny bones. I've always been fairly slim (8/10 in jeans) and I'm 5'4" but never look that skinny because I have a big frame with broad shoulders, a pronounced waist and short muscular legs.

However, I'm another that's never dieted, am not bulimic, just struggle to put on weight. Now I'm 60 I worry about osteoporosis and would much prefer to be a size 14/16 but no matter how much I eat the weight stays off. I'm on full fat milk and Complan as well as normal meal portion sizes but still can't get above 8 stone - genuinely wish I could gain at least a stone.

There's probably three factors at play with me:
Genetics - take after my Dad's side where all the girls are athletic build with muscle but little fat.
Diet - lifelong veggie, I bake and cook from scratch and avoid processed foods as much as possible because they're too sweet or salty for me. But I do eat chips, home made pizza etc, loads of pasta dishes. I don't live on a lettuce leaf and a handful of grapes.
Exercise - we have big dogs so I've always walked for miles.

No idea where I fall in the thin/fat debate really but I see a lot of women who are way skinnier than me and I still think that's down to build as much as anything.