was everyone slim in the 1950s/60s

[ambereeree]

I've been watching old films and it seems that everyone was slim in the 50s and 40s. Even women with quite a few children. Is this reality or just in films?

Agree hisaishi, my son looks as if he's been starved his whole life. I don't think he'd put on weight even if he was fed like a pate goose. My daughter, not so much but well within 10-12 range. Me, slower old age, too chunky for my own good.

Not where I lived miss climpson.

Surrey suburbs longwayoff. We had two excellent bakers. My mother adored cream and used it for her own cakes. We got ours from the dairy in the village.

Agree with RiverTam.
My mother , aunts and mother in law have all always been slim. They aren't stringy or bony but have very normal weights. They eat absolutely everything, proper breakfasts, pudding with main meal, biscuits with elevenses and cake with afternoon tea. Possibly a sherry or glass of wine on some days of the week, a little morsel if chocolate after dinner. They have always eaten somewhat like this. They never eat between meals otherwise,, never have heaving plates, eat full fat milk, butter and cheese.
It is really for them a question of portion size , little alcohol and not eating rubbish here , there and everywhere.
I was a child in the 60s and 70s and as everyone says , children were almost all slim. THe routine of meals was pretty fixed in the vast majority of households. We did have sweets on the way homefrom school sometimes but it wouldn't be a mars bar it might be a few penny chews.No fizzy drinks in my childhood. Lacking temperance was definitely seen as a negative.

I was born in 1961. Everyone was skinny. Most people were phenomenally healthy and strong. Women were strong and chopping wood and spending all day cleaning, washing, cooking, digging gave them forearms like Popeye and legs like Garth (for those that remember Garth!) Our neighbour moved in and she was considered fat. Everyone refered to her as the fat lady but actually by todays standards she would be considered chubby only. I would say she was a size 18. She never stopped doing stuff though so I suspect she was chubby over a massice layer of muscle that made her look the way she did. All the kids at my school had visible ribs. All food I ate up to teenage was at the table. Every single food item. The only meal away from the table as a family was Saturday evenings in the winter in front of the telly. Dad didn't approve and it felt anarchic.

Ah ha! NW London, missclimpson. Dairy? Absolutely not! We had 2 bakers, one at either end of the road. One did excellent bread made daily but also the vile aforementioned cakes. The other was a Jewish patisserie and made chollah bread and wonderful small pastries. No comparison between the two. The patisserie made, amongst other delights, small bite sized Danish pastries, poppy seed, fruit, cheese, that I've never seen since, sold by the pound. They were beyond delicious and people would make long journeys at the weekend to shop there. Sorry, wittering, got to stop.

There were cream cakes, but the default was sickly artificial cream.

DH says fresh cream cakes were in Hull too! Maybe

....the cream came from Denmark.

Apologies for Mumsnet on ipad and split posts.

Thinking about my own family: My sister is slim and always has been . She eats mounds of carbs and large portions, doesn't eat puddings or snack and she eats healthily. I have always struggled with my weight, eat far less than her and also eat healthily. My brother has been very overweight most of his life and is pre diabetic. He does eat the wrong things.

My daughter is a size 8-10 and eats like a horse. She doesn't exercise enough, but just doesn't put on weight. My son is like me and has to watch what he eats and has a weight problem, my other son is like my daughter. A lot of it is genetics.

Looking at school group photos does visually show the increase in size in school children. It does clearly show from the mid 70's onwards. The earlier photos are whole school photos not class photos and they are too small to see.

I think a lot of it is that slim people move around a lot but don't realise how much more active they are. Also where they appear to be able to eat loads, in terms of overall calories they may not be eating as much.

I was born in 1961. Everyone was skinny. Most people were phenomenally healthy and strong.

Apart from the smokers and all the men that died of heart attacks in their 50s.

People keep saying that they didn't eat so many "treats" in the 60s and 70s but I remember always having pudding after meals at home and at school. It was often something like icecream (which was not diary) and at school was really stodgy like spotted dick or treacle pudding with custard.
People died of heart disease at a relatively young age compared with now so the idea that everyone was healthy is crap. The only healthier thing then is that people did do more walking but there weren't so many really fit people compared with now, I don't think,

shins didn't she have a 23" waist or something? Fucking heffalump! There's a lot of believing your own bullshit from a today's 16 claiming they're the same size as Mazza!

She had a 28 inch waist in "Some like it hot" which although not a size 16 is pretty big compared with todays actresses. In the 80s that would have been a 14.

Marilyn Monroe was pregnant when she was filming Some like it hot. Her waist was usually 22 inches.

People absoluty weren’t healthier in the 50s. Heart disease, industrial accidents, poverty, as well as a high sugar high fat diet. Surely no one is arguing it was a healthy time?!

I remember my mum telling me about her maternal grandmother (who was born around 1900) who became obese and that it was considered very unusual for the time. They also lived in quite a deprived area of Glasgow. The doctor prescribed Thins which were a kind of cracker, which was to replace all food. It didn't work. My mum, her mum and her mum's sister were all diagnosed with thyroid problems when they go to their 50's. 2 under-active 1 overactive.

Marilyn Monroe was pregnant when she was filming Some like it hot. Her waist was usually 22 inches.

She was only at the beginning of pregnancy so that wouldn't have made her waist bigger. She may have had a small waist early on in her career but she wasn't particularly slim in the late 50s and certainly bigger than today's actresses.

What's the relevance of industrial accidents to health? The nation's health was at its best during rationing - low sugar, low fat, mainly plant based diet. Sugar, butter, cooking fat, eggs and meat were all rationed. Most people continued eating that way throughout the 50s.

Still have my Mums wedding dress from 1952. She had a 26" waist and was 5'8 and had had a baby

You can't conclude that the deaths at a younger age from heart disease are just due to diet and smoking. There have been a few medical advances since then!

I had a 26" waist when I got married in 2004, bought a size 12 dress off the peg and had it taken in. The tailor remarked what a slim waist I had, and I hadn't had any babies then. It's a perfectly normal, healthy waist measurement, and anything which is under the diabetes risk measurement is fine.

Part of the reason people died younger years ago compared with nowadays was nothing to do with health as such, but more to do with the enormous strides in medical treatment we have made since then.

In fact, we now have a huge population of old people, many of whom, have very little good quality of life and would have been dead if they had been in the same state of health years ago, but we keep them alive now because we can.

We seem to have a pill for everything now and we all expect to live way beyond what's necessarily desirable.