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?

The dresses didn't have to be corseted. You wore the corsets underneath. Whalebone, satin and hooks and eyes.

Exactly right. This ^ and ‘eating between meals’ was frowned on.

In the 70s women ate around 1500 cals per day which is why they maintained healthy weight. Most people today (close to 70% in the recent survey) are overweight. It’s a huge and worrying problem for how we maintain health and health service provision as our generation (I’m making assumption most people between ages 30 and 50) age and even more concerning for our kids who we are literally killing with kindness through poor nutrition.

Doh, thatcwas meant to be a reply to ‘ days of curly Spencer’s comment.

Most of the data shows that people weighed less even at the same heights.

These children from when I was lilttle look like what I remember of children and our family photos show including of adults at school events in the 1960s.

People tended not to eat so much or so often either. My father came home for lunch all his life as did we from school until I was 10. Until she learned to drive my mother pushed my 2 sibilngs in the pram to my school to take me (and home again) then to collect me at lunch time and finally to collect me - so she did that walk 3 x 2 times a day. It was 1.5 miles 1 way so she was walking 9 miles a way including when pregnant with my brother, pushing a heavy very old fashioned pram. Not surprisingly she rushed to pass her test (having given up trying to pass it in the 50s) and they bought a second car.

Just in films... If you look at old vox pops or path news views on the street everyone's about the same except there are a few more of the extremes... Ultra slim/obese... Have a search

Yes I was always very slim and fit in the 1950-1960 era.. I was born in 1942,so war years, and food rationing, but good cheap type meals,made by my grandmother,who lived with us, My own late Mum, wasn't a very good cook, but she did have to go out and do war work though.

I was married in 1967,aged 25,and was only 7st, which,was not then considered anorexic or anything, , All my girlfriends were slim also,

Not many people had a car, I used to cycle to work for many years,There were no junk food cafes around then, We just had a few fish and chip shops in our small town,usually having fish and chips on a Friday night, I used to like walking a lot, especially as my soon to be husband was a big outdoor type.

My personal fitness and keeping slim,was due to doing serious ballroom dancing for about five years.

And most kids growing up in the oldie days, were always playing outside (safely then ) so lots of skinny types around being always active.

You tend to get told off as an oldie,when you say the good old days, but good and bad it was, but I think its a case of knowing, that you should realise what food is best for you,and don't succumb to junkie stuff at all. and move around a lot, even with a stupid phone in tow ha ha.

Haven't managed to get though quite the whole thread but wanted to say:
(a) many many years ago when I myself was a size 6 UK, I had the chance to try on one of Marilyn Monroe's evening gowns. It was a very tight squeeze. She probably went up and down but basically I think was a 4 UK. My mum always said it was well known (to whom I don't know!) those 36-22-36 numbers were made up to make Monroe sound more voluptuous than she was in real life. Cameras, esp. old film cameras, make everyone look heavier.
(b) I have a WW 2 men's army jacket I used to love wearing when I was a size 6. It is now far too small for me, and DS 18, who was in July by far the shortest and slimmest lad in his 6th form and now complains of needing to get "more muscly," is far too big for it too, notably in the shoulders, not just the waist.
(c) Through work I have spent a lot of time in east Asia since the mid-1980s, and it is very, very striking how much bigger Asians have become. Everyone has noticeably better teeth. Women have noticeably more breasts. And you know how we all used to assume Asians were just a shorter race? I guarantee my grandchildren will not understand that claim. Japanese and Chinese 18-year-olds are dramatically taller than their parents, let alone their grandparents (who lived through WW2), and not much shorter than British and American teenagers.

Though I should add it seems true children are more rounded nowadays. My DC are considered "very skinny" though they look totally normal to me (and to their GP). I like to remind the 18-year-old that the weight comes naturally when we stop gaining height -- if you're not slim in your teens you probably never will be!

I was born in 1953. There was only one overweight girl in our class at primary school, the rest of us were skinny. My mother cooked us breakfast every morning. You weren’t allowed to leave the house without a hot meal, I hated it! We also got cod liver oil and malt every day, and orange juice.
So on Sunday we had a full breakfast, the one day of the week my father ate with us. Dinner was a Sunday lunch, we also had a high tea with cakes, tinned fruit etc , and about 9.30pm, supper which was cold meat from the joint with salad and bread and butter! There were five of us and my poor mother must have been on her feet all day 😐 we were all fit from constant exercise, but sadly my father died from a heart attack at age 54 😕

I was looking at a picture of a relative who we considered to be 'fat' in the early 70s and she looks fine by today's standards.

It was unusual to see a very overweight person, I remember going to America and being astonished at all of the really overweight people. But today you see loads of overweight people here. Probably only one girl at my secondary school was really overweight. I think she was probably about size 18. We were all always dieting too.

There was very little processed food. Very little fast food. People sat at tables to eat. There was little opportunity to eat and snack.

The introduction of vat on food 'eaten in' started the boom in take away food.

Yesterday 09:57 shearwater

People were bloody tiny as well, actually through poor nourishment....

Not poor nourishment; it’s processed food that does most of the damage; the British diet until the mid 80s was practically devoid of the crap that’s available everywhere now. In the 1940s-1970s people cooked and ate real food

I saw an exhibition of Marilyn Monroe's dresses. She was tiny based on them. Size 6, maybe 8 at a push. No idea where the theory that she was big came from.

No.... you're right.... they WERE alot slimmer. There was no fast food and people worked harder and moved more. No modern conveniences and no TV to sit in front of. You don't even have to look as far back as the 40s and 50s. People were far slimmer in the 60s and 70s too.

I don't think the corset explanation works. It only adjusts the torso - modern shoulders and arms would never fit in those clothes, and they must have be smaller in the past as you can't corset them.
Another factor in modern day general fatness is that it is accepted to eat in the street now. I remember when we were in Japan recently, and I was eating as I walked along, and suddenly realised that nobody else did. You can pile on loads of calories by mindlessly munching as you walk along.

I've mentioned this before but the episode of tales of the unexpected where the man and OW try to poison his "fat" wife. She'd be seen as normal now, even quite slim at ten stone 7. I know it's not a documentary but it is indicative of people's attitudes and perceptions at the time.

I think MM veered from 8 to 10 stone and was average height, my heitgher so about 5 foort 4 or 5.

I was lucky enough to be given a load of vintage sewing patterns . The sizes then were definately smaller than the same size now.

I was the only fat kid at school (born in 1955).

My theme tune was "Roll out the Barrel" sung at me at every opportunity by the other kids. My DM was a night nurse so we spent a lot of time with my DGM,

She was a feeder equating food to love and I only started to lose weight when I went to secondary school and became more physically active.
In my late teens/early 20s I had a 24" waist and was a size 10/12.

Am I the only one who thinks of the "Yorkshire men" sketch during threads like these?

FWIW I'm slim by today's standards (size 10 - but, yes, I realise that's, like, a 20 in old money). But I still don't like all this moralizing about size. My mum and my nan do it and it's bloody tedious.

Things change.

It's this sort of naive harking back to the past that brought us Brexit.

cress No, I don't. I think people are just giving their opinions. That's the point of the site.

Things change, but not always for the better. The rise in obesity is not a good thing and it is not harking back to the past to think so.

Being fat at 20 is one thing. At 50 or 60, with heart disease and diabetes, it's quite another.

I personally think it was the fast food of the later part of the 80s that started a lot of it. When I was at school the canteen had a burger bar which would no way be allowed now but this was mid 90s.
I personally collect a vintage clothing label from the 80s and I'm about a vintage size 14 (modern 10) and I rarely come across a 16 so I guess back then very very few women were bigger than a modern 12 and there just was simply not the demand for the bigger sizes as a result.
Keep fit and diets were popular in the 80s and I remember a toy I never had that I've seen online that was aimed at really young girls that was a keep fit kit complete with armbands.
Smoking was seen as acceptable decades ago and obesity frowned upon at the very least now now it's accepted and smoking demonized when obesity is just as bad but too many people/companies profit from obesity so I don't see that changing.

I was feeling quite proud of myself post weight loss after two DC via caesarean for waist measurement to be 26 inches, only to be told by my lovely DGAunt that that was nothing and she was a 22 inch waist after 3 DC and had the pictures to prove it. They did look glam though, 50/60s style with curves as well that weren't fake.

I like watching those old glamorous black and white films. That to me is stylish and sexy. Not the Geordie Shore generation.

Rationing was still in operation in the 50s. So people inevitably ate less...

There was no rationing in the Early twentieth century though, Edwardian times and the Twenties? And before ...