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?

No everyone didnt smoke in the 50s. A lot of men did. Rationing was still in force which was a major issue and portion sizes were tiny. I have plates and wine glasses from the 70's that are half the size of todays. There were no take aways except chip shops and no ready meals in supermarkets. Bought cakes were so dire no one bought them. Cafes were also dire. Housework was very physical and car ownershiop was much lower. Many jobs were also very physical. Houses were colder. Just loads of reasons really

Tinkly I have that experience.

Mate moved to London and said 'Yeah, move to Clapham Common, start jogging and get an eating disorder'

People are influenced by theirs peers, it's not just the food options available.

I know not everyone is middle class but the point of my posts was that middle class children and their parents aren’t overweight in anywhere near the same numbers as children and adults in more deprived areas. The children I know don’t have sugar free diets but they don’t eat lots of junk food and they have healthy home cooked meals most nights.
Obesity is linked to income levels and education levels.
I don’t know what can be done about changing the trend though.

My oldest has been brought up on decent home food and can cook but still goes with peer pressure and eats some right trash when left to it.

(It's irritating.)

Well it's certainly not people from lower income groups eating those vile, sickly, butter cream laden cupcakes at a fiver a pop so I wonder who is buying them?

People were slimmer. The average person was more active as fewer people had cars to leap into to go to the shops, and more jobs were physically demanding than they are now.

And no one walked along the street eating. I can remember growing up in the 50s and the idea of someone eating in the street would have shocked most people, so there wasn't this habit of grazing all the time.

Fast food didn't exist. Women, and it was always women, cooked meals that the family sat down and ate together and then everything was put away until the next meal was put on the table; again, people didn't graze the way they do now. And there was the variety of stuff there is now. You didn't get to choose from 50 different sugary cereals for breakfast.

As far as height goes. There were plenty of tall people around. My father, born in 1900 was 6ft 1inch, the smallest man in my family; my brother born in 1936 was 6ft 5inches and my mother born in 1908 was 5ft 8inches, tall for a woman even now.

Bluelady , eating an occasional cup cake is not going to make you obese. I eat cake and so do my kids but we are all slim because we don’t eat large portions and most of the food we eat is healthy and home cooked.

There was not the availability of cheap processed food everywhere like there is today. Eating in public was not the done thing, people could cook and they did not go out for meals all the time. There was not the massive quantity of crisps, sweets, chocolate and other snacks we see in supermarkets.

Food was expensive compared to wages it is much cheaper today.

People did not generally have cars and walked more.

I believe there are alot of misleading statistics about our collective weight gain and as they didn't really start to collect statistics about weight until around the end of the 1940's unless you were in the army where you had medicals. I look at alot of photos from the past. I think, something misleading is that going back through the decades people were more formally dressed, which makes people look slimmer. Current fashion styles seem to accentuate fatness. If I look at pictures of people who were poor and deprived in the 20's and 30's, they all look thin. Now, it is more likely that people in deprived communities are fat. I would say, though, that in the 1950's and 1960's, men tended to stay thinner. Women remained slim until their 40's or so, then tended to get fatter. Whenever I look at pictures of older women (middle aged) from Victorian and Edwardian times onwards through any decade, they are all stout. Now, it's men, too.

Something I would also say is that I disagree that food was all home-cooked, wholesome and healthy. My diet is much healthier now. When I was a child in the 1950's/1960's I ate white sliced bread, fatty meat, drank pop, ate crisps (with those blue bags of salt) and spent all my pocket money on sweets. We were dominated by American produced food and advertising. Sugary breakfast cereals and chocolate bars etc. I shudder to think of the crap we ate. You have to remember that not many people had refrigerators. We didn't have one until the mid/late 1960's. We scraped mould off alot of the bread and cheese we ate. Healthy times? Nah!

There were overweight people then it is just that there are a lot more of us now ….

Stats show that average body weight, waist and bust size for the UK has increased - there is an obesity epidemic and in the future the rise of diseases associated with obesity will increase more

They certainly seem to be healthier times, no diabetes epidemic then.

*I think vanity sizing complicates our view of what's normal now compared to back then.

I remember putting a bit of weight on and having to go up to a 14 in top shop in the early 80s. You were hard pushed to find a 14 and never a 16. So i was the LARGEST SIZE Top Shop sold for a while. Wow i felt a fatty. I dieted.

Photos of me back then show me as very very slim. A today's 8 -10.*

My mum was a size 18 in the early 1950s, she always had a bit of a complex about her size. I have photos of her in a swimsuit at that time and she'd be a size 12 these days. (If you make your own clothes, the sizes in the patterns are much closer to those sizes than today's sizing).

When I was a child in the 70s there were two of us at primary school who were chubby. And at secondary in the early 80s there was me who was a bit chubby and a girl two years younger who was obese.

Also in Primary there was one person in the whole school who had asthma, one girl in my class who had eczema, and that was it.

Everyone walked to school barring the ones who lived miles away. I go past the primary school I attended and now the road is filled with cars at chucking out time which I find ridiculous for the distances concerned.

I was a size 14/16 as a teenager and buying clothes was a nightmare because 16 was the absolute maximum you could buy outside specialist catalogues that had frumpy old lady styles, and the really high fashion shops stopped at 14, like the above poster says. I've never been able to buy anything from Top Shop, ever!

Less tasty food, rationing, snacking wasn't a thing, no hormones pumped into food, more active. More nourished skeletons.. look how big feet are these days, that's the bones growing more.

I meant nourished skeletons these days.

Worth remembering that not having enough to eat was still common enough to be unremarkable in the UK until what, the mid 30s, maybe a bit later. Posters are talking about their experiences of the 50s and 60s as children, but most of the adults then had grown up at a time when a significant minority of people were poorly nourished. And lack of food in childhood makes a difference to a person's adult stature. The 20s and 30s were a bad time for it. That's when a lot of the adults in the 50s and 60s would have been born and grown up.

So there must have been a certain percentage of people who were adults in the 50s who were smaller than they would otherwise have been if they'd had enough nourishing food as children and perhaps even later. If you were 40 in 1960 and had grown up poor, food could have been insufficient and/or substandard for all your childhood really.

In my family on a Friday night, my dad brought home a single mars bar on his way home from work and it was cut into 4 pieces, one for each of us. And we regarded that as a treat.

I would think you were one of my sisters except the Mars bar got cut in to 5 pieces for us! I remember the first time I had a whole mars bar to myself - I think it came in a selection box. I actually felt a bit sick afterwards as it was just too much.

Recently we were sorting through cupboard contents in the kitchen and I was reflecting on how plates have changed in size. There are some dinner plates we bought in the last few years and also some that I bought when I first lived away from home in the 1980s. The modern plates are at least an inch bigger in diameter. I also found one plate given to me by my Mum when I went to Uni, it is from a set that she and my father got when they first married in the 1950s and which I remember we used every day for our main meal when I was a child. The 1950s plate is even smaller - possibly two inches less than the modern one. In fact it is similar in size to the sort of plate we now use for a snack or a sandwich.

GrabEm very true.

And on occasion people in the anecdotes of the older family would be described to as "bandy legged." It was rickets.

I met some tiny old people when I was a kid.

My Dad cut up Mars Bars too and I have always found a whole one too sickly.

Don't the troop records from the first world war show the officers on average to be about 6 inches taller than the men? And the bantam brigades were about 5'4".

More nourished skeletons.. look how big feet are these days, that's the bones growing more

Are you saying someone is less or more healthy because they have bigger feet?

Thing is I can’t imagine being as hungry as they much have been. I don’t know how they managed. I can’t concentrate or focus when I’m hungry.

must have been

Can well imagine you did villers.

On the subject of troops specifically, I know there was a lot of concern in the early 1900s because when there was recruitment for the Boer War, too many men were in poor physical condition from lack of nourishment. The second one was 1899-1902, so some of the men being considered then would've been born early 1880s. Must've still been a fair few of that cohort around in the 50s. Their experience of food in their childhood would've been very difficult to the posters who remember the 50s and 60s as kids, no doubt.