Why weren't Victorian upper class women fat?

[waltzingparrot]

They sat around drinking tea, playing the piano, embroidering, reading. Just the odd amble round a park, occasional dance.

How did they stay slim with their tiny waists?

The cooking was crap?

@JesusInTheCabbageVan

Victorian MN food diary:

Breakfast: three kidneys cooked in butter
Lunch: half a turtle with a massive salad
Dinner: Not sure yet. Bought a peacock to roast, but DH forgot to put it in the pantry and it's really warm where we are. Should I risk it?

Spent 20 mins shouting at servants and fitbit thought I'd walked 2 miles.

If only MN gave out awards, this would win them all

Yes but that tapeworm article ends by concluding that actually they probably didn’t:

‘ With both Victorian and modern dieters, the actual popularity of this radical diet is murky. Historians disagree on whether people actually ingested tapeworm pills, or whether the advertised products were simply placebos meant to dupe desperate people. Likewise, reports on tapeworm clinics are hard to believe, as are most of the testimonies of its advocates. Moreover, rumors of stars like Maria Callas losing weight with the diet have often turned out to be simple manipulation of facts. It seems, then, that at no point of its history has the tapeworm diet been an actual fad.’

Main reason is lack of processed food.

Their diet would have been rich in meat (Victorian obsession with mutton chops, roast beef and above all dripping), but not processed meat and certainly no ready meals

Sorry - should have been *weren’t exactly a workout.

Here’s a nice contemporary example of callisthenics for the lady at home. Like working out to an exercise video but it’s a household manual instead.

www.victorianlondon.org/cassells/cassells-13.htm

This diet is no longer recommended!

Tapeworms - 'friends for a fair form' 'easy to swallow!'

yummy

Look at Victorian photos (for sale on eBay) - the older women in the photos were actually fairly plump.

There's a woman on YouTube who's name has currently escaped me. She makes and wears clothing from various different historical periods and she did a video about the reality of wearing corsets. As it happened she had severe scoliosis and she had to wear a corset all through adolescence and she said that being constricted in that way meant that she could either eat very small meals often or one meal over a long period of time but either way she always ended up eating less than her peers.

Actually, I think is the video I'm thinking of, same woman. She's very interesting.

l-o-n-g walks - riding horses - playing tennis (with corsets!) - swimming in sea! - playing croquet - Archery!

In the fifties we weren't fat. There was one fat kid in my whole primary school!

I don't think the Victorian era is a very good guide for contemporary style or health. Please look instead to film and photo footage from the 1950s in your local town. Rationing was recently ended, everyone walked or rode a bike to do chores, shop or work, and you will struggle to find an obese body in hours of viewing footage, bar a few (not many) mainly elderly and (presumably) well to do women. I looked at my late DFIL's films of Canterbury from the late 50 to early 1970s, and there are no fat people in them, none, at all.

Three reasons:

1. People were much tinier generally then. have you ever seen Victorian ladies' gloves and shoes? They'd barely fit an average ten year old today.

2. They didn't have access to endless amounts of the low effort, low expense, high calorie, high sugar content food on tap like we do now.

Even if they were rich and had staff in the kitchen full time, the effort and time required to produce the sort of food beyond simple meat/fish and potatoes in enough daily quantity for everyone upstairs to get hugely fat on would have been immense.

We just take for granted that we can go to the cupboard and grab the biscuit tin and twenty minutes later we've demolished a whole packet. Or most of a family sized bag of crisps, washed down with a Coke. Later we are bored so we go to the cupboard for a Mars Bar. McDonalds for tea because 'we were in a rush' then Chinese tomorrow because 'it's the weekend.' and on and on it goes. They couldn't do that in Victorian times.

3. They didn't sit in front of Goggle Box and work their way through most of a bottle of wine several night a week either.

The general pattern of meals was to have the main meal in the middle of the day, rather than in the evening.

It won't be just one thing, but the cumulative effect of all the differences.

@BlackAmericanoNoSugar - that’s Bernadette Banner.

@BlackAmericanoNoSugar

There's a woman on YouTube who's name has currently escaped me. She makes and wears clothing from various different historical periods and she did a video about the reality of wearing corsets. As it happened she had severe scoliosis and she had to wear a corset all through adolescence and she said that being constricted in that way meant that she could either eat very small meals often or one meal over a long period of time but either way she always ended up eating less than her peers.

Bernadette Banner. I love her! Would also recommend Abby Cox. Actually Abby definitely has at least one video in which she addresses the whole tiny waist/tight lacing thing. Yes it happened but it was a fashion - not something everyone did. A bit like a pp's reference to the Kardashian figure now, or assuming everyone in the 90s was a Kate Moss stick insect.

Ruth Goodman has an excellent book 'How to be a Victorian'. Absolutely fascinating. She reckons that once you are used to them that corsets are quite comfortable.

By the sounds of it food wasnt plentiful and so couldnt be wasted. The same old meals would come round and round. Meat and potatoes if well off, bread and gravy if poor.

In the fifties we weren't fat. There was one fat kid in my whole primary school!

It was the same when I was in primary school in the 70s. And for that matter in secondary school in the 80s. I was definitely one of the fatter girls at 15 or 16. I felt like a complete lump compared to most of my friends. Looking back, I was probably a size 8 in today's sizes.

@BlackAmericanoNoSugar

There's a woman on YouTube who's name has currently escaped me. She makes and wears clothing from various different historical periods and she did a video about the reality of wearing corsets. As it happened she had severe scoliosis and she had to wear a corset all through adolescence and she said that being constricted in that way meant that she could either eat very small meals often or one meal over a long period of time but either way she always ended up eating less than her peers.

yes but the corset she wore for her scoliosis is very different.

Also, no central heating. Keeping warm during cold weather forces your body to burn more calories.

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel
I have visited the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and I have viewed the skeleton of a woman very much deformed by the corsetry she wore.
I wish I could find the image and post it here, but Google is not putting forth.. Needless to say it did not look pleasant.
I also used to hang around a lot in Camden in my youth and there was a goth who had taken her corsetry to an extreme.
Melding those two images together, it is not a good thing to inflict upon the body.

They were. Victoria was almost spherical.

Plenty of them struggled with their weight such as the Queen. www.vice.com/en/article/bjgx7v/victorian-body-image-unmentionable-book

Banting produced his famous diet in the 1860s.

I love that ITV's Victoria is the most perfect doll-faced beauty imaginable! I know Queenie only got mega stout in later years but even when she was a slip of a newlywed she never looked like that actress