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?

@arabellastrange Baby names LOLZ yes

Vin Mariani Maybe actually it was this was helping keep everyone thin.

the probably died before they reached middle age spread.

I know it’s Edwardian but here’s a site referring to a dress pattern where the starting measurements for hips and bust are larger than they would be on any pattern today. The waist is teeny but that’s the corset effect.
reconstructinghistory.com/people-were-smaller-back-then/

Didn’t they do a lot of physical housework. No vacuum cleaners and washing machines back then.

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

Umm only some of them did! The rest of them all worked, and bloody hard and had less to eat.

They struggled with weight

Banting.

Fascinating thread, thank you

Bit of a sidestep but reading one of the links upthread about corsets and stays took me right into a flashback of my grandma talking about her stays. But she pronounced “stays” to rhyme with “eyes”, so “sties”. How is it actually pronounced?

In the 'Little House' series of books, Laura hates her corsets. Her Ma told her that she should wear them at night too, as Mary did, telling her that Pa could span her (Ma's) waist with his two hands when they married.

Laura didn't wear her corsets at night though, and described herself as round and dumpy as a little French horse.

Imagine wearing corsets all day AND all night, just for the dubious honour of knowing a man can fit his hands round your waist...

Check out the tape worm diet

Not read all the thread, but yeah, I'm going with corsets and less processed crap and more "proper" food.

They didn't eat high sugar foods and processed foods. The food was fatty and fat fills you up for longer.

I saw an exhibit which included Queen Victoria's mourning clothes and she was a barrel. Very short and very wide! (The exhibit was called, "Death Becomes Here" and was at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years back - it was amazing).

I think also they’d just eat three meals a day rather than constantly snacking. If I just have three meals a day I easily keep to my calorie requirements - it’s the snacks of convenience food and crisps and wine that send me over.

There'd definitely be no fridge raiding!

@ActonBell if the dress patterns that site refers to, were outerwear, they would most likely have been sized to accommodate padding. It was common for women to wear padding under their clothes to achieve a fashionable figure. It would be tied on around their waist, over their base layers & corset, & under their petticoats. A bustle achieved a similar effect. Likewise they might wear a chemise with a lot of frills etc to help give them a bit more fullness in the chest if they were very flat. However the idea was not really so much to achieve a big bust, but to make the waist appear small in comparison.

Another lovely YT video to enjoy.

This is all very interesting. I agree with a pp that footage from the War and post-war years shows that overweight people were rare. Due to rationing, people were restricted in what they could eat. They were also, on the whole, more active because far fewer people had cars.

When I was at school in the 90s, very overweight people were still rare and I can remember watching video footage of very overweight Americans and it being surprising. It’s very normal now to see overweight people everywhere now and so perceptions change.

It’s harder to keep weight down in 2021 because jobs are more sedentary, transport is easy and food is plentiful and addictive. Most of us have to consciously go for exercise and avoid food if we want to keep weight down.

I try to cycle or walk everywhere - it’s actually usually quicker to get to work in my city by bike than by car. But the temptation of sitting in the car and picking up a drive thru coffee on the way is something that I wrestle with most days.

[quote ArabellaStrange]@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.[/quote]
OBVIOUSLY extreme tight lacing is bad for you, will deform your skeleton and stop you eating, whether you are a modern Goth or a Victorian.
What I am disagreeing with is the idea that 1. Corsets in general will deform you and stop you eating 2. That the typical Victorian woman wore her corset so tight she couldn’t eat properly and thus stayed thin.

A properly fitted corset (or even a supportive underbodice from the centuries before boning became standard) will be worn laced in a way that will look tight to people who haven’t tried it, and it will have an effect on the silhouette, but this is not the same as the fashionable extreme tight lacing that was practiced by SOME women from the 1840s/50s.

Put it this way: I bet if corsets came back as a fashion it wouldn’t make a huge difference to the obesity crisis.

A pair of tight jeans can make you not want to eat too much or you undo the top button when you’re stuffed, but it doesn’t mean that because tight jeans are fashionable modern women are thin. It’s the other factors mentioned on the thread mostly to do with diet and exercise that have made the difference.

I sometimes think I'd quite like to go back to stays and multiple layers of clothing. Think of all the lumps and bumps you'd hide away!

@SirSamuelVimes

I sometimes think I'd quite like to go back to stays and multiple layers of clothing. Think of all the lumps and bumps you'd hide away!

But think of it — no stretch fabrics, very few garments available off the peg/ready made, so most things individually made to fit, whether by you or a seamstress, so not at all forgiving if you put on weight, or you would have to leave big seam allowances to let them out.

Remember the bit in the Little House on the Prairie series where Ma and Laura are sewing Mary’s best dress to take to the School for the Blind, and at the last fitting the skin-tight bodice doesn’t fit, and they panic, and it turns out her corset strings have stretched?

(It’s always made me think about the helplessness you would feel as a blind woman going away to a strange place, with a wardrobe of clothes that only fit when you’re properly corseted, and presumably you needed someone else to fasten your corset strings?

Prospering- most women could get in and out of their own corsets. You lace them to fit initially for which you might need help but then they’re front fastening, so I imagine Mary could dress herself?

They wore corsets, they also didn’t have any processed food and very little sugar.

@Goatinthegarden, I agree. Think the most striking thing about watching footage from the 80s and beyond is how our shape has changed (men and women). Any crowd scene shows that most people were far more slender than they are now. Footage of any British high street nowadays would show that most people are slightly or very overweight. I also remember how Americans were remarkable for being fat, and now the UK is exactly the same. What is causing this? Fast food? Snacking? People quitting smoking? Because few adults when I was young formally 'exercised', as we now understand the term.

Fascinating