1940s low fat high carb weight loss

[Todaypicard]

Hi everyone.
Ive been struggling with weight gain since I went back to work after maternity leave 4 years ago, and have probably gained about 10kg.
Recently was reading about 1940s diets (wartime/rationing) and that this was the healthiest period of our past in terms of diet. Obesity was negligible. Diets were full of veg, whole meal bread, potatoes, with meat/cheese/sugar all rationed and therefore eaten in very small amounts. And obviously no processed food! We were also more active. Further reading finds that the countries in the world with the lowest weights and highest health outcomes are low fat/high carb countries like Japan.
I also found a great website called 1940sexperiment where a lady shares all her wartime recipes and has lost a lot of weight in the process.
So…. I’m going to have a go at more wartime eating! It might be a bit dull, but it’s certainly nutritious and filling!
Todays menu: porridge for breakfast, carrots/broccoli/cabbage/potatoes and gravy for lunch, and some vegetable soup for dinner. If anyone would like to join me then please do so!

Then this obviously wouldn't be for you . Luckily we don't have rationing now . The OP has chosen to eat this way for a challenge and to see if it helps her to lose weight. She is not saying that the rest of MN needs to join her !

What a strange post to me.

I was responding to another poster not the OP

And I am very interested in what the OP is doing, gave some advice and wished her luck.

I know its a challenge that she is taking up and an interesting one. I havent said or implied or indicated that she thinks other posters need to join her, where have you got that from.

@soupfiend
It appeared to me there you were nitpicking a lot of the posts. Perhaps I misjudged .

My kids eat like that, not every day because they also like granola, but this is standard breakfast several times a week. I got up today up today and found my precious pecorino sardo stash depleted by the hungry horde!

@Todaypicard

I recently read the book Nella Last's war which is a diary of an average woman during WW2 which was done as part of Mass Observation Project.

In the book she speaks of eating 'three course meals', and her friends being quite envious of how well they eat . But her meals seem to comprise a home made vegetable soup from veg they grow in their garden, then something on toast like sardines or kidneys and then some kind of home made desert, using fruit she has bottled or made into jam or a cake using the rations and war-time recipes .

I guess using vegetable soup as a starter is a good idea as it fills you up with few calories and you get your vitamin and fibre intake in.

And they all smoked a lot! They didn't have real coffee either. Even in the sixties when I was a kid British food was mostly yuk-boiled fish, offal, fruit stayed in the bowl for weeks, boiled cabbage until it was mush. Lettuce limp and muddy. I was 7 st and ate very little and hated carbs except for chocolate ( ice cream was horrible and so were biscuits). Then came the 70s-garlic, pasta, pizza, crusty french bread, lovely ice cream, lovely yogurt,chilli con carne etc etc suddenly food became a total sensory experience of joy-lets face it, things are stacked against us now.

Wouldn't that be ironic - people were thinner until the 70s just because the food was disgusting (not due to lack of additives and processing but just because nobody cooked well and commercial producers didn't produce good products) 😣 That'd cast "we should just eat like our grandmothers" in a different light - we should produce and buy only unappealing food so we don't want to eat it 🤔

Surely though fruits and vegetables can't have been less edible in their natural state (prevailing wisdom is they were in fact better because they were produced less intensively) so I wonder why fruit stayed in the bowl?

I absolutely love offal! If you eat animals, I believe that utilising as many parts as possible is the sustainable thing to do.

I’m not a huge fan of kidneys, liver and lungs because they all take part in removal of toxins from the body so should be eaten in moderation, but if done right they can be great. I usually get some liver from the farmer we buy meat from. Buying 1/6 of a cow in one go (portioned) means that we had to step up and learn how to cook, including quite elaborated meals because we get all parts, including the so-called subprime beef.

I use websites like The Great British Chefs and BBC Good Food for inspiration because our local “cuisine” is mainly based on mince and delicacies like köttfärslimpa (🤢), so you are certainly not lacking in culinary resources in the UK.

I concur a lot of food was gross in my own experience although I am younger. My mum grew up in the 50’s and my grandparents were adults during the war and my recollection from being a child in the 80’s, they lived in a remote part of the U.K. they hadn’t yet been affected by fast food culture. They lived miles from town so just used the village shop or grew things like potatoes and tomatoes

they ate fresh veg a lot - mostly potatoes and boiled cabbage but it was also boiled fish, a lot of cured hams, and I remember thinking a lot of it was yuk, really tough/cheap cuts of beef in a pie made with suet type things.

My mum then got sucked into 90’s frozen food and then that’s all we got fed from then on because she was the generation of mums who had to go out to work. She didn’t get to stay home like my gran

I mostly recall my grandma just making a lot of jam, trifles and cakes and that was the only time you ate fruit - on a cake or in custard or in jam. My mum only gave us tinned fruit for years from the 90’s 😂. So the fruit was always with sugar not eaten on its own

the one thing I really loved was the fresh white bread doorstep loaves with loads of fresh butter on.

I feel like maybe we idolise the older periods of time in strange ways. Loads of people were poor, and had very low incomes and not great access to interesting ingredients or even cooking utensils. They did the best they could but it was still a lot of sugar? If you were wealthy then it was a game changer but the majority of people in the U.K. were not.