I am aware that obesity is a serious problem today-I see many people every day who are overweight. Clearly this has a lot to do with the fact that most of us do not do hard physical work…yet most of us consume large meals, 3 times a day.
My question is: how did our great-grandparents avoid obesity? I was looking at the First-Class dining room menue on the White Star liner “TITANIC”, and dinner was 8 courses of food! You started out with a soup, moved on to salad, then a fisg course, then a meat course, then a poultry course, then vegetables, dessert, then a snifter of brandy! 3rd-class dinners were not so elaborate, but they were very substantial-you would get soup and two courses. With meals like this, how did these people avoid getting fat? Add to this the fact that the Edwardians enjoyed very fatty cuts of meat (no chicken breast for you sir, it was rashers of bacon and pig’s feet, plus soups dripping with fat and cream…I just don’t understand…or was obesity really very prevalent back them.
Take a look at the TITANIC’s menus…it is really amazing how much food these people consumed!
I’m guessing the people on the Titanic, were fat. Maybe people who could affor the Titanic could also afford lots of food? Also no fast food. And 12 hour work days would do it for you too.
These are just WAGs.
I’ve heard the same thing. Here is some info.
In the book ‘the obesity myth’ Paul Campos says that in 1950 50% of americans were overweight by todays standards. So people may not be much fatter now than they were back then. In fact the ‘obesity epidemic’ that has occured from 1990 to now is really nothing more than the fact that most people weigh about 7 lbs more than the did in 1991, pushing the entire ‘average’ a little higher and causing the ‘epidemic’.
http://www.mamashealth.com/book/omyth.asp
(as long ago as the 1950s, nearly half of America’s adult population was supposedly overweight).
http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-25-04-2.html
Prof. Friedman’s thesis is every bit the apostasy Mr. Campos’ is. Prof. Friedman carefully analyzed Americans’ body weights from 1991 to 2004 and found most Americans aren’t packing on the pounds, but are a mere six to seven pounds heavier now than they were then. Prof. Friedman concluded that only the very obese have gotten significantly heavier, a phenomenon that misleadingly skews the distribution curve to the right.
Plus we are not doing blue collar work anymore, saving anywhere from 700-1000 calories a day.
Ever had an 8-course meal?
Last time I had one, I was pleasantly full, but NOT genuinely stuffed.
I’m guessing the serving sizes go down when the number of courses goes up.
And remember, you can’t go by dining aboard a ship or boat. On a vessel, frequently it can be much like prison… the food is the high point of your day, if nothing else is going on.
Ever been to Europe or somewhere else with reasonable portions? You can eat a many-coursed meal and not feel as full as you feel halfway through your lake of pasta that you get here. Portions were smaller then in general, and portions that formed one of eight courses would be smaller still.
One of them, at least, did get stuck in the White House bathtub. (Not mentioned in this article.)
Vigorous swimming.
But not for very long.
Hm. Probably because it’s a legend. I can’t find anything on snopes, but it sounds like something his rivals would have spread.
Taft was around 300 pounds, and some sources state he had a special bathtub built for him, I think the story of his becoming stuck in a fixture is simply too juicy to be true.
As I understand it, people did a lot more walking in those days.
Like, there were no remote controls, see, so they had to be walking back and forth between their couches and their DVD players all the time.
If you’re going to spoil a perfectly good story with sweet, sweet reason, why don’t you just trot off to General Questions, eh? Why not?
Uh, ever try to move a National Average? Let me tell ya, it takes a heck of a lot to get that average to move! And, if the average shifted upwards by 7 lbs., isn’t that, at least, sympomatic?
Also, did they average men and women together to come up with this figure Assuming this data is valid, I think it is showing one trend. Another trend to watch is what percent of Americans meet the definition of obese? IIRC, don’t the experts say anything greater than 10% above your ideal body weight is obese?
Was this survey sponsored by McD’s? 
- Jinx
So it really does keep coming down to “eat less, exercise more.”
Darn.
For women, at least, there was a socia stigma attatched to eating a lot at meals. (In public, or in front of guests, that is.) A nibble here and there was more “proper.” Secondly, ladies suffered from their tight corsets-- one can’t eat very much while wearing a abdomen-crusher and be comfortable.
the middle class viewed obesity as a mark of respectability back then: a paunchy man was a prosperous one. And the same went for the women. Lillian Russell was over 190 lb. at the height of her popularity.
Among the working class, there were plenty of scrawny young adults and children, but the stodgy, starchy diets they consumed, as well as their high consumption of beer, caused portliness by middle age.
Edward IV, who gave his name to the era, was so fat that he couldn’t fasten the bottom of his waistcoat. Ever since then, men have follwed this (although the 3-piece suit went of out of fashion in the 1990’s, if it comes back again I’d be suprised if the vest doesn’t stay unbuttoned at the bottom).
Also, I’ve seen a photo of the special frame-chair used by Edward’s favorite Paris brothel support and position his majesty’s corpulence so that he could be fellated.
Oh, I’d say it’s considerably more than that. One set of my cousins grew up on a working farm (middle one in 1940). They were also active in h.s. sports. The middle one estimates that he consumed at least six thousand calories daily, with probably one or two thousand more during the busiest times, e.g., planting and harvest, and there wasn’t a spare pound anywhere on him. Today he has to watch and keep his consumption under two thousand - of course, this is 45-50 years later, and anyone who doesn’t cut the calories as they age will undoubtedly get enormous.
However, I think that anyone who has ever been involved with h.s. or college sports can provide more detail than I about how much an athlete has to eat in order to sustain both a good weight level and sufficient energy for their activites. Chuck carried no excess weight beyond what a running back needed when he was playing football; of that I am sure, and I can recall how he ate at every meal of his that I ever saw back then.
You’d want to eat whenever you were hungry, and if you were too thin, you’d want to force yourself to eat even when you’re not hungry (but never junk food and crap.) This will shock your body into growth, and combined with a careful weightlifting routine it’s the best way for someone who’s too skinny to gain a lot of muscle.
The curse of the wrestler is that he needs a tremendous amount of energy to wrestle, but needs to stay under his weight class. Therefore you get a lot of guys who develop metabolism problems as high school wrestlers that stay with them for the rest of their lives. If you eat what you want to, you’ll bust your weight class. If you don’t eat, you’ll be tired (and this is as much of a problem in practice as it is in meets: practice is far more brutal than a meet, and tired wrestlers half-ass through practice not concentrating on their moves.)
Nothing pissed me off more than being made to run sprint after sprint because the coach was angry that people were half-assing their moves (of course they are, they’re tired and they don’t get enough to eat.) But you get used to it and eventually stop questioning it.
And then if you want to eat a lot of food, you’ll have no choice but to lose the weight as fast as you can, with many unsafe practices like diuretics and plastic suits (which sometimes kill people.)
The wealthy may have eaten large meals. but my guess is that these meals contained very little deep fried foods. Plus, there weren’t potato chips to snack on between meal.s
I’m 54. I have a VHS tape taken from 8mm film showing my Dad and his brothers diving when my Dad was 30 years old. That was 1954. Man those guys looked anorexic. None of my 7 brothers or sisters were overweight either during the growing up years.
What I recall as different back then was that we had three full meals a day where everyone sat around the table like as if eating was a big deal. After you got up, eating was over. Oh and on Sunday we might get a cookie or two with tea in the mid afternoon.
Nowadays kids buy processed foods from vending machines at school and the first thing they do when they get back home is to snack on processed foods which are loaded with simple carbs and fat, cheap but very fattening.
Er, add III to that: he was Edward VII (Edward IV reigned from 1461-1483 with a bit of a gap in 1470/71 while Henry VI made a brief comeback).