I’ve heard older family members say “I weighed 93 pounds on my wedding day”, and then you see a picture of them and they were slim but healthy looking (meanwhile, if you plug in their BMI, it shows that the number is so dangerously underweight).
Are those family members exaggerating, or has there been a significant change to body composition/muscle mass in people over the past 50+ years (based on diet, lifestyle)?
Semi related: could this be the origin of some men thinking that all “thin” women weigh 120 pounds (regardless of height)?
Edit: NOT talking about obesity, more like how can a person have been 93 pounds in 1960 but have an identical looking body to someone who is 130 pounds today?
In: Biology
Yes, average weights have increased pretty steadily over the last 50 years. However, this is mostly due to people carrying more fat. You seem to be asking whether two people who “look the same” from different eras had different weights. In this case, the shift of body composition towards fat works against your theory. Fat is the least dense of materials that compose a body. Someone with a similar size but lower fat percentage would be heavier due to being made more of dense materials like muscle and bone.
Overall, it seems like people in your family just like to say numbers, and when those numbers apply to women (especially themselves) to shade them lower. Probably not a good idea to tell your grandma you think she actually weighed more than she claims.
I found a sign from a train station in Sweden in the 50s.
As we can see the numbers are all in a healthy BMI span.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/s/NPP7t4W2pG
Yes. Nearly every data source suggest obesity rates and weight have increased over the last few decades, especially in the US. There are many different reasons for why this has happened.
When the draft for WWII began in US, many were underweight. The school lunch program was partially inspired by national defense readiness. Industrial food and sedentary lifestyle has made us fatties !
50 years ago, there wasn’t fast food at every street corner.
You are, only at the meals and money was a lot less.
Yes people did weigh less, and people weigh more now, because over our over abundance and easy access to food. not all people who weighed a lot less in history were healthy, but also not all the people who weigh more now are healthy.
As far as looks go? Yes people are looking more fat, than they are skinny for a variety of reasons including but not limited to:
-genetics
-society (stupidly imo) pushing fat acceptance
-ultra processed foods or calorie dense foods being the main food type most people eat
-lack of activities that keep us active that are free or affordable to do
-sedentary jobs
Aside from more processed foods and a shift to a sedentary lifestyle, smoking (appetite suppressor extraordinaire) was more common in public spaces. And if your grandma is speaking of her weight 50 years ago, people tend to put on weight as they age, especially after menopause.
Take a look at the actors in movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Everybody weighed a lot less back then.
The average entrée at a US restaurant is literally two servings.
Food for thought, no pun intended
BMI is not a comparison of lean mass to mass, just a ratio of weight. If someone was incredibly small and frail muscularly, but had a little fat on them, they look “slim but healthy”, when they are actually “frail but carrying some fat”, and of course the smaller your overall frame and muscles are, the less fat you need to carry to not look gaunt. A lot of women were extremely tiny, but weren’t dangerously low body fat. A lot are now. There’s definitely a correlation between that stereotypes and about certain personality traits, but that’s dangerous territory to talk about.
There’s both a movement towards obesity and a movement towards strength culturally, and weight numbers include both. A “thin but healthy” woman now is likely carrying more muscle mass than her counterpart in the past, but only in certain cultures.
If you look at art through the ages, more muscle and proportional fat has been the predominant preferred body type in porn since the beginning of time. There’s only variations in times of lengthy famine or culturally in small tribes.
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