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
1) Exaggeration. People do it all the time, they misremember things, say things incorrectly, or outright lie and then believe their own lies.
2) Wedding prep is not necessarily the same as general health. People have in the past and recently gone to extraordinary lengths to look good for their weddings. This might include starving themselves, dehydrating themselves, crazy unsustainable dieting, etc. This is not what they would have looked like or weighed on a daily basis.
3) People are dumb. It’s quite difficult to look at someone and accurately guess their weight based on their shape particularly when they are wearing clothing and changing that clothing. You may be looking at the modern 130lb picture and be like yeah I dunno that looks about the same for a 90lb picture because of your incompetence not any real change in the bodies involved.
4) And this is a distant fourth place. Changes in body composition, muslcle mass, bone density, fat ratios, etc. can cause two people who look similar to have different weights. This can be hard to evaluate because again you aren’t doing a scientific dissection of the people in question you’re just looking at them from the outside and being like “Eh that looks the same.”
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