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
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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