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.”
In 1978 I may have weighed about 125 lbs. I was just over 6 foot tall. This was when I graduated from high school. I was considering joining the military, because I wanted to fly like my father did. But because I was considered 40lb underweight and had bad eyesight I never did. Now just turning 64, I am 148lbs at about 5’11”. I did top out about 160lbs for a month or so several years ago. My wife was 6’1″ and around 95lbs when she graduated high school. My mother was less that 100lbs when she got married. People 50+ years ago were a lot more active and dense calorie foods were rare. Now kids are discouraged from being active. My point is, 50 years ago, is not that long ago and people back then were more active and ate less of everything. What is really crazy is how tall kids are now compared to 50+ years ago.
A lot of people don’t understand the sheer amount of non-visual visceral fat our bodies can store without being very obvious versus the impact of muscle on physique and size.
I’d imagine this plays a large role due to the over abundance of simple sugar and carbs in our Western diets.
Additionally, our ion intake (salts) and water stores can play a huge role as well. I easily jump 5-6 lbs in a single day through water loss alone.
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Most importantly though, in my opinion, as a whole we’ve gotten fatter – especially the US. Obvious or not, it’s an epidemic that we pretend isn’t a problem. Appearance or numbers don’t matter, but health does.
I did a strict diet in 2019. I got down to 63kg. This was about my high school weight. At 173cm I had a BMI of 21 or right in the middle of what is considered normal weight. In 1980 I was a normal if slightly skinny kid. I think that the whole world has just forgotten what normal even looks like.
Find some family photos on the beach in the 1970’s or ’80’s.
As young kids we were “all skin and bones”, not just me and my brother, but many of the other kids on the beach too. If you saw kids that skinny these days people would be panicking and calling Social Services!
I suspect some of us were slightly unhealthily underweight back then, but the pendulum has swung very far the other way now, with almost no skinny kids, and a lot of very chubby ones.
Take a look at phone booths. Could the average person today fit comfortably within those? That tells you an awful lot about body proportion changes over recent times.
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