Reading War and Peace rn. All of the (many) main characters are upper-class, and feasting is regularly depicted. Yet there are few fat characters, their corpulence is always remarked upon, and one gets the strong impression that all of them are <30 BMI. Another bit of evidence for the pile.
There is a Facebook group called "Unidentified Photos of the British Isles" which often includes photos of groups, street scenes etc from 100 or more years ago with a lot of NORMAL WEIGHT people. Time after time (and I have looked in the past) you will see 20+ people in a photo and not one of them is overweight. Who knows what their diet was, but they all managed to stay reasonably trim.
Note - You may have to scroll through dozens of photos to find this type of photo.
I'm not sure you have to even look that far back, there weren't that many fat people around when I was 20. I remember a couple maybe out of all the people I knew at school, no-one on my college matriculation photo. Most girls were 'on diets' but it was pretty much unheard of for a man to even know what he weighed, let alone care.
My Mum tells me that when she was at school in the 1960s girls were more worried in case they were too skinny. And the fact that old newspapers have often got ads for 'weight gain powders' to help women find a husband bears that out. Try selling that now! (Also I bet they didn't work....)
We used to laugh at visiting Americans and wonder how the hell anyone could possibly be so lazy and gluttonous that they'd get themselves into that state. And then it started happening here.
You and your logic! We just KNOW it's true.
Reading War and Peace rn. All of the (many) main characters are upper-class, and feasting is regularly depicted. Yet there are few fat characters, their corpulence is always remarked upon, and one gets the strong impression that all of them are <30 BMI. Another bit of evidence for the pile.
There is a Facebook group called "Unidentified Photos of the British Isles" which often includes photos of groups, street scenes etc from 100 or more years ago with a lot of NORMAL WEIGHT people. Time after time (and I have looked in the past) you will see 20+ people in a photo and not one of them is overweight. Who knows what their diet was, but they all managed to stay reasonably trim.
Note - You may have to scroll through dozens of photos to find this type of photo.
Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/825630921200236
I'm not sure you have to even look that far back, there weren't that many fat people around when I was 20. I remember a couple maybe out of all the people I knew at school, no-one on my college matriculation photo. Most girls were 'on diets' but it was pretty much unheard of for a man to even know what he weighed, let alone care.
My Mum tells me that when she was at school in the 1960s girls were more worried in case they were too skinny. And the fact that old newspapers have often got ads for 'weight gain powders' to help women find a husband bears that out. Try selling that now! (Also I bet they didn't work....)
We used to laugh at visiting Americans and wonder how the hell anyone could possibly be so lazy and gluttonous that they'd get themselves into that state. And then it started happening here.