They were the people that grew up after or even during the war, you know, and sometimes the Great Depression before that.
And children were sick more often. Not with allergies, but like... with polio and other scary shit.
And they drank so much, it was sort of crazy. Alcoholism was normalized.
I'm a fan of low childhood morbidity and a steady diet, to be sure.
This is why BMI is a bad index, I've heard. It was made when everyone was skinner due to poorer diets.
People were generally smaller and weaker. Regularly starved, during childhood. My dad grew up on Wonderbread, Jiffy corn bread, and collard greens. Occasionally, peanut butter or black-eyed peas. Hardly any meat. He joined the Army at 17 because they fed you three full meals, every day, and you got to have your own bed.
And women didn't breastfeed their kids and fed them store-bought babyfood, back then, so our generation and the one before had mishapen jawlines and terrible skin. A lot of women had hairy faces because the bad diet threw their hormones off. And people still married their cousins.
It's actually amazing, when I look around at my generations' children, how they're usually better-looking than their parents. Breastfeeding, babywearing, feeding toddlers real food, well-baby checkups and midwives, no alcohol during pregnancy, etc. Huge difference.
My Mom wore sandals made of old tires and hand-me-downs that barely fit. Her feet grew once, in winter, so her dad cut off the front of the toe section.
The old photographs trick people because the resolution was so low. Made everyone look like a movie star. 😂
There's hardly anyone that poor or neglected, anymore.
To quote my father when one of us kids would turn up our nose at gristle or fat on a steak, “your ancestors would have killed each other for that.”
Yup.
My uncle used to talk about how they would have dumplings one day and the dumpling cooking water as a soup the next day. Two meals. 🤌🏼
His son is easily 185 cm tall. He barely broke 175.
BMI is horrible indicator of one’s fitness level.
My daughter (the one in the green dirndl) has an "overweight" BMI, but she wears a size small. I'm considered "extremely obese". Could never get below "obese", even when I was long-distance running in the mountains and wore a size 8.
I now go by waist-to-height ratio and jean size. Have a pair of old jeans I want to squeeze into. I don't weigh myself, anymore, as it drove me nuts.
