Oh yes, definitely. At risk of going off on ‘when I were a lass’ rant, we genuinely did walk everywhere, junk food didn’t exist when I was a kid, I remember when McDonald’s opened in our town and it was like something rare and exotic. We did t have that much money, we got a 10p mix on a Friday on the way home from school and that was it, unless it was kids parties and even that was homemade cake and crisps rather than ultra processed stuff. Lifestyles have changed hugely. We didn’t drink pop, and we didn’t eat junk - everything was cooked from scratch. There were no fat kids in my class - the ones we thought were fat then would be classed as normal now. Vanity sizing is a thing too - I have clothes from the seventies that are an entirely different shape to modern stuff and the sizing is so different.
I have dresses from the
nineties that throw today's sizing into sharp relief. A UK 10 (US 6) summer dress from 1998, bought at Warehouse, that measures as a 32.5 inch bust. Silk, no stretch, so you have to be a bit smaller to fit it. A size 10 now is supposed to fit a 34 inch bust, generally.
I was trying to think of who was considered properly fat in the media in the 70s and 80s. There was Hattie Jacques, the comedy legend in the Carry On films and the comedy series Sykes who through my eyes as a child was effing HUGE. I went back and looked for her stats and apparently at her hugest late in life she was 20 stone ... 280lb. Often much smaller. That's a tiddler compared to these young, FA girls now. Tess would dwarf her. Yet she suffered badly for her weight, had leg ulcers and kidney problems and died of a heart attack in her fifties.
I also remembered Diana Dors who as a young woman cut a swathe as this larger than life, buxom platinum blonde bombshell. She started her career as a Rank starlet, and was billed as the British Marilyn Monroe, although she was probably more of a Jayne Mansfield. Had a hard old life full of knocks, survived, married endless dodgy men who stole from her, left her bankrupt half the time and she ended up kind of messy and fat by 70s standards and doing chat shows, tell-alls, diets on morning TV and bit parts in Adam Ant videos to get by. Another old legend who'd been around the block, had ups and downs and survived and was kind of loved for it.
This is Diana, young
Then there's this weird time capsule of her on TV in 1983, one year before she died at age 53, fat and shilling her new diet (1000 calories a day) and doing a weigh-in with what she announces as her fellow 'fatties', male and female.
Watch it here.
Stay to the end or fast forward because this is when you see the standards of the day and how much they've changed. There is only one woman there who tops 200lb. Most are in the 170s, 180s, 190s. One, astoundingly, only weighs 144lb. Dors herself weighs in at 186lb. Definitely obese by medical standards (Dors was 5' 6" so that puts her 0.1 under at a BMI of 30). Even the biggest man is under 230lb. Now, they could cast around and find twenty random youngish people over 300lb just walking down the high street.
It's truly staggering how times and perceptions have change in less than 40 years.
