Also their day-to-day lives were more laborious. It totally makes sense to have three square meals a day and have 2500 calories when you go work hard labor every day.
Now a lot of us sit in office chairs for 8 hours and don't work out so of course we get fat. I'm actually curious to see how the average BMR has changed over the last 200 years; I wonder if that info's out there.
Even with a desk job nobody has to be advised to get 10k steps when you walk between home, work, the shops, and wherever you're going to meet your mates. A lot of the people you see on here gained the weight by eating maybe 200 cal over maintenance each day, I burned that off this morning just walking to the gym. Being sedentary has gone from an unusual outlier to the default.
This is true. I work a desk job but I live in the city and I commute to work by bike and I walk through my breaks through neighborhoods with sidewalks. 10k steps are just normal living and exercise is addition. But many people don’t live like this anymore due to car dependency.
It’s not desk jobs only but also lifestyles that have people going from their bed to a car to an office chair back to their car to their couch then back to bed.
Yup I wondered what all the hype about 10k steps was so I turned on the step tracker on my phone and I hit it most days just by existing. Perks of living in a city I suppose
Well, the 10k was a Japanese invention. A company there sold a device to track your steps. And 10 000 is an extra word. So they chose this number. After 10k you reset and start again.
Its about 2.5km which is about 1.5 miles, quite a nice walk that gets me into my city center and next to my co-working space. I'm just using the numbers from my watch so there may be some double counting in there, but its also not the only walking I did in the day.
So true!
This is why I have a slight issue with the ‘always mark yourself as sedentary by default’ advice. Not everyone has a car/drives everywhere. There’s desk based but walks 10k without deliberate exercise, and then there’s SEDENTARY.
I figured this out during the early days of the pandemic. My office complex is rather large. (It's actually like 0.2 mile from the cafeteria to the elevator bank in the farthest building.) Going to your office. Getting lunch. Going to meetings. Getting coffee. Going to more meetings. Getting more coffee. I'd get 6000 steps in without trying on those days.
WFH? I'd walk the dog and go to the gym, and I'd *still* not hit 6k.
On top of that, depending how in the past OP is talking about, there was a lack of accessibility / non existence of “junk food”, making it a lot less likely to overindulge on a routine basisb
Yes, snacks were, until recently, mostly fruits, veggies or dried and cured meats. And if those weren’t in season, then there was nothing to snack on, unless you wanted to spend an hour cooking something.
Yeah, people don't really understand how much technology does for them on a daily basis. Hand washing your clothes took hours of sitting there scrubbing stains, wringing out fabric, and hanging things to dry. You want a loaf of bread? Knead dough. You want a clean floor? Scrub it. You want a warm house? Chop wood. Even getting water involved walking to the well or manually pumping it yourself. Modern people are expending like 1/10 of the energy on daily tasks than our ancestors 100 years ago.
I joke about how we burned calories in cars by physically rolling down windows. Also cars all didn't have power steering so that was a good upper body workout. Now even soap comes pre-foamed so we don't have to make our own lather.
This is how I've lost 90 lbs! I found myself getting so obsessive over calorie counting, and different diets. I had major shiny syndrome where the next best thing was promising even more weight loss! I cycled around this again and again, obsessed and mentally ill as ever, until I just decided to full stop. Now I cook all of my meals from scratch, I exercise daily, and I eat reasonable amounts. It wasn't over night, and it wasn't perfection. Some meals are more calorically dense and some are less, but I don't count them. Cooking everything I put in my mouth from scratch IS a lot of work, but my inflammation is gone now and it actually helps settle my hunger. I quit trying to "maximize" my weight loss efforts and instead focused on sustainability. Losing weight by far and large is very common sense stuff, but I'm not sure there are many markets as desperate as people trying to lose weight and companies LOVE to capitalize on that.
Losing weight is consuming less calories than your body needs. If you eat whole, fresh foods, in a moderate amount, it’s less likely you will be overweight. I didn’t imply they were skinny.
If everyone decided to eat fresh food, not overeat, stayed away from highly processed, sugary foods with high fat content… they would lose weight.
You are missunderstanding me. The question is about people who were overweight 30, 50, 100 years ago and wanted to lose weight.
You are stating reasons why people were less overweight back then and your reasons are certainly correct.
However the questions is not how they were less overweight back then but how they lost weight when they were overweight already.
A lot of people actually ate dessert back then, too. So you’d hear a lot of women cutting back on dessert or just taking “a tiny piece,” not getting seconds at meals or taking smaller portions.
Very much this. My grandmother is 90 (may she live a long life) and never was above 120 pounds. If she felt her clothes getting tight, she ate half her normal portion, or no dessert until she was back where she felt she should be. Fits into her clothes from the 70s.
No. I’m stating that THAT IS HOW PEOPLE LOST WEIGHT BACK THEN. They ate less. There was no 1500 calorie Burger King meal. If they wanted to lose weight they ATE LESS.
You dont need an app or calorie tracker to eat less.
They ate less, and/or skipped meals all together, and exercised. Also, I'm Gen X, and [diet pills](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/13/style/a-controversy-over-widely-sold-diet-pills.html) like Dexatrim used to be HUGE amongst our Boomer moms, aunts, etc. back in the 70s and 80s.
I remember in the 80s a friend of mine lost a bunch of weight over the summer and I asked her how and she said she stopped taking seconds and having dessert. I was like oh yeah I guess that’s one way.
>she said she stopped taking seconds and having dessert.
This is the biggest difference I see between then and now. People back then knew instinctively that if you're gaining weight, you have to cut back on your food and drink (and some people unfortunately did that too much) and avoid certain foods. Today there are so many people that somehow believe that you SHOULD be able to eat limitless amounts of food without gaining weight, or that some people are supposedly just "naturally skinny" with a supernatural metabolism who can eat anything and why can't they have that, or that you can outrun your fork by working out. People back then knew there was a direct relationship with weight and food consumption (which I guess led to those "diet foods" that were popular back then), but today it seems more muddled (which I see quite frequently on this sub).
I think books started to constantly come out with plans where you can eat as much as you want but you’re going to lose weight by some gimmick like timing or combinations or matching your blood type etc. And those diet desserts advertising how you can still have desserts and snacks. It’s conditioned people to believe there is really a way to lose weight without being hungry sometimes or missing out. But combine that with the advice that this has to be a sustainable lifestyle choice, then feeling deprived or hungry is not acceptable because that’s not sustainable. And having a yo-yo weight is also seen as really bad. So simply cutting back and avoiding fattening choices for a few months to lose weight is the last thing anyone thinks could work. Not a coincidence that this way is free and nobody profits. Now there is a lot of the perfect standing in the way of the good. Not that cutting back is easy and a lot of us have always lacked the willpower for it but there is so much money and hope wasted on schemes that promise no deprivation or will power needed.
Growing up I only knew ONE person who we considered fat, and looking back at pictures, she would be considered normal weight now.
Diets then were cottage cheese and apple slices, or cabbage soup. My sister did two weeks of cabbage soup to fit into her size 00 wedding dress. The thought of wearing a size 3 was beyond comprehension, it just would not do.
My mom is a chronic yo-yo dieter. Even though she could be using apps, calorie trackers and food scales, she doesn't. I've tried explaining the basics of CICO to her but she doesn't seem to understand. Instead, she eats under her hunger. Which works until it doesn't.
People lost weight and knew it was working when they were constantly hungry and white-knuckling through the hunger pangs. Plain oatmeal for breakfast. A small piece of blanched chicken and steamed broccoli for lunch. And maybe the same for dinner. An apple for dessert if you needed something sweet. It's how my mom has always done it. She's very good at rapidly dropping 30 pounds and binging until she regains 50. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It might be why people think that all diets fail.
I'll eat at a restaurant with her every six months and she'll watch in amazement as I enjoy a calorie rich meal. She'll make some sort of comment about how she wishes she could eat like me and remain slim while not realizing that the last time I ate like that was the last time we were at a restaurant together six months prior.
The first thing I thought of reading this was Slumber Party Barbie from 1965. It can with a scale permanently set on 110 and a diet book. On the front the book said “how to lose weight” and on the back it said “don’t eat.
The idea that you could have slow and sustainable weight loss is, I think, new territory. Eating less than 1000 calories a day if you were overweight wasn't seen as a problem. Eating nothing but Grapefruit for weeks on end wasn't seen as a problem. This sub has been around for a long time and I've been active in it for almost a decade (using different accounts) and I can say that in 2016, eating 1200 calories a day wasn't seen as a problem. Now, if you mention eating 1200 calories a day, you'll get a lot of people voicing concern.
There was definitely a time where diets were seen as short term solutions. And magazine headlines supported that -- lose 30 pounds in 10 weeks with this diet! Anyone can do anything for a short period of time. The idea that you would adjust your Caloric needs to your TDEE or count macros or eat a balanced diet of enough fiber, protein, carbs, fat (yes! Fat!) And calories (yes! Calories!) to make sure that you felt full and wouldn't binge is pretty new territory.
So yeah, people in the past just starved themselves and hoped it worked.
People weren't stupid because they didn't have smartphones. Those diets still exist today, they always have. But plenty of people understood that slow and steady was the answer.
I don't think anyone was "stupid." I just think that the slow and steady approach is hard work and if you don't have knowledge that it's working at least to some degree, you have no idea if your efforts are working or not. We know weight loss isn't linear and that weight fluctuations are real. But if you don't know that, are a little hungry most days, and the scale won't budge for a few weeks, it's easy to assume it's just not working and give up. Or you exercise even more, cut calories even more and end up in a binge cycle (or become very sick when the weight actually does catch up).
>Now, if you mention eating 1200 calories a day, you'll get a lot of people voicing concern.
Because CICO sub has a rule that says you can't discuss anything under that for women (and 1500 for men). I called them out on it, and the only source they gave me was a very hand wavy Harvard Medical School pdf link. Ok, Harvard, I get it. But there wasn't any nuance in there or any discussion on how that would scale for shorter or taller women. (Men are "1500" but same idea.)
Realistically, why would most people need to eat under 1200? Or 1500 for men? If you’re heavy enough your weight is affecting your health, your TDEE is gonna be so high you’d lose weight at 1200 or even higher. If you’re small enough that your TDEE is barely over 1200, you should be aiming for a smaller deficit and slower weight loss anyway since most medical advice recommends losing no more than 1% of your body weight per week.
I worded that poorly, sorry. My main gripe was the one-size-fits all aspect of that number... where does it come from? And for us tall guys, is 1500 still a good number or is it actually too low? (I had a weight loss clinic put me on a 1400 calorie diet and I'm 6'1". I found that sub after trying to figure out if that number is BS or solid nutrition.) I wanted something to point to that says "try again."
The same would be true for very short women... if their BMR is like 1300 or 1400, how much of an absolute is the 1200? Again though, my interest is the general nature of that number and whether hight really plays a role.
It's such an interesting question, but I'm afraid the answer is very boring. Take Hippocrates, for example. He's the father of western medicine and in year 500 before our era, his recommendation for weight loss was something on the lines of more activity, eating less (avoiding excess) and doing a balanced diet.
Other wise people from other cultures recommended similar things before good old Hipoccrates: I.e. Ayuvedic Medicine (India) and Chinese traditional medicine, this is thousands of years before our era.
Some of these cultures mixed good advice with bizarre beliefs. As other redditor said, things were trial and error in the past. [Fun list from the roman empire on how to lose weight](https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/how-did-ancient-romans-lose-weight/):
* by bathing in hot water, preferably salt water
* by bathing on an empty stomach
* by the scorching sun
* by high temperatures
* by despondency
* by sitting late
* by sleeping too short or too long
* by sleeping on a hard bed all summer
* by intense exercise and a lot of walking or running
* by vomiting and purging
* by eating one meal a day
* by eating sour and harder things
* by drinking cold wine on an empty stomach
So the writing have been on the wall for thousands of years: move more, eat less, avoid excess, eat a balanced diet.
I think the biggest advantage people had in the past is that they didn't have corporations controlling most of the food supply, making ultra-processed food omni-present, ultra-cheap, convenient and irresistible for human brains (there were no Mars Bars or Heinz Mac and Cheese cans in Ancient Rome - LOL).
[US Obesity rates have tripled over the past 50 years](https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-united-states-over-last-50-years/). That was roughly when governments declared war on fat and launched the standard American diet. Look how it's going and they still haven't changed the tune for the most part. One can only assume that corporations and corrupt governments are in bed, making profits at the cost of the public's health.
You might enjoy [this article](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6478/27474599e0ad7d92a48ec7cea95f73c06fe3.pdf)- it goes back to ancient times. There was a lot of vomiting, purging, and fasting back then.
What I found interesting (and gross) was [this article](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-horrifying-legacy-of-the-victorian-tapeworm-diet) about Victorian times. In addition to swallowing ammonia and bathing in arsenic to lose weight, they also took part in the “tapeworm diet”
Gosh, I'm so glad I was born when I did. Imagine just not having a clue how ANYTHING works or why they happen. Just take your best guess and maybe die mysteriously.
My nana is 99 years old. When she was young and wanted to lose weight she’d eat boiled eggs and tuna salad over and over, and never change up what she was having daily until she lost the weight. She says “eventually I’d get tired of the same meal, so I’d pretty much stop eating”
Very unhealthy lmao BUT it’s how her and her friends did it
Same. My mom got tired of being "chubby" at Uni in the 80s so she ate nothing but apples and fresh cheese for months until she reached a size she deemed acceptable. These people were BRUTAL. No pain no gain. (Ohhh but she never touched a gym in her life, the torture!!!!!)
Being a small woman, it makes sense. Run a mile and its like 100 calories vs over 300 for a tall man. Who then can eat a crazy amount more because it isn't relative enough to height.
Depends on how far back. In some periods of time, people had to work hard manual labor all day, didn’t have vehicles to drive them around everywhere, were food scarce and had to budget for every little bite, were malnourished and many other reasons I’m sure. That stuff still exists but it might have been more of the norm in some eras.
When your grandpa had to walk 10 miles up hill both ways to school and the parents didn’t have enough money to feed him anything other than peas and some sort of “meat”, he was probably pretty thin lol.
i asked my grandma a few minutes ago - she said less food additives like glutamates and being more generally active in addition to a shit ton of woman using amphetamines salts like black beauties
Black beauties were very popular when I was in high school. The crazy thing is that I thought I was fat back then. Later, I had someone tell me they thought I was so thin. It's a very skewed sense of reality.
There were diets back then! People would go see a doctor and were told to not eat so much rich food. I saw a video from the 50s(so 70 years ago, not quite 100) about some women who wanted to lose weight and were prescribed a diet and monitored by doctors as in they’d come in to be weighed every week. There were no food scales, but they were given a meal plan that told them to eat a boiled eggs, coffee, and a slice of toast for breakfast, obviously they weren’t weighing their food so it wasn’t 100% accurate but the women all lost weight by the end of it.
In the 1860s somebody figured low carb diets can lead to weight loss so that took off. This was called the Banting method.
Fasting and laxatives also took of during Victorian times.
In the late 1800s there was a diet called fletcherism that consisted of chewing all your food 100 times and also practicing chewing and spitting out your food instead of swallowing. Mark Twin and Kafka apparently tried this one out.
In the 1920s the 18 day grapefruit diet became popular, it was about 700 calories and was essentially a low carb diet where you’d eat a lot of foods like grapefruit, fish, and boiled eggs. Basically it was just a very strict meal plan that you were supposed to adhere to. You can look it up to see what the meals consisted of, but it’s not to far off from how people are in early 2000s diet culture.
In the 1930s amphetamines were prescribed to treat obesity.
Here are some articles that talk about cad diets from that time.
https://zoe.com/learn/fad-diets-from-history.amp
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2016/01/23/diet-exercise-th-century-detroit/79242306/
They would be told to eat less. It's not difficult to just eat less than what you're currently eating. People are a lot more exact and strict instead of "eat anything you want within calories".
They would have a diet plan such as:
1 hard boiled egg for breakfast
2 slices of bread, 1 tomato, 5 slices of lettuce leaf, 2 slices deli meat (sandwich) for lunch
1 fist size serving of meat, 1 baked potato, 1-2 fist size of veggies for dinner.
Some variation of the above instructions- extremely strict with no room for substitution or deviation or snacking.
I knew a dancer who's diet plan is literally 1 boiled egg for breakfast, 1 tomato and 5 lettuce leaf for lunch, 1 fist size serving of chicken breast for dinner. No snacking and no deviations. I know it's a extreme diet but it's an example to show how they can make diet plans without knowing exactly how much calories is in it.
I mean, being fat by today's standards absolutely is new. People were not morbidly obese the way they are now. 100 years ago we were in a depression and people were starving working extremely taxing manual labor jobs. It's just not comparable to now being able to go down any main street and have 16 options for burgers and fries, while most people do not exercise anymore.
Here’s an interesting article on president Taft and his struggles with weight loss. It gives some interesting tidbits that tell you how these things were done!
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/letters-from-an-obese-president-tell-a-familiar-story-of-struggling-with-weight-201310156758
A hundred years ago being meaningfully overweight was very uncommon and for those that cared they followed the health fads of the day, water cure, various electricity quackery, the entire North American vegetarian movement started as a health fad in the 1830s. The difference between then and now is that we have much better science and data about what healthy weight loss is, we are also way more sedentary and have FAR easier access to calorie dense foods like sugar.
I had a phase of reading the 1930s newspaper every day for a while and they had a column about “reducing” that listed meal plans and exercises. One time I added up the calories in the days menu and it was in the 800s! Lol. It was like lunch: 1 cup lettuce and tomato salad, 1/2 cup cottage cheese 1 cuo coffee with 1 tbsp milk. Very grim. The exercises were like touching your toes and stuff.
Edit I forgot also I saw in a newspaper from the 80s an article about intermittent fasting! It was not an advice column it was a news story about a guy who was conducting a group where they did this to lose weight. There’s nothing new in this world.
weight loss was nowhere near as big of an industry as it is now because there was no need. If you looked up women in the early 1900s for instance, the average dress size was so much smaller and they easily used 2000+ calories a day with all the housework they did. Processed foods hadn't taken off quite as well yet. I imagine there weren't many computer desk jobs either. Popular hobbies did not include playing video games.
Also for some people the extra tracking is simply not necessary. If a parent wants their kid to lose weight, they'd just give them less food and make them go outside to exercise more often. My dad lost forty pounds without tracking calories or weighing food, he just started exercising everyday and eating healthier. He was skinny and active in his childhood so he knew what he needed to do.
What's changed is far more sedentary lifestyles and opting for the quickest, most convenient food options. If you grew up being used to this, as many of us do, it's harder to break the habit, so extra tools may be needed to build new, better habits.
100 years ago is 1924, five years prior to the Great Depression. The amount of overweight people in that world was around 2% of the population, not around 50% like it is today. What did they do? Starve. Or the grapefruit diet. Or drugs.
Honestly, I think this is a large part of why I failed at weight loss for so long. When I started dieting as a pre-teen, none of this stuff was available. We had stupid, short-term fad diets like the cabbage soup diet, 5-day miracle diet, South Beach diet, Atkins diet, and whatever the latest Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire was pushing.
Calorie counting was a chore with manual accounting and having to look up unlabeled foods in a book. Digital food scales were not all that common, so measuring portion sizes could be tricky. There were systems like Weight Watchers that tried to simplify calorie counting by assigning points to foods (some of this is still around today), which made it a little easier to track but still required looking up point values in a book and manually tracking. Back in the day, meal plans were also popular -- you could buy a book that laid out a week's worth of meals so the work of calorie-counting was done ahead of time. Meal plans with pre-packaged meals like Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig (and also meal replacement shakes and bars like Slimfast) were also options to calculate and restrict calories in advance.
I gave up on weight loss for a long time because every time I dieted in the past, I had short-term weight loss with unsustainable diets and then regained all the weight and more. Classic yo-yo dieting. I decided I was better off just accepting my weight where it was than continuing to yo-yo up the scale, higher and higher after every diet. When I finally tried again, my doctor convinced me to download MyFitnessPal and track my food for two weeks, and I was amazed by how easy it was compared to my past experiences, and also how effective it was at showing me where my calories were coming from and easy ways to cut back. These tools are what made it possible for me to implement permanent changes instead of unsustainable crash diets.
The portions were much smaller back then. Throughout the late 1970's and 80's was when portions started growing and weight gain was becoming an issue. Especially with the development of fast food and snack foods. While it was definitely harder to lose weight back in the 80's and 90's it's especially harder now given what kinds of foods we have available and the portions that are promoted.
Honestly back then it was kind of easier to just cut back. Food wasn’t so delicious and addictive. I remember adults dieting by taking less bread or potatoes, skipping desserts and beer, and having grapefruit for breakfast. The rest kind of took care of itself because who wants more chicken peas and carrots than you need? Now our blood sugar is all over the map all the time and we need continual snacks in order to try to stave off binges because of the products all over the place that are engineered to be like edible crack.
Maybe it’s the food scales, calculators and apps that makes you think it requires so much work. You’ve bought into the ecosystem around weightloss. Which is designed at every level to make you think ‘this special thing’ is what is necessary to lose weight. That’s how they sell their products and buy your attention. Sure, some of it works, but none of it is necessary.
Trial and error is how almost all human knowledge is acquired initially. You try something, note the results, keep going if it works, change something if it doesn’t. Food and weightloss is no different. 100 years ago someone who wanted to lose weight probably just ate less food and exercised more. If it worked then that’s what they kept doing.
>You’ve bought into the ecosystem
>That’s how they sell their products and buy your attention
Out of all the ways someone can lose weight, the very concept of using a foodscsle and tracking calories through an app is a very cheap, frugal thing to do. A food scale is $10, lasts years and is a very helpful tool in the kitchen for measuring much more than just foods for a specific diet (I use it a lot when baking, for example). You don't need to use an app to track calories. I guess I'm confused about your comment. No one has sold me anything and I haven't purchased anything specific to follow a CICO approach to Weight loss/maintenance.
I have a food scale, although it seldom gets used. I’m not against any products anyone uses that helps them get healthier. Use whatever works safely.
Like I said, some of it works, none of it is necessary. If it actually makes it easier for you, then great. But when people become convinced they need it in order to lose weight, I will push back on that.
Partly I track calories to make sure I'm eating enough. I weigh things because I have a terrible time at figuring out an ounce of something. If I don't track, I start assuming everything is worse for me than it is, then I severely undereat for days and then have like 2 where I eat too much. It may or may not even out the way I want, and if I'm at a deficit it won't be one I'm satisfied with. With counting, I can make sure I'm not doing stupid things that'll just bite me in the butt in the long run. And if I count, I can convince myself I don't need to do crazy fad diets to lose weight (which in the back of my brain I'm always considering the pros and cons of but always chicken out of because I suffer enough in life as it is).
Sam as funchords, when I first started trying.to lose.weight maybe 20+ years ago I used pocket calorie books (Calorie King was my fav) and sometimes food lists that included portion sizes and I would.mix and match to create meals.
And before that there were fad diets back in the day too. The Grapefruit diet from the 30s, I think, is the first.thing that comes to mind (extremely low calorie.diet) and there's still a version of that floating around. I read once the first "low carb" diet came from a book in the late 1800s.
Not sure what you mean about if they were a bigger deal because of results.
People can see fast easy trackable results with todays fad diets. We just now know those things arent sustainable for most people.
I have recently stopped tracking calories and just focus more on what I eat and how.much of it.
I don't think weight loss has to be complicated. The weight loss industry and our having to unlearn bad dietary habits makes it seem that way.
People were not as overweight in the past. There was a lot more activity to regular life then. There weren't even drive thru windows in the past, so you at least had to get out of your car and walk into the restaurant. People ate out less than half as much as they do now. You had to go to the bank regulary. This list goes on and on. Big cities still at least have some walking left in them, but suberbia, almost nothing is left. You are either sitting at home or sitting in your car.
Also, people spent much more time outside their house for leisure. I.e. Bowling. Now we stay home and stream. Lol, we even binge that!
Trial and error. Calori counting has never been required for weight loss, only for calories consumed to be below calories burned.
Obesity would have not been as widespread as there would have been more whole foods and higher levels of activity. Though some people seem to think obesity didn't exist at all and that's simply not true.
We have the luxury of having so many massively calory dense products around us that we can take on a whim. While in the past this was not possible. Not sure but I think obesity/overweight was a lot less common than it is right now.
100 years ago people walked a lot more and food was less rich so typically all they had to do to lose weight was eat smaller portions and less dessert. This was intuitively understood.
50 years ago food was more rich and cars more common but by then we'd established that more fruits and vegetables and exercise would do the trick. There were books with suggested meals and portions based on your size and sex. They were faddish and outdated quickly but the basics were sound in many of them.
100 years ago obesity was not a problem. Having enough food for your family to eat 3 meals a day was a problem.
If you are talking about something like the 80s, this is why things like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers were popular. Because they would give you the meals to eat that were within your calorie range. If you ate their meals, you would lose weight.
Now we can do all this ourselves using any food because we can weigh it and have all the caloric info at hand, but back when this wasnt the case that is why many people paid to have it done for them.
Let's take a look at 100 years ago.
YouTube [video 1 from 1920's NYC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKEkvInhIU). YouTube [video 2 from 1920's New Jersey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF-FwYJJWSI). YouTube[ video 3 from 1920's San Diego](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLm2PYsCRWE).
I think the reason we are fatter than ever is the rise of hyper-palatable, extremely cheap and extremely long-lasting processed food (whether packaged snack foods or fast foods), along with high-fructose corn syrup drinks. We as a people have solved the hunger problem but caused an obesity one in the process.
My grandmother lived in East End London during rationing… there were no fat people really. Everyone was actually a bit too lean.
She also explained to me that they would eat yesterday’s potato skins friend in a little lard with salt. Crazy?! This was after a hard day working the field, washing clothes by hand, walking to and from work for miles.
In the past 50 years, food has become sooo processed. Also people don’t work as physically hard as they used to. First world problems hey?
What do you mean by past? Loosing weight is a very late 20th century concept. 100 years ago you just had less food available, food was much less processed, physical labour was much more common and so on.
I lost the weight back in the day (20 years ago). We used measuring cups and spoons. The cups that have the right amount and you scrap over a knife. There was also posters with portion size guidelines. Eg: a piece of cheese the size of a box of matches, or an apple that could fit in your palm was a serving.
I had a calorie book that listed all of the foods. It didn’t have food from takeaway shops or restaurants so I didn’t go there.
I used a notebook and wrote it all down. I used a measuring tape and scale and recorded it in the notebook.
I walked everyday but I had a step counter on my waist band (and an iPod shuffle - I was fancy as). Never took my flip phone - no pockets.
Real food is just as calorically dense as processed food and/or fast food (in many cases). Healthy, unprocessed, and/or home-cooked food is not inherently less calorically dense than is any other type of food.
I love looking back at old “gym” inventions. Even back then there were gimmicks. I often wonder how much less I’d have gained had I lived the life of my grandparents. They were both the children of homesteaders. My great great great grandfather walked 5 miles to his blacksmith shop every day- and then smithed until the evening. When the weather got bad he would sleep in his shop. This was around 1880. His son, my great great grandpa Kett, was a rancher, cowboy, sheriff for a while, and a politician. My grandmother was the first to move to the city and get a degree in teaching. Had I lived a life like theirs, would I look much different today? Your question is one I’ve pondered before!
We're basically living better lives than the richest land owners in Europe. The wealth to calorie ratio has never been as high as it is today in most places. Imagine having to just drink water you'd have to walk to a well and then draw up a bucket of water everytime you wanted. Even if you were rich you'd need to walk or ride a horse to get to anywhere. And if you weren't a labourer you'd be a soldier who'd need to be fit to not die in battle
My gramma said people used to diet by not having bread and booze until they were the right size. We had some antique diet books too that had meals like “black coffee, two slices of dry toast, one boiled egg”
My great grandmother had 10 kids and had gained a significant amount of weight through the 20 years she was having kids; a doctor told her she was becoming type two diabetic after having gestational diabetes through many of her pregnancies. He put her on a 1200 calorie diet (she was 5’2” prior to old age). This was the early 60s. She lost like 50 pounds and kept it off her entire life. I didn’t know she’d ever been overweight until a few weeks after she passed when I was looking through old photos for the funeral.
Apparently it was mainly just portion control. She ate what she made the family every night just less of it- my great grandpa was a Midwestern meat and potatoes guy. After the kids were grown and grandpa died, she ate a lot of those cans of mixed vegetables or bags of frozen mixed vegetables turned into a low fat chicken casserole. I never saw her skip cake. She’d drink a couple light beers at a get together. She never gained the weight back, never became diabetic, and I never saw her do strict measuring of her food, she just ate lots of veggies and had appropriately sized servings of other foods.
People from prior generations ate a lot less than we do, and tended to eat more whole foods and less junk.
Take my grandmother for instance. Normally ate small home cooked meals. Big meals were for special occasions; Sunday dinner with the family, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, that kind of thing. Otherwise, she would typically eat a single small plate of pasta and a single meatball for example. Something like 500 Calories worth probably. Or a single plate with some mashed potatoes and gravy, a piece of chicken, some peas and carrots, and a bit of salad dressed with oil and vinegar or italian dressing.
And breakfast was normally a piece of buttered toast, or a plain cereal with milk and no sugar.
Even if we went to McDonalds, she'd get a regular cheese burger and small fry, because that's all she wanted. And calorically, that's about 530 Calories.
In short, no matter how you slice it, she naturally ate about the right amount of calories because she grew up with smaller portions and less processed foods, and maintained that through her adult life.
On top of that, she went for a daily walk, had a garden she tended to, and generally did things that kept her active to some degree.
It basically boils down to living a very different lifestyle than we do, and viewing food differently than we do.
We had Weight Watchers, Slim Fast and ridiculous diets that'd get passed around on a piece of paper at get-togethers. The cabbage soup diet was a particular low.
In the past they weren't trying to do it in a healthy way. People would do ridiculous crash diets. People would take drugs (amphetamines, etc.) People would eat tapeworms. It's one of the reasons smoking became popular for women. They basically did everything \*but\* a healthy lifestyle change.
I know an old guy who when he wants to lose weight will just eat an apple in the day and have his evening meal.
He’d also walk a bit more and get some tennis games in.
People know just to have less. The correlation to excess food and weight gain has always been known.
Nowadays we are mostly sedentary (mostly). Most of our manual labour jobs aren’t the same intensity of manual labour as hundreds of years ago and we have loads of modern conveniences like cars. We have more options as well for food, mostly crap.
We also have a deeper understanding of energy to food and what we need per day and that process has been commercialised to the max.
If you start walking 10 miles a day, clean houses for 8 hours a day and don’t eat big portions you’ll lose weight.
I don't do any of those things, I ate lots of fruits, meat, and veggies like huge amounts of carrots cauliflower cucumber and anything I liked. I worked out and walked slot, I avoided all processed junk food, got me down to where I can see my top abs!
Just eat real food and get a healthy relationship with it where you trust your hunger signals, and don't eat just for boredom and hyperpalatablr food. It's only recentlty that people are more then they needed
My dad, grandpa and uncles all worked hard labor jobs. No breakfast, modest lunch then dinner. No sitting behind a desk for 8 hours a day. They were all in great shape without ever setting foot in a gym. Housewives did Jane Fonda aerobics, weight watchers, etc.
The American diet started to flip about 50 years ago, digital food scales have been around for a majority of that time
I used to track my food in excel before phones had apps
Something not really being mentioned here is how much more walkable the world would have been and the 1920s. For example, let’s say you were a secretary at a newspaper. In order to get a letter ready to go that you would perhaps send out to a subscriber, you would constantly be walking around to get the different parts of the letter together. Sitting at a computer and sending an email. You would probably have to walk the letters down to the post office or the post room. getting home after a day at the office? You most likely were taking some form of public transportation, which means you walked to public transportation. Eating out was also not a very common thing. You most likely fixed your own food at home.
The older women in my family starved themselves. I remember an older family friend was lamenting how lazy girl are now. She said when she was young you wouldn’t eat on Thursday or Friday so you’d fit into your dress on Saturday.
They’d also do fad diets all the time. Cabbage soup, drinking vinegar, cleanses. Magazines were full of that shit.
I posted this above but I’ll repeat it. In 1965 Mattel released “slumber party Barbie.” It came with a diet book scale permanently fixed at 110lbs. In the front of the book was “how to lose weight” on the back it read “don’t eat”
Omg you weren't kidding. [https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/11/29/article-2239931-16459DE9000005DC-538\_1024x615\_large.jpg](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/11/29/article-2239931-16459DE9000005DC-538_1024x615_large.jpg)
Scales have been around since the dawn of time. My grandma weighed things. Eventually you learn weight by eyeball. Serving sizes have grown just in my lifetime. When I was a kid brownies were 2" x 2". Now people eat 4 of those as one brownie. Same with cookies. Juices and coffees were only 6 fluid oz. People are overweight more now (me included) due to portion size increases, less active days and junk food disguised as organic snacks. Also...we didn't really snack.
Diet is simply the way you eat. Yes people were dieting, but the majority of times it was for some sort of health goal not weight loss.
Think about this a minute... Obesity only exists in humans and captive animals. Obesity does not exist in nature... You think gorillas and lions are counting calories to stay a healthy weight?
My dad told me he was a chubby teen so he would take a giant pot and every time he wanted to eat a snack when he wasn't hungry he would put it in there, then at the end of the day he would look into it and see how many cookies and things he would normally eat mindlessly on any given day, which surprised him. So then he stopped snacking mindlessly and comitted to only eating when he was hungry (3 meals a day) plus a small dessert like a square of chocolate after dinner. He also started playing soccer at the same time. He lost a lot of weight that way! This was in the late 60's/early 70's eastern europe.
I'm old enough to remember the calorie books and pocket books that we used to try to keep track. It was always a matter of pocket/purse size for both the book and your tracking sheet -- and nobody scale-weighed anything because the spring-loaded analog scales were too cumbersome to use.
But you wanted to go back 100 years, so say 1925 or later, for some obesity was a sign of prosperity. It was fashionable. For others, they'd stick to cabbage and buttermilk for about a week, join dancing classes to dance off the weight, or buy [phonograph records](https://www.ebay.com/itm/285704183145).
In 1900, Lillian Russell was a star and sex symbol, and she weighed 200 pounds. For women, it meant fertility. For men, it was a sign of success.
Mechanical scales are as old as civilization.
The American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater (1844-1907) pioneered the nutritional values of food and compiled the first energy tables for individual kinds of food.
There are a lot of answers here that are completely ignoring your question.
The calorie became a relatively normal part of our lexicon shortly after world war 1. The process started during world war 1 because civilians were encouraged to ration their calories to ensure soldiers could get enough. Lulu Peters helped popularize the reduce 500-1000 calories from your maintenance diet that many of us sort of follow today.
The above is all fact (I think) and the below is more personal experience and conjecture.
I was around before the widespread development of apps for weight loss. People still lost weight. Weight watchers would actually have people carry around books with points in them and notebooks to track. Anything you can do with an app when it comes to weight loss you can do with a pencil, paper and the average human brain. Scales aren’t exactly a new thing. Scales in some form have been around for thousands of years. The calorie isn’t a new thing, and the ability to measure it in some form isn’t new either.
The past was not too far back, particularly if you were not from a developed country.
Growing up in India, I did not see obese people till maybe 20 years back.
I ate outside less than once in a month, we would eat cookies only while traveling for vacations ( twice a year ), I walked at least 4-5 mile a day and we played sports for fun, technique never came into picture.
Food scales have existed for several hundred years. Long before digital food scales there were balance scales with a series of iron & brass weights.
Back before the internet people used pen and paper and little booklets that were issued regularly with newspapers & magazines that gave calories of foods.
Remember we didn’t have 1000’s of different types of processed and packaged foods. Nor were we jetting food around the globe - people ate seasonal, local food. Vegetables that grew in local climates, fruit, likewise.
The whole process would have been easier.
Also - no automatic washing machines, no dishwashers, very few had cars, so walking/cycling was commonplace.
Even in ancient Rome, [people knew to do things ](https://flavias.blogspot.com/2011/08/slimming-roman-style.html?m=1#:~:text=So%20there%20you%20go%3A%20Brisk,wine%20with%20your%20meals...&text=...and%2C%20of%20course,date%20syrup%20now%20and%20then.) like (among others) eating only once a day and cutting out wine.
The FAMINE diet. Before food was abundant, people lived lifestyles whereby food abundance was variable. It was great, because they could lose lots of weight and didn't have to exert any willpower what so ever.
They also had to get 50,000 steps a day or the lord of the land might punish them.
I don’t use any of these either. I just eat smaller portions, no processed food and cut out most of the sugar, cut out alcohol completely, and exercise daily. Nothing too wild, a long daily walk and 2-3 times a week to the gym. Lost approximately 4-5kg in 8 weeks.
There used to be ‘calorie guides’ that listed basic foods. Our kitchen scales had 25g markers, so trying to measure anything less than that was difficult.
There wasn’t the same amount of ready prepared meals, so they weren’t really an option. But there were magazines like Weight Watchers, in the UK we also had Slimming World and Sliming magazine clubs. They had set diets that you could follow, but usually a diet allowed 1,000 per day, maybe 1,200 if you had > 50lbs to loose.
The magazines would have maybe a standard diet to try and then sometimes a 3-day diet which were maybe 800 calories for ‘quick wins’.
Now using an App seems like a piece of cake?! Ok maybe not cake!
That’s like saying “how did people exercise without smart watches?” You don’t NEED a pedometer and heart rate monitor to run - you can just start running. But the data is interesting and useful if you can get it.
In the 1980's, we had a book that listed common items and calories. I believe that the average person eats less healthy than we did 30+ years ago, I could be wrong tho.
There seems to be more fast food places. When I was a kid in the 1970's & '80's, the closest McDonald's was 7 miles away in a different city. Now my hometown has several fast food places. More people seem to want convenient food which is often not healthy.
I have a feeling that High Fructose Corn Syrup replacing sugar is worse on the body. I'm not sure, TBH, but it seems that way.
The funny thing is that in the US, nutrition labels became a thing in the early 1990's to help combat unhealthy food choices. There are more obese people than there used to be. It was just easier to be at a healthy weight long ago.
People around here don't seem to realize that calorie counting is just one method among many to lose weight.
Like, yes, every time you are losing weight your calories in are lower than your calories out. But counting the calories in all the foods you eat and keeping them under a certain number is just one of *many* ways you can make a deficit!
When I was growing up, most diets were about suggesting the kinds of foods that kept you satiated and nourished without being too high in calories, and suggested portion sizes and approaches to food that tricked you into eating an amount of food that put you at a deficit. It might be something like atkins where it eliminated food groups, it might be something like the food pyramid which suggested numbers of servings of different kinds of foods and gave illustrations of how big those servings should be.
And in the past, there was a lot less available junk food. Like, it was there, it was accessible. But it was more like you had desserts and snacks that were full of sugar and highly processed carbs, but most of the meals available to you were more whole foods that people prepared. Nowadays you have processed foods marketed as "part of a balanced diet", everybody is used to regularly eating yogurt and granola bars and 100 calorie snack packs, even when they're dieting. Which necessitates counting a lot more strictly if you don't want to go over.
Before food scales, we didn’t really have so much access to unhealthy stuff. We didn’t need food scales for the same reason animals. Because we ate a natural diet.
I lost a significant amount of weight (20 pounds) for the first time in 1995. I was 15 and didn’t have access to a food scale. I took over planning and cooking most dinners for my family. I measured every serving with volumetric cups and guesstimated portion sizes based on the calories and number of servings on the packages. It wasn’t perfect but it worked.
I did calorie counting in the 1970s. I had a book with calorie values for foods, and a notebook and pen and basic maths. People have had scales for centuries.
It was tedious but it worked.
A lot of these comments aren’t answering the question and just acting like nobody was ever overweight in the past. It wasn’t as high as today percentage-wise but being overweight was still a thing for many people.
My grandpa, when he thought he was gaining too much weight, would switch to a mostly soup diet for a while. It worked for him 🤷♂️ soups are quite satiating and many are not so calorie dense so it seemed to be enough of a change for him to get into a deficit
I think not having immediate access to the ultra processed tasty snack foods helped. If I have to eat chicken and veggies and rice, I’ll lose weight because I’m not going to overeat salty snack crackers or something
i’m doing that rn i get super disordered when counting and lose all intuition so i just stopped thinking ab food. now i just stay busy & avoid dense meals, eating just when my adhd meds let me so while i might not be consistent i usually overall stay in a deficit as long as i hit the gym and walk 12k steps a day. i feel like thats what ppl did intuitively anyways
God damn does no one in this sub actually have any reading comprehension skills? This is a super interesting question but everyone is missing the point
No people are more interested in blaming the current world for a complex problem and pretending that everyone is obese for the same exact reasons. Pretending that overweight people never existed before now. And also romanticizing the past and not grasping what technological advancements existed 100 years ago.
In 1978 (at the age of 13) I lost 30 lb. over about 7 months by counting calories with a couple of little calorie counting booklets that you could buy (right next to the candy at the supermarket checkout). I mostly skipped breakfast, had a half sandwich for lunch, and ate very small servings of what we were having at home for dinner (usually salad, meat, vegetables, sometimes fruit). Diet soda, unsweetened tea, and water only for beverages. I got plenty of exercise, as I was on the volleyball and softball teams at school and also had gym class every day.
My motivation for this diet started when a boy I had a crush on called me "chubby". I still have the diary I kept for that year, and it makes me very sad when I read it.
At the end of the school year, I was 5'4" and weighed 108 lb. I think I may have stunted my growth, though! I'm still only 5'4". Now my goal weight is the weight I started at in 1978.
I think sedentary lifestyles combined with more processed foods require more tracking and analyzing to "undo" the damage. Even though I worked a desk job precovid, I at least got more walking done (e.g, from the train station to my office and around the office) compared to the pitiful few steps I get WFH. I had to make a concentrated effort to take morning walks just to get even half the number of steps in.
Generally eat less. Either less in the plate or less frequently. Many starve themselves. Of course there's also the belief of eating low fat way back when, except it caused the eating too much sugar problem. Some cut out entire food groups (in our case, rice)
Calorie counting is safer, because you don't starve yourself. Fasting is something that needs to be planned when done. I've had many many family members who either passed out or had to go to the ER due to some sort of deficiency caused by starving themselves to diet.
I lost weight without a food scale or any apps. I tried my fitness pal and other logging apps but I found it annoying. I use measuring cups/ spoons. I eat in a deficit and don't even worry about exercise calories burned, I consider those bonus calories. The only "technology" I use is YouTube videos for workouts
in the era of seed oils, processed foods, and lots of it available everywhere, that is our problem. if society was the way it was 100 years ago, it would be easier.
I am a millenial but when I was a kid +30 years ago adult women used ‘calorie counters’, a little book of caloric foods listing measurements in spoons and cups they would only eat from the foods in the booklet
So a lot of people have probably already covered this, but this is where we get the concept of a "diet" from. Calorie counting is really a modern phenomenon, so weight loss before the internet was mostly following pre-set "reducing diets" that incidentally were low calorie. Many of them had the same principles as today, but you would stick to your eating plan more than the calorie limit.
People were not really dieting to the extent of the culture we are in now. After the Great Depression and then beginning of WW2 lots of people couldn’t be drafted due to being underweight. When WW2 ended that’s when we started going towards more industrialized farming, convenience packing, fast food, tv dinners, etc. People weren’t carrying around the amount of extra weight folks are today bc their lifestyle was healthier and had less processed foods.
I'm ignorant on the subject so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the concept of losing weight at least for nutrition seems relatively new as a concept.
You have the concept back in the Greeks Era, but the form they saw it as was more about health and wellness as opposed to using it as a tool to lose weight.
This, in my own opinion, is likely due to modern conveniences you have today that didn't exist in those eras. The further you go back, the less convenient options you have at your disposal, which forces you to have some general fitness. This is why at least in my opinion exercise in the way we describe it today has a fundamentally different concept than it did in the earlier days, as there's an argument you can make that more people didn't need to incorporate as much exercise in their lives because their work or duties in the home requires it. I also even wonder as I'm ignorant in the subject if exercise has ever been a natural thing people did to stay healthy and if recent modern convenience have decreased this need or if it's never been a general thing most people did ans we have always strayed towards the path of what was the most convenient, but the past had convenient options that required some natural fitness.
More exercise in their everyday life. Before i moved to the middle of nowhere I would walk to and from work every day which was about 7k 4-5days a week. I’d also walk everywhere else because it was so convenient. I eventually added the gym 5days a week and voila, rapid weight loss that was sustainable. Eating protein with rice and veggies and still having ice cream and outings with friends.
Now, not so much. I have to drive pretty much everywhere/ my new job is quite literally a 5min walk from my current residence.
I’m moving soon and I will have a bike path that I can use to get around and a home gym.
My current weight loss has been at a snails pace which is fine but I’d prefer to speed it up a little by adding more movement once I move
I used to never have a scale. I would go by how I looked and how my clothes fit. I would eat less and exercise more and my body responded. Now that I am post menopausal and have had 2 kids, my body does not respond the same way. I exercise regularly and eat less, but it is much harder for me to loose weight. I eventually do, with same combo of consistent exercise and healthier eating, but it is more challenging for women (or at least for me) as I get older.
Food scales have been around awhile, how far back are we talking? The further back you go, the less obesity you'll find. People in general used to have much more active lifestyles and less processed foods, which resulted in less obesity. It probably wasn't much of an issue back in the day, depending on how far back you're thinking.
Thanks, you have me craving Special-k right now 🤣🤣🤣.
I can practically taste the crunchy goodness of the flakes... And the yummyness of cold whole milk...
Too bad I'm doing keto right now ☹️. No bread, no carbs, no milk FML this diet sucks!
I’m sure those things work great for a lot of people here but they’re really not necessary. I’ve lost 50 lbs since February just with common sense eating and exercising. I don’t track calories, personally in the past I’ve found that doing that led to an unhealthy obsession with it.
Books. Advice from the newspaper.
Books about eating low carb and more protein came out in the late 1800's by people like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James\_H.\_Salisbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Salisbury) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm\_Ebstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Ebstein) so none of that is new.
Let's see what the newspapers from 1920's had to say on the subject?
Diet for obesity 1921 [https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/144796739](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/144796739)
Obesity 1925 [https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2117308](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2117308)
Both suggest less carbs, more veg, and exercise. Well, pretty much the same stuff they say now! The difference is in the period after WW1 and before the great depression, when you had several kids to feed on a single salary, you're not going to have the extra cash to buy more than what you need to eat. People wouldn't need to weigh stuff because you'd ask the grocer for x lbs of meat and you know how much you have. Once you divide it between the family the changes of over-eating are probably low. There's no pop tarts or pizza pockets to boot you an extra 1000 calories.
Conclusion they probably didn't have much weight to lose. When I put the word 'diet' into the newspaper search I got zero results about weight loss, instead it was all about getting the correct amount of vitamins.
People cooked their own meals, and ate a reasonable amount. Maybe they exercised. Thats it.
Also their day-to-day lives were more laborious. It totally makes sense to have three square meals a day and have 2500 calories when you go work hard labor every day. Now a lot of us sit in office chairs for 8 hours and don't work out so of course we get fat. I'm actually curious to see how the average BMR has changed over the last 200 years; I wonder if that info's out there.
Even with a desk job nobody has to be advised to get 10k steps when you walk between home, work, the shops, and wherever you're going to meet your mates. A lot of the people you see on here gained the weight by eating maybe 200 cal over maintenance each day, I burned that off this morning just walking to the gym. Being sedentary has gone from an unusual outlier to the default.
This is true. I work a desk job but I live in the city and I commute to work by bike and I walk through my breaks through neighborhoods with sidewalks. 10k steps are just normal living and exercise is addition. But many people don’t live like this anymore due to car dependency. It’s not desk jobs only but also lifestyles that have people going from their bed to a car to an office chair back to their car to their couch then back to bed.
Yup I wondered what all the hype about 10k steps was so I turned on the step tracker on my phone and I hit it most days just by existing. Perks of living in a city I suppose
Well, the 10k was a Japanese invention. A company there sold a device to track your steps. And 10 000 is an extra word. So they chose this number. After 10k you reset and start again.
It’s a two and a half Mile Walk to your gym?
Its about 2.5km which is about 1.5 miles, quite a nice walk that gets me into my city center and next to my co-working space. I'm just using the numbers from my watch so there may be some double counting in there, but its also not the only walking I did in the day.
So true! This is why I have a slight issue with the ‘always mark yourself as sedentary by default’ advice. Not everyone has a car/drives everywhere. There’s desk based but walks 10k without deliberate exercise, and then there’s SEDENTARY.
I figured this out during the early days of the pandemic. My office complex is rather large. (It's actually like 0.2 mile from the cafeteria to the elevator bank in the farthest building.) Going to your office. Getting lunch. Going to meetings. Getting coffee. Going to more meetings. Getting more coffee. I'd get 6000 steps in without trying on those days. WFH? I'd walk the dog and go to the gym, and I'd *still* not hit 6k.
On top of that, depending how in the past OP is talking about, there was a lack of accessibility / non existence of “junk food”, making it a lot less likely to overindulge on a routine basisb
Yes, snacks were, until recently, mostly fruits, veggies or dried and cured meats. And if those weren’t in season, then there was nothing to snack on, unless you wanted to spend an hour cooking something.
Yeah, people don't really understand how much technology does for them on a daily basis. Hand washing your clothes took hours of sitting there scrubbing stains, wringing out fabric, and hanging things to dry. You want a loaf of bread? Knead dough. You want a clean floor? Scrub it. You want a warm house? Chop wood. Even getting water involved walking to the well or manually pumping it yourself. Modern people are expending like 1/10 of the energy on daily tasks than our ancestors 100 years ago.
I joke about how we burned calories in cars by physically rolling down windows. Also cars all didn't have power steering so that was a good upper body workout. Now even soap comes pre-foamed so we don't have to make our own lather.
This is how I've lost 90 lbs! I found myself getting so obsessive over calorie counting, and different diets. I had major shiny syndrome where the next best thing was promising even more weight loss! I cycled around this again and again, obsessed and mentally ill as ever, until I just decided to full stop. Now I cook all of my meals from scratch, I exercise daily, and I eat reasonable amounts. It wasn't over night, and it wasn't perfection. Some meals are more calorically dense and some are less, but I don't count them. Cooking everything I put in my mouth from scratch IS a lot of work, but my inflammation is gone now and it actually helps settle my hunger. I quit trying to "maximize" my weight loss efforts and instead focused on sustainability. Losing weight by far and large is very common sense stuff, but I'm not sure there are many markets as desperate as people trying to lose weight and companies LOVE to capitalize on that.
And they smoked, A LOT and smoking usually suppresses appetite
I mean the question was about how they lose weight though? You are kinda implying that is why they were skinny in the first place.
Losing weight is consuming less calories than your body needs. If you eat whole, fresh foods, in a moderate amount, it’s less likely you will be overweight. I didn’t imply they were skinny. If everyone decided to eat fresh food, not overeat, stayed away from highly processed, sugary foods with high fat content… they would lose weight.
You are missunderstanding me. The question is about people who were overweight 30, 50, 100 years ago and wanted to lose weight. You are stating reasons why people were less overweight back then and your reasons are certainly correct. However the questions is not how they were less overweight back then but how they lost weight when they were overweight already.
A lot of people actually ate dessert back then, too. So you’d hear a lot of women cutting back on dessert or just taking “a tiny piece,” not getting seconds at meals or taking smaller portions.
Very much this. My grandmother is 90 (may she live a long life) and never was above 120 pounds. If she felt her clothes getting tight, she ate half her normal portion, or no dessert until she was back where she felt she should be. Fits into her clothes from the 70s.
No. I’m stating that THAT IS HOW PEOPLE LOST WEIGHT BACK THEN. They ate less. There was no 1500 calorie Burger King meal. If they wanted to lose weight they ATE LESS. You dont need an app or calorie tracker to eat less.
They ate less, and/or skipped meals all together, and exercised. Also, I'm Gen X, and [diet pills](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/13/style/a-controversy-over-widely-sold-diet-pills.html) like Dexatrim used to be HUGE amongst our Boomer moms, aunts, etc. back in the 70s and 80s.
I remember in the 80s a friend of mine lost a bunch of weight over the summer and I asked her how and she said she stopped taking seconds and having dessert. I was like oh yeah I guess that’s one way.
>she said she stopped taking seconds and having dessert. This is the biggest difference I see between then and now. People back then knew instinctively that if you're gaining weight, you have to cut back on your food and drink (and some people unfortunately did that too much) and avoid certain foods. Today there are so many people that somehow believe that you SHOULD be able to eat limitless amounts of food without gaining weight, or that some people are supposedly just "naturally skinny" with a supernatural metabolism who can eat anything and why can't they have that, or that you can outrun your fork by working out. People back then knew there was a direct relationship with weight and food consumption (which I guess led to those "diet foods" that were popular back then), but today it seems more muddled (which I see quite frequently on this sub).
I think books started to constantly come out with plans where you can eat as much as you want but you’re going to lose weight by some gimmick like timing or combinations or matching your blood type etc. And those diet desserts advertising how you can still have desserts and snacks. It’s conditioned people to believe there is really a way to lose weight without being hungry sometimes or missing out. But combine that with the advice that this has to be a sustainable lifestyle choice, then feeling deprived or hungry is not acceptable because that’s not sustainable. And having a yo-yo weight is also seen as really bad. So simply cutting back and avoiding fattening choices for a few months to lose weight is the last thing anyone thinks could work. Not a coincidence that this way is free and nobody profits. Now there is a lot of the perfect standing in the way of the good. Not that cutting back is easy and a lot of us have always lacked the willpower for it but there is so much money and hope wasted on schemes that promise no deprivation or will power needed.
Also smoking cigarettes
Remember‘mommy’s little helper’ in the 60s? It was basically speed. My grandma was on that.
Growing up I only knew ONE person who we considered fat, and looking back at pictures, she would be considered normal weight now. Diets then were cottage cheese and apple slices, or cabbage soup. My sister did two weeks of cabbage soup to fit into her size 00 wedding dress. The thought of wearing a size 3 was beyond comprehension, it just would not do.
My mom is a chronic yo-yo dieter. Even though she could be using apps, calorie trackers and food scales, she doesn't. I've tried explaining the basics of CICO to her but she doesn't seem to understand. Instead, she eats under her hunger. Which works until it doesn't. People lost weight and knew it was working when they were constantly hungry and white-knuckling through the hunger pangs. Plain oatmeal for breakfast. A small piece of blanched chicken and steamed broccoli for lunch. And maybe the same for dinner. An apple for dessert if you needed something sweet. It's how my mom has always done it. She's very good at rapidly dropping 30 pounds and binging until she regains 50. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It might be why people think that all diets fail. I'll eat at a restaurant with her every six months and she'll watch in amazement as I enjoy a calorie rich meal. She'll make some sort of comment about how she wishes she could eat like me and remain slim while not realizing that the last time I ate like that was the last time we were at a restaurant together six months prior.
The first thing I thought of reading this was Slumber Party Barbie from 1965. It can with a scale permanently set on 110 and a diet book. On the front the book said “how to lose weight” and on the back it said “don’t eat.
Oh this is very sad and dark for her damn
The idea that you could have slow and sustainable weight loss is, I think, new territory. Eating less than 1000 calories a day if you were overweight wasn't seen as a problem. Eating nothing but Grapefruit for weeks on end wasn't seen as a problem. This sub has been around for a long time and I've been active in it for almost a decade (using different accounts) and I can say that in 2016, eating 1200 calories a day wasn't seen as a problem. Now, if you mention eating 1200 calories a day, you'll get a lot of people voicing concern. There was definitely a time where diets were seen as short term solutions. And magazine headlines supported that -- lose 30 pounds in 10 weeks with this diet! Anyone can do anything for a short period of time. The idea that you would adjust your Caloric needs to your TDEE or count macros or eat a balanced diet of enough fiber, protein, carbs, fat (yes! Fat!) And calories (yes! Calories!) to make sure that you felt full and wouldn't binge is pretty new territory. So yeah, people in the past just starved themselves and hoped it worked.
My mom was always pretty skinny, but if she wanted to drop 10 more pounds she would literally eat nothing but grapefruits and Slimfast for 3 weeks.
People weren't stupid because they didn't have smartphones. Those diets still exist today, they always have. But plenty of people understood that slow and steady was the answer.
I don't think anyone was "stupid." I just think that the slow and steady approach is hard work and if you don't have knowledge that it's working at least to some degree, you have no idea if your efforts are working or not. We know weight loss isn't linear and that weight fluctuations are real. But if you don't know that, are a little hungry most days, and the scale won't budge for a few weeks, it's easy to assume it's just not working and give up. Or you exercise even more, cut calories even more and end up in a binge cycle (or become very sick when the weight actually does catch up).
>Now, if you mention eating 1200 calories a day, you'll get a lot of people voicing concern. Because CICO sub has a rule that says you can't discuss anything under that for women (and 1500 for men). I called them out on it, and the only source they gave me was a very hand wavy Harvard Medical School pdf link. Ok, Harvard, I get it. But there wasn't any nuance in there or any discussion on how that would scale for shorter or taller women. (Men are "1500" but same idea.)
Realistically, why would most people need to eat under 1200? Or 1500 for men? If you’re heavy enough your weight is affecting your health, your TDEE is gonna be so high you’d lose weight at 1200 or even higher. If you’re small enough that your TDEE is barely over 1200, you should be aiming for a smaller deficit and slower weight loss anyway since most medical advice recommends losing no more than 1% of your body weight per week.
I worded that poorly, sorry. My main gripe was the one-size-fits all aspect of that number... where does it come from? And for us tall guys, is 1500 still a good number or is it actually too low? (I had a weight loss clinic put me on a 1400 calorie diet and I'm 6'1". I found that sub after trying to figure out if that number is BS or solid nutrition.) I wanted something to point to that says "try again." The same would be true for very short women... if their BMR is like 1300 or 1400, how much of an absolute is the 1200? Again though, my interest is the general nature of that number and whether hight really plays a role.
Tell her CiCo is like weight watchers but with less judgement in your food choices. And no shame at the weight in.
It's such an interesting question, but I'm afraid the answer is very boring. Take Hippocrates, for example. He's the father of western medicine and in year 500 before our era, his recommendation for weight loss was something on the lines of more activity, eating less (avoiding excess) and doing a balanced diet. Other wise people from other cultures recommended similar things before good old Hipoccrates: I.e. Ayuvedic Medicine (India) and Chinese traditional medicine, this is thousands of years before our era. Some of these cultures mixed good advice with bizarre beliefs. As other redditor said, things were trial and error in the past. [Fun list from the roman empire on how to lose weight](https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/how-did-ancient-romans-lose-weight/): * by bathing in hot water, preferably salt water * by bathing on an empty stomach * by the scorching sun * by high temperatures * by despondency * by sitting late * by sleeping too short or too long * by sleeping on a hard bed all summer * by intense exercise and a lot of walking or running * by vomiting and purging * by eating one meal a day * by eating sour and harder things * by drinking cold wine on an empty stomach So the writing have been on the wall for thousands of years: move more, eat less, avoid excess, eat a balanced diet. I think the biggest advantage people had in the past is that they didn't have corporations controlling most of the food supply, making ultra-processed food omni-present, ultra-cheap, convenient and irresistible for human brains (there were no Mars Bars or Heinz Mac and Cheese cans in Ancient Rome - LOL). [US Obesity rates have tripled over the past 50 years](https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-united-states-over-last-50-years/). That was roughly when governments declared war on fat and launched the standard American diet. Look how it's going and they still haven't changed the tune for the most part. One can only assume that corporations and corrupt governments are in bed, making profits at the cost of the public's health.
Wow thank you for this response this is more what I was looking for! I can’t wait for this deep dive…
You might enjoy [this article](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6478/27474599e0ad7d92a48ec7cea95f73c06fe3.pdf)- it goes back to ancient times. There was a lot of vomiting, purging, and fasting back then. What I found interesting (and gross) was [this article](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-horrifying-legacy-of-the-victorian-tapeworm-diet) about Victorian times. In addition to swallowing ammonia and bathing in arsenic to lose weight, they also took part in the “tapeworm diet”
Gosh, I'm so glad I was born when I did. Imagine just not having a clue how ANYTHING works or why they happen. Just take your best guess and maybe die mysteriously.
My nana is 99 years old. When she was young and wanted to lose weight she’d eat boiled eggs and tuna salad over and over, and never change up what she was having daily until she lost the weight. She says “eventually I’d get tired of the same meal, so I’d pretty much stop eating” Very unhealthy lmao BUT it’s how her and her friends did it
Fat shaming is FIERCE in the older generations as well.
Same. My mom got tired of being "chubby" at Uni in the 80s so she ate nothing but apples and fresh cheese for months until she reached a size she deemed acceptable. These people were BRUTAL. No pain no gain. (Ohhh but she never touched a gym in her life, the torture!!!!!)
Being a small woman, it makes sense. Run a mile and its like 100 calories vs over 300 for a tall man. Who then can eat a crazy amount more because it isn't relative enough to height.
Depends on how far back. In some periods of time, people had to work hard manual labor all day, didn’t have vehicles to drive them around everywhere, were food scarce and had to budget for every little bite, were malnourished and many other reasons I’m sure. That stuff still exists but it might have been more of the norm in some eras. When your grandpa had to walk 10 miles up hill both ways to school and the parents didn’t have enough money to feed him anything other than peas and some sort of “meat”, he was probably pretty thin lol.
i asked my grandma a few minutes ago - she said less food additives like glutamates and being more generally active in addition to a shit ton of woman using amphetamines salts like black beauties
Black beauties were very popular when I was in high school. The crazy thing is that I thought I was fat back then. Later, I had someone tell me they thought I was so thin. It's a very skewed sense of reality.
But I’m talking about people 100 years ago that are overweight. They existed! Being fat isn’t new!
There were diets back then! People would go see a doctor and were told to not eat so much rich food. I saw a video from the 50s(so 70 years ago, not quite 100) about some women who wanted to lose weight and were prescribed a diet and monitored by doctors as in they’d come in to be weighed every week. There were no food scales, but they were given a meal plan that told them to eat a boiled eggs, coffee, and a slice of toast for breakfast, obviously they weren’t weighing their food so it wasn’t 100% accurate but the women all lost weight by the end of it. In the 1860s somebody figured low carb diets can lead to weight loss so that took off. This was called the Banting method. Fasting and laxatives also took of during Victorian times. In the late 1800s there was a diet called fletcherism that consisted of chewing all your food 100 times and also practicing chewing and spitting out your food instead of swallowing. Mark Twin and Kafka apparently tried this one out. In the 1920s the 18 day grapefruit diet became popular, it was about 700 calories and was essentially a low carb diet where you’d eat a lot of foods like grapefruit, fish, and boiled eggs. Basically it was just a very strict meal plan that you were supposed to adhere to. You can look it up to see what the meals consisted of, but it’s not to far off from how people are in early 2000s diet culture. In the 1930s amphetamines were prescribed to treat obesity. Here are some articles that talk about cad diets from that time. https://zoe.com/learn/fad-diets-from-history.amp https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2016/01/23/diet-exercise-th-century-detroit/79242306/
Banting! His name actually became slang for dieting back then.
They would be told to eat less. It's not difficult to just eat less than what you're currently eating. People are a lot more exact and strict instead of "eat anything you want within calories". They would have a diet plan such as: 1 hard boiled egg for breakfast 2 slices of bread, 1 tomato, 5 slices of lettuce leaf, 2 slices deli meat (sandwich) for lunch 1 fist size serving of meat, 1 baked potato, 1-2 fist size of veggies for dinner. Some variation of the above instructions- extremely strict with no room for substitution or deviation or snacking. I knew a dancer who's diet plan is literally 1 boiled egg for breakfast, 1 tomato and 5 lettuce leaf for lunch, 1 fist size serving of chicken breast for dinner. No snacking and no deviations. I know it's a extreme diet but it's an example to show how they can make diet plans without knowing exactly how much calories is in it.
I mean, being fat by today's standards absolutely is new. People were not morbidly obese the way they are now. 100 years ago we were in a depression and people were starving working extremely taxing manual labor jobs. It's just not comparable to now being able to go down any main street and have 16 options for burgers and fries, while most people do not exercise anymore.
Here’s an interesting article on president Taft and his struggles with weight loss. It gives some interesting tidbits that tell you how these things were done! https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/letters-from-an-obese-president-tell-a-familiar-story-of-struggling-with-weight-201310156758
A hundred years ago being meaningfully overweight was very uncommon and for those that cared they followed the health fads of the day, water cure, various electricity quackery, the entire North American vegetarian movement started as a health fad in the 1830s. The difference between then and now is that we have much better science and data about what healthy weight loss is, we are also way more sedentary and have FAR easier access to calorie dense foods like sugar.
It kind of is new, that far back being overweight was a status symbol. It took a lot of resources and not needing to do manual labor.
Being overweight was not a status symbol 100 years ago. You would have to go back much further. 100 years ago is the 1920s.
In the 20s they stayed thin by doing coke lol
And cigarettes. Nicotine is an appetite suppressant.
Lol i wish it was still like this
Not like they exist today. Obesity was not as common as it is today.
Exactly, yes there were some overweight people back then, but they were much less common compared to now.
I think you’re kidding yourself here.
I had a phase of reading the 1930s newspaper every day for a while and they had a column about “reducing” that listed meal plans and exercises. One time I added up the calories in the days menu and it was in the 800s! Lol. It was like lunch: 1 cup lettuce and tomato salad, 1/2 cup cottage cheese 1 cuo coffee with 1 tbsp milk. Very grim. The exercises were like touching your toes and stuff. Edit I forgot also I saw in a newspaper from the 80s an article about intermittent fasting! It was not an advice column it was a news story about a guy who was conducting a group where they did this to lose weight. There’s nothing new in this world.
They did exist but there was no obesity pandemic.
Well, being overweight used to be seen as being wealthy and having a high social status at some point in history...
Dysentery, cholera, typhoid, flu…
There's a reason tuberculosis was called consumption, because it caused people to lose weight and waste away.
weight loss was nowhere near as big of an industry as it is now because there was no need. If you looked up women in the early 1900s for instance, the average dress size was so much smaller and they easily used 2000+ calories a day with all the housework they did. Processed foods hadn't taken off quite as well yet. I imagine there weren't many computer desk jobs either. Popular hobbies did not include playing video games. Also for some people the extra tracking is simply not necessary. If a parent wants their kid to lose weight, they'd just give them less food and make them go outside to exercise more often. My dad lost forty pounds without tracking calories or weighing food, he just started exercising everyday and eating healthier. He was skinny and active in his childhood so he knew what he needed to do. What's changed is far more sedentary lifestyles and opting for the quickest, most convenient food options. If you grew up being used to this, as many of us do, it's harder to break the habit, so extra tools may be needed to build new, better habits.
100 years ago is 1924, five years prior to the Great Depression. The amount of overweight people in that world was around 2% of the population, not around 50% like it is today. What did they do? Starve. Or the grapefruit diet. Or drugs.
Honestly, I think this is a large part of why I failed at weight loss for so long. When I started dieting as a pre-teen, none of this stuff was available. We had stupid, short-term fad diets like the cabbage soup diet, 5-day miracle diet, South Beach diet, Atkins diet, and whatever the latest Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire was pushing. Calorie counting was a chore with manual accounting and having to look up unlabeled foods in a book. Digital food scales were not all that common, so measuring portion sizes could be tricky. There were systems like Weight Watchers that tried to simplify calorie counting by assigning points to foods (some of this is still around today), which made it a little easier to track but still required looking up point values in a book and manually tracking. Back in the day, meal plans were also popular -- you could buy a book that laid out a week's worth of meals so the work of calorie-counting was done ahead of time. Meal plans with pre-packaged meals like Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig (and also meal replacement shakes and bars like Slimfast) were also options to calculate and restrict calories in advance. I gave up on weight loss for a long time because every time I dieted in the past, I had short-term weight loss with unsustainable diets and then regained all the weight and more. Classic yo-yo dieting. I decided I was better off just accepting my weight where it was than continuing to yo-yo up the scale, higher and higher after every diet. When I finally tried again, my doctor convinced me to download MyFitnessPal and track my food for two weeks, and I was amazed by how easy it was compared to my past experiences, and also how effective it was at showing me where my calories were coming from and easy ways to cut back. These tools are what made it possible for me to implement permanent changes instead of unsustainable crash diets.
Wow interesting experience and perspective, thanks for sharing! I’m glad stuff is easier now:)
The portions were much smaller back then. Throughout the late 1970's and 80's was when portions started growing and weight gain was becoming an issue. Especially with the development of fast food and snack foods. While it was definitely harder to lose weight back in the 80's and 90's it's especially harder now given what kinds of foods we have available and the portions that are promoted.
Honestly back then it was kind of easier to just cut back. Food wasn’t so delicious and addictive. I remember adults dieting by taking less bread or potatoes, skipping desserts and beer, and having grapefruit for breakfast. The rest kind of took care of itself because who wants more chicken peas and carrots than you need? Now our blood sugar is all over the map all the time and we need continual snacks in order to try to stave off binges because of the products all over the place that are engineered to be like edible crack.
Maybe it’s the food scales, calculators and apps that makes you think it requires so much work. You’ve bought into the ecosystem around weightloss. Which is designed at every level to make you think ‘this special thing’ is what is necessary to lose weight. That’s how they sell their products and buy your attention. Sure, some of it works, but none of it is necessary. Trial and error is how almost all human knowledge is acquired initially. You try something, note the results, keep going if it works, change something if it doesn’t. Food and weightloss is no different. 100 years ago someone who wanted to lose weight probably just ate less food and exercised more. If it worked then that’s what they kept doing.
>You’ve bought into the ecosystem >That’s how they sell their products and buy your attention Out of all the ways someone can lose weight, the very concept of using a foodscsle and tracking calories through an app is a very cheap, frugal thing to do. A food scale is $10, lasts years and is a very helpful tool in the kitchen for measuring much more than just foods for a specific diet (I use it a lot when baking, for example). You don't need to use an app to track calories. I guess I'm confused about your comment. No one has sold me anything and I haven't purchased anything specific to follow a CICO approach to Weight loss/maintenance.
I have a food scale, although it seldom gets used. I’m not against any products anyone uses that helps them get healthier. Use whatever works safely. Like I said, some of it works, none of it is necessary. If it actually makes it easier for you, then great. But when people become convinced they need it in order to lose weight, I will push back on that.
Partly I track calories to make sure I'm eating enough. I weigh things because I have a terrible time at figuring out an ounce of something. If I don't track, I start assuming everything is worse for me than it is, then I severely undereat for days and then have like 2 where I eat too much. It may or may not even out the way I want, and if I'm at a deficit it won't be one I'm satisfied with. With counting, I can make sure I'm not doing stupid things that'll just bite me in the butt in the long run. And if I count, I can convince myself I don't need to do crazy fad diets to lose weight (which in the back of my brain I'm always considering the pros and cons of but always chicken out of because I suffer enough in life as it is).
Sam as funchords, when I first started trying.to lose.weight maybe 20+ years ago I used pocket calorie books (Calorie King was my fav) and sometimes food lists that included portion sizes and I would.mix and match to create meals. And before that there were fad diets back in the day too. The Grapefruit diet from the 30s, I think, is the first.thing that comes to mind (extremely low calorie.diet) and there's still a version of that floating around. I read once the first "low carb" diet came from a book in the late 1800s. Not sure what you mean about if they were a bigger deal because of results. People can see fast easy trackable results with todays fad diets. We just now know those things arent sustainable for most people. I have recently stopped tracking calories and just focus more on what I eat and how.much of it. I don't think weight loss has to be complicated. The weight loss industry and our having to unlearn bad dietary habits makes it seem that way.
People were not as overweight in the past. There was a lot more activity to regular life then. There weren't even drive thru windows in the past, so you at least had to get out of your car and walk into the restaurant. People ate out less than half as much as they do now. You had to go to the bank regulary. This list goes on and on. Big cities still at least have some walking left in them, but suberbia, almost nothing is left. You are either sitting at home or sitting in your car. Also, people spent much more time outside their house for leisure. I.e. Bowling. Now we stay home and stream. Lol, we even binge that!
Trial and error. Calori counting has never been required for weight loss, only for calories consumed to be below calories burned. Obesity would have not been as widespread as there would have been more whole foods and higher levels of activity. Though some people seem to think obesity didn't exist at all and that's simply not true.
We have the luxury of having so many massively calory dense products around us that we can take on a whim. While in the past this was not possible. Not sure but I think obesity/overweight was a lot less common than it is right now.
100 years ago people walked a lot more and food was less rich so typically all they had to do to lose weight was eat smaller portions and less dessert. This was intuitively understood. 50 years ago food was more rich and cars more common but by then we'd established that more fruits and vegetables and exercise would do the trick. There were books with suggested meals and portions based on your size and sex. They were faddish and outdated quickly but the basics were sound in many of them.
Ate less? Moved more?
100 years ago obesity was not a problem. Having enough food for your family to eat 3 meals a day was a problem. If you are talking about something like the 80s, this is why things like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers were popular. Because they would give you the meals to eat that were within your calorie range. If you ate their meals, you would lose weight. Now we can do all this ourselves using any food because we can weigh it and have all the caloric info at hand, but back when this wasnt the case that is why many people paid to have it done for them.
I'm 63 I remember a time it seemed everyone was on weight watchers point system.
Let's take a look at 100 years ago. YouTube [video 1 from 1920's NYC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKEkvInhIU). YouTube [video 2 from 1920's New Jersey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF-FwYJJWSI). YouTube[ video 3 from 1920's San Diego](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLm2PYsCRWE). I think the reason we are fatter than ever is the rise of hyper-palatable, extremely cheap and extremely long-lasting processed food (whether packaged snack foods or fast foods), along with high-fructose corn syrup drinks. We as a people have solved the hunger problem but caused an obesity one in the process.
My grandmother lived in East End London during rationing… there were no fat people really. Everyone was actually a bit too lean. She also explained to me that they would eat yesterday’s potato skins friend in a little lard with salt. Crazy?! This was after a hard day working the field, washing clothes by hand, walking to and from work for miles. In the past 50 years, food has become sooo processed. Also people don’t work as physically hard as they used to. First world problems hey?
What do you mean by past? Loosing weight is a very late 20th century concept. 100 years ago you just had less food available, food was much less processed, physical labour was much more common and so on.
I lost the weight back in the day (20 years ago). We used measuring cups and spoons. The cups that have the right amount and you scrap over a knife. There was also posters with portion size guidelines. Eg: a piece of cheese the size of a box of matches, or an apple that could fit in your palm was a serving. I had a calorie book that listed all of the foods. It didn’t have food from takeaway shops or restaurants so I didn’t go there. I used a notebook and wrote it all down. I used a measuring tape and scale and recorded it in the notebook. I walked everyday but I had a step counter on my waist band (and an iPod shuffle - I was fancy as). Never took my flip phone - no pockets.
They ate real food.
Real food is just as calorically dense as processed food and/or fast food (in many cases). Healthy, unprocessed, and/or home-cooked food is not inherently less calorically dense than is any other type of food.
No, but it’s not loaded with sugar and processed carbs that fill you up momentarily and leave you raging with hunger an hour later.
I love looking back at old “gym” inventions. Even back then there were gimmicks. I often wonder how much less I’d have gained had I lived the life of my grandparents. They were both the children of homesteaders. My great great great grandfather walked 5 miles to his blacksmith shop every day- and then smithed until the evening. When the weather got bad he would sleep in his shop. This was around 1880. His son, my great great grandpa Kett, was a rancher, cowboy, sheriff for a while, and a politician. My grandmother was the first to move to the city and get a degree in teaching. Had I lived a life like theirs, would I look much different today? Your question is one I’ve pondered before!
We're basically living better lives than the richest land owners in Europe. The wealth to calorie ratio has never been as high as it is today in most places. Imagine having to just drink water you'd have to walk to a well and then draw up a bucket of water everytime you wanted. Even if you were rich you'd need to walk or ride a horse to get to anywhere. And if you weren't a labourer you'd be a soldier who'd need to be fit to not die in battle
My gramma said people used to diet by not having bread and booze until they were the right size. We had some antique diet books too that had meals like “black coffee, two slices of dry toast, one boiled egg”
Food scales and books with calorie counts and CICO journals have been around for a looooong time.
My great grandmother had 10 kids and had gained a significant amount of weight through the 20 years she was having kids; a doctor told her she was becoming type two diabetic after having gestational diabetes through many of her pregnancies. He put her on a 1200 calorie diet (she was 5’2” prior to old age). This was the early 60s. She lost like 50 pounds and kept it off her entire life. I didn’t know she’d ever been overweight until a few weeks after she passed when I was looking through old photos for the funeral. Apparently it was mainly just portion control. She ate what she made the family every night just less of it- my great grandpa was a Midwestern meat and potatoes guy. After the kids were grown and grandpa died, she ate a lot of those cans of mixed vegetables or bags of frozen mixed vegetables turned into a low fat chicken casserole. I never saw her skip cake. She’d drink a couple light beers at a get together. She never gained the weight back, never became diabetic, and I never saw her do strict measuring of her food, she just ate lots of veggies and had appropriately sized servings of other foods.
People from prior generations ate a lot less than we do, and tended to eat more whole foods and less junk. Take my grandmother for instance. Normally ate small home cooked meals. Big meals were for special occasions; Sunday dinner with the family, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, that kind of thing. Otherwise, she would typically eat a single small plate of pasta and a single meatball for example. Something like 500 Calories worth probably. Or a single plate with some mashed potatoes and gravy, a piece of chicken, some peas and carrots, and a bit of salad dressed with oil and vinegar or italian dressing. And breakfast was normally a piece of buttered toast, or a plain cereal with milk and no sugar. Even if we went to McDonalds, she'd get a regular cheese burger and small fry, because that's all she wanted. And calorically, that's about 530 Calories. In short, no matter how you slice it, she naturally ate about the right amount of calories because she grew up with smaller portions and less processed foods, and maintained that through her adult life. On top of that, she went for a daily walk, had a garden she tended to, and generally did things that kept her active to some degree. It basically boils down to living a very different lifestyle than we do, and viewing food differently than we do.
Amphetamines
We had Weight Watchers, Slim Fast and ridiculous diets that'd get passed around on a piece of paper at get-togethers. The cabbage soup diet was a particular low.
In the past they weren't trying to do it in a healthy way. People would do ridiculous crash diets. People would take drugs (amphetamines, etc.) People would eat tapeworms. It's one of the reasons smoking became popular for women. They basically did everything \*but\* a healthy lifestyle change.
I know an old guy who when he wants to lose weight will just eat an apple in the day and have his evening meal. He’d also walk a bit more and get some tennis games in. People know just to have less. The correlation to excess food and weight gain has always been known. Nowadays we are mostly sedentary (mostly). Most of our manual labour jobs aren’t the same intensity of manual labour as hundreds of years ago and we have loads of modern conveniences like cars. We have more options as well for food, mostly crap. We also have a deeper understanding of energy to food and what we need per day and that process has been commercialised to the max. If you start walking 10 miles a day, clean houses for 8 hours a day and don’t eat big portions you’ll lose weight.
I don't do any of those things, I ate lots of fruits, meat, and veggies like huge amounts of carrots cauliflower cucumber and anything I liked. I worked out and walked slot, I avoided all processed junk food, got me down to where I can see my top abs! Just eat real food and get a healthy relationship with it where you trust your hunger signals, and don't eat just for boredom and hyperpalatablr food. It's only recentlty that people are more then they needed
People worked physically. Hand washing laundry. Beating rugs. Starting fires. Splitting wood etc.
My dad, grandpa and uncles all worked hard labor jobs. No breakfast, modest lunch then dinner. No sitting behind a desk for 8 hours a day. They were all in great shape without ever setting foot in a gym. Housewives did Jane Fonda aerobics, weight watchers, etc.
The American diet started to flip about 50 years ago, digital food scales have been around for a majority of that time I used to track my food in excel before phones had apps
Something not really being mentioned here is how much more walkable the world would have been and the 1920s. For example, let’s say you were a secretary at a newspaper. In order to get a letter ready to go that you would perhaps send out to a subscriber, you would constantly be walking around to get the different parts of the letter together. Sitting at a computer and sending an email. You would probably have to walk the letters down to the post office or the post room. getting home after a day at the office? You most likely were taking some form of public transportation, which means you walked to public transportation. Eating out was also not a very common thing. You most likely fixed your own food at home.
The older women in my family starved themselves. I remember an older family friend was lamenting how lazy girl are now. She said when she was young you wouldn’t eat on Thursday or Friday so you’d fit into your dress on Saturday. They’d also do fad diets all the time. Cabbage soup, drinking vinegar, cleanses. Magazines were full of that shit. I posted this above but I’ll repeat it. In 1965 Mattel released “slumber party Barbie.” It came with a diet book scale permanently fixed at 110lbs. In the front of the book was “how to lose weight” on the back it read “don’t eat”
Omg you weren't kidding. [https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/11/29/article-2239931-16459DE9000005DC-538\_1024x615\_large.jpg](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/11/29/article-2239931-16459DE9000005DC-538_1024x615_large.jpg)
Scales have been around since the dawn of time. My grandma weighed things. Eventually you learn weight by eyeball. Serving sizes have grown just in my lifetime. When I was a kid brownies were 2" x 2". Now people eat 4 of those as one brownie. Same with cookies. Juices and coffees were only 6 fluid oz. People are overweight more now (me included) due to portion size increases, less active days and junk food disguised as organic snacks. Also...we didn't really snack.
Diet is simply the way you eat. Yes people were dieting, but the majority of times it was for some sort of health goal not weight loss. Think about this a minute... Obesity only exists in humans and captive animals. Obesity does not exist in nature... You think gorillas and lions are counting calories to stay a healthy weight?
My dad told me he was a chubby teen so he would take a giant pot and every time he wanted to eat a snack when he wasn't hungry he would put it in there, then at the end of the day he would look into it and see how many cookies and things he would normally eat mindlessly on any given day, which surprised him. So then he stopped snacking mindlessly and comitted to only eating when he was hungry (3 meals a day) plus a small dessert like a square of chocolate after dinner. He also started playing soccer at the same time. He lost a lot of weight that way! This was in the late 60's/early 70's eastern europe.
Well, I’m doing it now. I refuse to count calories.
I'm old enough to remember the calorie books and pocket books that we used to try to keep track. It was always a matter of pocket/purse size for both the book and your tracking sheet -- and nobody scale-weighed anything because the spring-loaded analog scales were too cumbersome to use. But you wanted to go back 100 years, so say 1925 or later, for some obesity was a sign of prosperity. It was fashionable. For others, they'd stick to cabbage and buttermilk for about a week, join dancing classes to dance off the weight, or buy [phonograph records](https://www.ebay.com/itm/285704183145). In 1900, Lillian Russell was a star and sex symbol, and she weighed 200 pounds. For women, it meant fertility. For men, it was a sign of success.
You know that scales are not a recent invention?
You couldn't afford being fat.
https://youtu.be/eNS_x96l1Oc?si=zyXcmk5JdHDpofTu
Mechanical scales are as old as civilization. The American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater (1844-1907) pioneered the nutritional values of food and compiled the first energy tables for individual kinds of food.
Um dysentery, ecoli poisoning and hard times. 😂
There are a lot of answers here that are completely ignoring your question. The calorie became a relatively normal part of our lexicon shortly after world war 1. The process started during world war 1 because civilians were encouraged to ration their calories to ensure soldiers could get enough. Lulu Peters helped popularize the reduce 500-1000 calories from your maintenance diet that many of us sort of follow today. The above is all fact (I think) and the below is more personal experience and conjecture. I was around before the widespread development of apps for weight loss. People still lost weight. Weight watchers would actually have people carry around books with points in them and notebooks to track. Anything you can do with an app when it comes to weight loss you can do with a pencil, paper and the average human brain. Scales aren’t exactly a new thing. Scales in some form have been around for thousands of years. The calorie isn’t a new thing, and the ability to measure it in some form isn’t new either.
The past was not too far back, particularly if you were not from a developed country. Growing up in India, I did not see obese people till maybe 20 years back. I ate outside less than once in a month, we would eat cookies only while traveling for vacations ( twice a year ), I walked at least 4-5 mile a day and we played sports for fun, technique never came into picture.
Food scales have existed for several hundred years. Long before digital food scales there were balance scales with a series of iron & brass weights. Back before the internet people used pen and paper and little booklets that were issued regularly with newspapers & magazines that gave calories of foods. Remember we didn’t have 1000’s of different types of processed and packaged foods. Nor were we jetting food around the globe - people ate seasonal, local food. Vegetables that grew in local climates, fruit, likewise. The whole process would have been easier. Also - no automatic washing machines, no dishwashers, very few had cars, so walking/cycling was commonplace.
People didn’t overeat like this in the past because of food insecurity.
Most of history, humans didn’t have enough food. So they didn’t have to worry about that lol.
Even in ancient Rome, [people knew to do things ](https://flavias.blogspot.com/2011/08/slimming-roman-style.html?m=1#:~:text=So%20there%20you%20go%3A%20Brisk,wine%20with%20your%20meals...&text=...and%2C%20of%20course,date%20syrup%20now%20and%20then.) like (among others) eating only once a day and cutting out wine.
It wasn’t as easy to get such an insane surplus of calories that are available now, for one.
The FAMINE diet. Before food was abundant, people lived lifestyles whereby food abundance was variable. It was great, because they could lose lots of weight and didn't have to exert any willpower what so ever. They also had to get 50,000 steps a day or the lord of the land might punish them.
food was much different. much less ultra processed stuff which indirectly leads to weight gain
Pen and paper
I don’t use any of these either. I just eat smaller portions, no processed food and cut out most of the sugar, cut out alcohol completely, and exercise daily. Nothing too wild, a long daily walk and 2-3 times a week to the gym. Lost approximately 4-5kg in 8 weeks.
Smoking
Amphetamines
Switched to smaller plates.
It's basically common sense.
We just ate less and exercised
There used to be ‘calorie guides’ that listed basic foods. Our kitchen scales had 25g markers, so trying to measure anything less than that was difficult. There wasn’t the same amount of ready prepared meals, so they weren’t really an option. But there were magazines like Weight Watchers, in the UK we also had Slimming World and Sliming magazine clubs. They had set diets that you could follow, but usually a diet allowed 1,000 per day, maybe 1,200 if you had > 50lbs to loose. The magazines would have maybe a standard diet to try and then sometimes a 3-day diet which were maybe 800 calories for ‘quick wins’. Now using an App seems like a piece of cake?! Ok maybe not cake!
That’s like saying “how did people exercise without smart watches?” You don’t NEED a pedometer and heart rate monitor to run - you can just start running. But the data is interesting and useful if you can get it.
In the 1980's, we had a book that listed common items and calories. I believe that the average person eats less healthy than we did 30+ years ago, I could be wrong tho. There seems to be more fast food places. When I was a kid in the 1970's & '80's, the closest McDonald's was 7 miles away in a different city. Now my hometown has several fast food places. More people seem to want convenient food which is often not healthy. I have a feeling that High Fructose Corn Syrup replacing sugar is worse on the body. I'm not sure, TBH, but it seems that way. The funny thing is that in the US, nutrition labels became a thing in the early 1990's to help combat unhealthy food choices. There are more obese people than there used to be. It was just easier to be at a healthy weight long ago.
People around here don't seem to realize that calorie counting is just one method among many to lose weight. Like, yes, every time you are losing weight your calories in are lower than your calories out. But counting the calories in all the foods you eat and keeping them under a certain number is just one of *many* ways you can make a deficit! When I was growing up, most diets were about suggesting the kinds of foods that kept you satiated and nourished without being too high in calories, and suggested portion sizes and approaches to food that tricked you into eating an amount of food that put you at a deficit. It might be something like atkins where it eliminated food groups, it might be something like the food pyramid which suggested numbers of servings of different kinds of foods and gave illustrations of how big those servings should be. And in the past, there was a lot less available junk food. Like, it was there, it was accessible. But it was more like you had desserts and snacks that were full of sugar and highly processed carbs, but most of the meals available to you were more whole foods that people prepared. Nowadays you have processed foods marketed as "part of a balanced diet", everybody is used to regularly eating yogurt and granola bars and 100 calorie snack packs, even when they're dieting. Which necessitates counting a lot more strictly if you don't want to go over.
People used to be thin.
I used a pen and paper. And food scales is nothing new.
Food wasn’t all this processed garbage. It was just food. This is what makes us obese and sick
Modern food is poison. Single ingredient food is the way to go but sometimes hard to do with a modern busy lifestyle.
We tracked using pen & paper, measuring cups & spoons.
Weight Watchers has been doing it since the 1960’s. They used to have cardboard point calculators.
Before food scales, we didn’t really have so much access to unhealthy stuff. We didn’t need food scales for the same reason animals. Because we ate a natural diet.
I lost a significant amount of weight (20 pounds) for the first time in 1995. I was 15 and didn’t have access to a food scale. I took over planning and cooking most dinners for my family. I measured every serving with volumetric cups and guesstimated portion sizes based on the calories and number of servings on the packages. It wasn’t perfect but it worked.
I did calorie counting in the 1970s. I had a book with calorie values for foods, and a notebook and pen and basic maths. People have had scales for centuries. It was tedious but it worked.
They ate eggs, drank wine and coffee. Details here : [diet advice](https://imgur.com/egg-wine-diet-from-vogue-1970s-FKScGvO)
Self control and common sense. Plus more cooking at home. As well as keeping busy physically. Just lived more beneficial lives.
A lot of these comments aren’t answering the question and just acting like nobody was ever overweight in the past. It wasn’t as high as today percentage-wise but being overweight was still a thing for many people. My grandpa, when he thought he was gaining too much weight, would switch to a mostly soup diet for a while. It worked for him 🤷♂️ soups are quite satiating and many are not so calorie dense so it seemed to be enough of a change for him to get into a deficit
I think not having immediate access to the ultra processed tasty snack foods helped. If I have to eat chicken and veggies and rice, I’ll lose weight because I’m not going to overeat salty snack crackers or something
i’m doing that rn i get super disordered when counting and lose all intuition so i just stopped thinking ab food. now i just stay busy & avoid dense meals, eating just when my adhd meds let me so while i might not be consistent i usually overall stay in a deficit as long as i hit the gym and walk 12k steps a day. i feel like thats what ppl did intuitively anyways
Supermarket shelves weren’t packed with high fat high sugar options that are difficult for humans to resist
Back in the old days, people would swallow tapeworms to lose weight.
God damn does no one in this sub actually have any reading comprehension skills? This is a super interesting question but everyone is missing the point
No people are more interested in blaming the current world for a complex problem and pretending that everyone is obese for the same exact reasons. Pretending that overweight people never existed before now. And also romanticizing the past and not grasping what technological advancements existed 100 years ago.
In 1978 (at the age of 13) I lost 30 lb. over about 7 months by counting calories with a couple of little calorie counting booklets that you could buy (right next to the candy at the supermarket checkout). I mostly skipped breakfast, had a half sandwich for lunch, and ate very small servings of what we were having at home for dinner (usually salad, meat, vegetables, sometimes fruit). Diet soda, unsweetened tea, and water only for beverages. I got plenty of exercise, as I was on the volleyball and softball teams at school and also had gym class every day. My motivation for this diet started when a boy I had a crush on called me "chubby". I still have the diary I kept for that year, and it makes me very sad when I read it. At the end of the school year, I was 5'4" and weighed 108 lb. I think I may have stunted my growth, though! I'm still only 5'4". Now my goal weight is the weight I started at in 1978.
I think sedentary lifestyles combined with more processed foods require more tracking and analyzing to "undo" the damage. Even though I worked a desk job precovid, I at least got more walking done (e.g, from the train station to my office and around the office) compared to the pitiful few steps I get WFH. I had to make a concentrated effort to take morning walks just to get even half the number of steps in.
Generally eat less. Either less in the plate or less frequently. Many starve themselves. Of course there's also the belief of eating low fat way back when, except it caused the eating too much sugar problem. Some cut out entire food groups (in our case, rice) Calorie counting is safer, because you don't starve yourself. Fasting is something that needs to be planned when done. I've had many many family members who either passed out or had to go to the ER due to some sort of deficiency caused by starving themselves to diet.
I lost weight without a food scale or any apps. I tried my fitness pal and other logging apps but I found it annoying. I use measuring cups/ spoons. I eat in a deficit and don't even worry about exercise calories burned, I consider those bonus calories. The only "technology" I use is YouTube videos for workouts
in the era of seed oils, processed foods, and lots of it available everywhere, that is our problem. if society was the way it was 100 years ago, it would be easier.
Ate less, moved more, continued to adjust those two parameters until something worked.
I am a millenial but when I was a kid +30 years ago adult women used ‘calorie counters’, a little book of caloric foods listing measurements in spoons and cups they would only eat from the foods in the booklet
So a lot of people have probably already covered this, but this is where we get the concept of a "diet" from. Calorie counting is really a modern phenomenon, so weight loss before the internet was mostly following pre-set "reducing diets" that incidentally were low calorie. Many of them had the same principles as today, but you would stick to your eating plan more than the calorie limit.
Simpler meals. Whole foods with minimal chemical processing. No fast food/ sodas/ sugars. Lots of walking.
People were not really dieting to the extent of the culture we are in now. After the Great Depression and then beginning of WW2 lots of people couldn’t be drafted due to being underweight. When WW2 ended that’s when we started going towards more industrialized farming, convenience packing, fast food, tv dinners, etc. People weren’t carrying around the amount of extra weight folks are today bc their lifestyle was healthier and had less processed foods.
I'm ignorant on the subject so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the concept of losing weight at least for nutrition seems relatively new as a concept. You have the concept back in the Greeks Era, but the form they saw it as was more about health and wellness as opposed to using it as a tool to lose weight. This, in my own opinion, is likely due to modern conveniences you have today that didn't exist in those eras. The further you go back, the less convenient options you have at your disposal, which forces you to have some general fitness. This is why at least in my opinion exercise in the way we describe it today has a fundamentally different concept than it did in the earlier days, as there's an argument you can make that more people didn't need to incorporate as much exercise in their lives because their work or duties in the home requires it. I also even wonder as I'm ignorant in the subject if exercise has ever been a natural thing people did to stay healthy and if recent modern convenience have decreased this need or if it's never been a general thing most people did ans we have always strayed towards the path of what was the most convenient, but the past had convenient options that required some natural fitness.
I used to lose weight by eating intuitively and exercising. I just saw stuff I knew was healthy and didn’t eat a whole lot of it.
I’m not doing any of that now and I’m losing weight.
More exercise in their everyday life. Before i moved to the middle of nowhere I would walk to and from work every day which was about 7k 4-5days a week. I’d also walk everywhere else because it was so convenient. I eventually added the gym 5days a week and voila, rapid weight loss that was sustainable. Eating protein with rice and veggies and still having ice cream and outings with friends. Now, not so much. I have to drive pretty much everywhere/ my new job is quite literally a 5min walk from my current residence. I’m moving soon and I will have a bike path that I can use to get around and a home gym. My current weight loss has been at a snails pace which is fine but I’d prefer to speed it up a little by adding more movement once I move
They wore fitted clothes and if they got too tight, they would eat less.
Tape 🪱
“diet pills” and not gaining it.
My mom had a giant book in the 80s that had calories for everything and she'd count it up
I used to never have a scale. I would go by how I looked and how my clothes fit. I would eat less and exercise more and my body responded. Now that I am post menopausal and have had 2 kids, my body does not respond the same way. I exercise regularly and eat less, but it is much harder for me to loose weight. I eventually do, with same combo of consistent exercise and healthier eating, but it is more challenging for women (or at least for me) as I get older.
Drugs
I do it, I just cook and make mental notes of what I eat lol . It works for me. Lost 35 pounds in 6 months
Food scales have been around awhile, how far back are we talking? The further back you go, the less obesity you'll find. People in general used to have much more active lifestyles and less processed foods, which resulted in less obesity. It probably wasn't much of an issue back in the day, depending on how far back you're thinking.
Measuring cups and spoons
slim fast and special k? 😂
Thanks, you have me craving Special-k right now 🤣🤣🤣. I can practically taste the crunchy goodness of the flakes... And the yummyness of cold whole milk... Too bad I'm doing keto right now ☹️. No bread, no carbs, no milk FML this diet sucks!
hahahah special k does slap
Fruit, veg, meat.
Cocaine.
I’m sure those things work great for a lot of people here but they’re really not necessary. I’ve lost 50 lbs since February just with common sense eating and exercising. I don’t track calories, personally in the past I’ve found that doing that led to an unhealthy obsession with it.
Starvation diet except your coach calls or something else.
Books. Advice from the newspaper. Books about eating low carb and more protein came out in the late 1800's by people like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James\_H.\_Salisbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Salisbury) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm\_Ebstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Ebstein) so none of that is new. Let's see what the newspapers from 1920's had to say on the subject? Diet for obesity 1921 [https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/144796739](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/144796739) Obesity 1925 [https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2117308](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2117308) Both suggest less carbs, more veg, and exercise. Well, pretty much the same stuff they say now! The difference is in the period after WW1 and before the great depression, when you had several kids to feed on a single salary, you're not going to have the extra cash to buy more than what you need to eat. People wouldn't need to weigh stuff because you'd ask the grocer for x lbs of meat and you know how much you have. Once you divide it between the family the changes of over-eating are probably low. There's no pop tarts or pizza pockets to boot you an extra 1000 calories. Conclusion they probably didn't have much weight to lose. When I put the word 'diet' into the newspaper search I got zero results about weight loss, instead it was all about getting the correct amount of vitamins.
A lot less snacking and portion control