the ‘obesity epidemic’ in america is probably due to a combo of our grandparents living through the great depression and our parents being teens and young adults during the days of twiggy and heroin chic and the rise of diet culture.
combine that with the fact that gen x was the last generation allowed to play outside, pretty much, and the fact that everybody nowdays is working service jobs that exhaust them without working their muscles, and there is basically no way on earth you’re going to get a fit and healthy population without changing the basic structure of our society.
don’t fall for the hype. don’t focus on weight. it’s actually far more dangerous to be underweight than overweight. even with what is clinically defined as ‘morbid obesity’ it’s possible to be healthy as a horse, if your bone structure and metabolism are set up for it and you’ve got lots of muscle to support it.
on top of that, the charts for ideal weight are at least a generation out of date. they were compiled based on a population that didn’t regularly get enough dairy and fresh produce, at a time when girls didn’t do athletics in school. young women in the 1960′s were measurably smaller than young women today. their bones were thinner, they had less muscle mass, their shoulders were more sloped, they had a smaller lung capacity – society discouraged them from being physically active past the age of ten or twelve, and they finished their physical development in a sedentary setting.
boys were plenty active, but just like the girls, they were eating just about nothing but red meat and starch and some mushy greens with the vitamins boiled out. the thing where the poor get fat because sugar and fat are cheap wasn’t really happening yet, especially in rural areas; a farm kid’s diet was beef and wheat in the north, pork and corn in the south. “eat your vegetables” was such a hard sell because everything else was expensive and bland and overcooked. you’ve seen the godawful cookbook excerpts from that time. mushy green beans and fried spam on a bed of mashed potatoes, seasoned with nothing but a pinch of white pepper.
sorry, that was kind of a tangent. i guess my point is, even the people who ate well by the standards of the time were malnourished compared to the standard of today. your lunch of a matcha cucumber smoothie and a cobb salad with one ounce of ham, one ounce of turkey, and 15 kinds of fresh vegetable, would give them the explosive shits because they’ve never had that much fiber in one place before. there’s more vitamins and antioxidants in your black bean fajita dinner than they saw in a week.
so first of all, the idea of trying to be the same size and shape they were is absurd.
and second, if malnourishment in one generation primes the next two for protective fat retention, the combination of that and the incredible wealth of nutrition we have available to us today is obviously going to make us HYUGE.
instead of fighting it, we should embrace it. we could all be HUMAN BOULDERS OF MIGHT.
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