Back in the early 1990's I was a member of a local computer club. I recall people discussing how much weight they'd gained in the year after purchasing their first computer.

If you look at some of those women's waists they are not that trim. Since almost every woman wore some type of girdle if in public at that time to be proper it does add thickness to the body but normally not that much.

An interesting observation, alisande, and apparently quite true.

Remember that 1933 was a Depression year. Food was scarce for many. I don't presume that people who were struggling to get by could have afforded the money for an admission ticket, nor would be among those wearing suits or ties and Sunday dresses to go to the World's Fair. But maybe.

This was during the Great Depression. Times were tough and food was scarce for many.

ETA: Elmer beat me by a couple minutes.

I was curious about Worlds Fairs being held during the 30's and the great depression. I found this article about Chicago which I thought was really interesting but there were also Worlds Fairs held in San Francisco in 1936 and New York in 1939 and don't forget the LA 1932 Olympics.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/225.html

I knew zero fat people growing up. All relatives, parents, grandparents, aunts uncles, cousins, and friends were thin. We had one neighbor who was maybe overweight but a fat person made your head turn. That was before fast food places and sedentary lifestyles. Today all my family is still thin and my close friends are but in general, facts prove we have become very large as a nation.

People walked/moved a ton more than they do now. Well, except for people like one of my dds who lives in nyc and walks constantly. Lucky girl.

As an aside, my mother was born in 1920 and had a huge sweet tooth. When she started working after high school she would buy herself a 2!-pound box of chocolates every time she was paid. And mostly ate 'em all herself. Yes, she was a tiny little thing.

My grandmother, born in 1879, was fat. She was quite short and wore a size 22 1/2 (half sizes were for short, fat people - no such thing exists today). She lived in AR and pretty much lived on homemade biscuits with either chicken or pork milk gravy, and a few green beans cooked with bacon drippings all day on the stove. And lots of pie and cakes. She didn't eat much meat and not many veggies other than scallions from her garden. She had 7 babies (one was stillborn), lived to be 89 and died of congestive heart failure. One wonders how much longer she might have lived if she'd eaten a healthier diet.

My paternal Ggrandmother was overweight....it always amazed me with all the

work she did...house, laundry, 5 kids, a huge, huge garden, canning, all her

own baking, ironing, sewing .....etc., etc........

andon and on. But....she was a wonderful cook and of course, ate her own cooking

too. :) Two of my aunts became "fat" later in life too...but their Mother had

taught them to cook, and they didn't do nearly the hard work she did. :)

Well, I think what alisande is pointing out is that, while they may not be skinny-minnies, no one in the picture is obese. Other differences from today: dressed nicely, not walking around with a turkey leg and red Solo cup, no backpacks, and...no children?

Yes I think bodies have changed, but there were larger people then also. What makes use think things looked better then, (to me) is the way people dressed. One did not wear the stuff then that is worn out in public today.

My mother was born in 1904 and ate all those things, but was always quite slim. But she was a hard worker....always busy and didn't tolerate sitting around.

On my father's side of the family, most were overweight, except his mother was very slim. However, the 4 children....my sibs and I were normal weight, although I did manage to diet myself up into a very unhealthy weight, but at the same time, I was tied down for several years taking care of my mother and 8 years taking care of Ken, but once I had some free time and quit dieting, I lost the weight. Anyway, my brothers' and sister's kids were all very overweight. My daughter isn't, but I remember my father telling me I would get fat, because it ran in the family. I am probably much more

active than any of them though, and I think that is as important as diet. For one thing, if you have a lot to do, you can't eat a crappy diet because you will feel too bad to get anything done.

(I wrote a lot to simply say, yes....activity accounts for a lot when maintaining a healthy weight.)

Off topic.....A very interesting book about the 1893 Chicago Fair and with a surprising side story is Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Growing up in a farming community most of the people were not slim. Most of the men had a stomach that protruded. There was only one woman who would be considered slim in the area and she had health problems. I think weight depended more on your area than what was acceptable. Many farmers, men and women, ate a high carbohydrate diet and lots of it.

Perhaps there are no obese people in the photo as they were not capable of all the walking required to see the events. Also, was anything handicapped accessible back then?

Elizabeth until perhaps the late 1970s unless your handicap came from an injury in war or was minor like loosing an arm or leg you either stayed home or were sent to a home that would take care of you until you died. There was no need for anything handicapped accessible because the handicapped seldom were seen in public.

I read that book, Elmer. I loved learning about Daniel Burnham.

I agree, Alisande, people have changed. Of course everyone can remember someone overweight or obese when we were kids, but not to the extent it is today. And I can tell my perceptions have changed. If I have a patient that is average height and weighs 200 pounds, I think "hey, a thin one today". That's pretty sad. And morbid obesity in children is skyrocketing. That is the saddest part. Read some of Gary Taubes books for an in-depth look at the problem.

When I think of the 1893 Chicago Fair or World's Fair: Columbian Exposition, the official name, I think of H. H. Holmes. He was called America's first serial killer. He built the World's Fair Hotel (later called "The Murder Hotel"), about 3 miles away from the Fair for out of town guests who checked in but never checked out. Quite a fascinating story, though pretty gruesome.

Exactly what I meant ..... handicapped folks could not attend and the obese could not due to the exertion.

OT - Interesting Elmer, I just bought Larson's Devil in the White City yesterday at a used book shop,

Whether people were rich or poor there was rationing The good news is there were Victory gardens in backyards and parks, My parents were married in 1936. Mom was a great steward and made delicious vegetable soups and they had limited meat, Those depression recipes lived on into my family. Sugar was rationed also. A good thing. They played tennis, rode bikes and had nightly afterdinner walks and so it went. Great looking health family for us with good habits.

My DM and a gal friend came to the World's Fair in Chicago by train from Providence, RI. Having seen the momentum and industry here was one of the reasons she later agreed to marry my father and make a move from Little Old Rhode Island to The City By The Lake. (She told me she missed the hills of New England so much that she'd drive over the railroad embankments for a 'thrill'.) I have the little trinket bracelet with her initials that she made at DIY coin machine at the fair. It has the fair's logo on the clasp.

caflowerluver, that's precisely the side story that Larson tells about, interspersed with talking about the exposition itself.

Larson seems to have an MO in some of his books, that follows that pattern of "Let's talk about this normal story you may have heard of or if not, may be interested in, and in addition, here's another related thing going on at the same time that was less normal that you likely know nothing about.

His books "In the Garden of Beasts" and "Thunderstruck" have that same style. I enjoyed all three.

Elmer - I first heard about Holmes in 1974 when I moved there. It was from a native Chicagoan whose family had lived there during that time. I will have to check out the books.

In the 1940s, people in farm communities walked more miles than today. One high wear article of clothing was shoes. It was not unusual to wear out two sets of heels before discarding a pair of shoes. For grades one through eight, my sister and I walked 2 miles to school, five days a week. That was good exercise because two miles was walked without stopping. We did not run, but it was not a leisurely pace either since we viewed it as a necessary chore that was best dispensed with as soon as practical. On cold days, there was an urgency to get out of the cold.

At school, most games played at recess and noon involved running.

Typically, people in my neighborhood went to town one day a week for shopping and another trip to church. The car was parked for the reminder of the week. If you visited a neighbor, you walked.

Household chores were physical.

Yet with all this available activity, there were a few individuals who were overweight. You would not see those people roaming fair-grounds. They were too overweight and maybe too week, or hurt too much to roam any distance, and therefore there would not be many of these people in photos roaming a large venue. They were very conscious of their weight and/or malady and tended to shun crowds.

Exactly. Starting when I was six years old I walked a mile to school, back at noon and after school totaling almost four miles every day. Plus recesses. There were no fast food places and my mother wouldn't have used them if there were. After school, we played outside and in the summer didn't come in till dark. There was not even a plump kid in our group.

Nutrition Action Letter had an article where they compared food consumption today vs the 70s and found we eat about 500 calories more per day now which would translate into 50 more pounds.

And of course, back then people's bodies (and the entire environment) were not filled with microscopic bits of plastic. We have absolutely no idea what that is doing to our metabolism. But we do know that much of that plastic contains endocrine disruptors (#3 has phthalates, #6 styrene, #7 bisphenols). None of this is good.

There are a lot of things that are making us fat. Think about how different the available foods were back then and what you ate compared to today. Some is from just eating more food and moving less...there's that. Then the sort of foods...fast food abounds and convenience foods abound! Then there is not food but drinks...no one drank liters of soda back then. Just think of all the sugar or HFCS that people are consuming by drinking commercially created drinks rather than drinking water. At our house, we had water and tea and that's about it. Sodas were a special treat.

I was born in the 60s and there were very few people that were fat that I knew. Even the "fat" people weren't really fat, I go back and look at old photos and think "they weren't really even fat, maybe just a little overweight".

There is also the invention of the microwave, this makes eating convenience foods much faster and simpler. I can remember as a kid, we had to heat things us in the toaster oven which took a long time.

Most moms stayed home and cooked the meals...we didn't run to McDonald's to eat after we got home. In fact, we didn't even have a fast food restaurant until I was a teen. Convenience foods at our house consisted of canned vegetables and frozen vegetables. Mom didn't fix us frozen pizzas for a meal...that would have been awful! She fixed us well rounded meals with lots of vegetables. For snacks, I can remember eating grapes and lettuce leaves. HA!

Bottom line is eating and drinking too much and unhealthy stuff and moving too little.

I enjoyed seeing the photo. The dress of the people verses the "nude statue". :0) The people so prim & properly covered up....the statue....no clothing because 'it's' art....how our views of what's acceptable have changed is what strikes me.

Weight back then: My mother was chunky. My sister obese. My brother was about 30lbs over weight as was my father....and I was a little skinny, under weight kid.

"As an aside, my mother was born in 1920 and had a huge sweet tooth. When she started working after high school she would buy herself a 2!-pound box of chocolates every time she was paid. And mostly ate 'em all herself."

LOL, living the dream! I always thought when I was a kid that with my first paycheck I would spend it all on candy! That didn't happen, I had college classes to pay for and car payments, and payments for braces my parents could never afford. But I did buy one bag of candy. We were all thin growing up. There weren't snacks available, my mother always said if you don't want a piece of bread and butter you're not hungry. It was that wonder bread so not much nutrition in that.

Mine sure did! I got sick gained 70 lb took off 50 of it. The last few pounds are very stubborn. I still consider a win as it's been 12 years. The secret for me at least with my condition is I have to keep moving and very seldom sit around. I've always had a good no refined carbs or refined sugar and good-fat balanced diet so that has never been my problem. I haven't changed my portion size at all.

Mother was normal weight until she got sick with heart problems. Then she gained about a hundred extra pounds and couldn't take it off. They found out later it was because of the medication.

Father was always skinny from birth to death.

Oldest sister and second youngest sister are obese.

Oldest sister has tried for years with weight watchers and many other things. I feel badly for her that nothing was successful. She has a wonderful life though and does not worry about her weight.

Second youngest sister has too many disabilities to effectively lose the weight although she has dropped 20 lbs since she started her walking program with other disabled people.

It is a very complicated thing. They even found a virus which contributes to people's excess weight.