Being fat in old-time Phoenix


Like breaking a leg, or shaving your head, I think that everyone should be fat at least one time in their life. And by fat, I don't mean "pleasingly plump", I mean being so fat that the other kids would call you a "water rat" (which rhymes with fat).

Speaking for myself, I got pretty fat in my mid-forties, which put me in the category of "obese" in the height-weight charts, but living in 21st Century America, no one really noticed (except my doctor, who would raise an eyebrow every time I saw him).

And of course now I'm thinking about what would qualify you as "fat" in old-time Phoenix, when it's obvious that most people were what we would now consider thin. Let's time-travel back to 1905.

No, I'm not going to do any "fat shaming" here, so if you're looking for a fat person in the pic up there, don't bother. Maybe you'll find one, but I just picked out that pic from my collection as a typical group of people in Phoenix.

I watched a documentary recently that theorized about why people were so much thinner "back in the day", and it's got me thinking. Oddly enough, one of the reasons, according to the documentary, was tobacco use. Tobacco is an appetite suppressant, and besides a lot of people eat just for something to do. And if you look at that pic up there, I guarantee that the vast majority of people there used tobacco in some form. Maybe not the ladies, or the dog, the but the rest of them did. And I'm old enough to remember ads in the 1970s that sold women cigarettes by telling them that it would keep them "slim and light".

There's also better medical attention nowadays. Speaking for myself, I was a sickly kid, always coming down with something, and I'd imagine that a lot of people had their appetite suppressed in old-time Phoenix for the same reason - they got sick a lot. It's hard to put on weight with a stomach disorder!

Times have changed so much since those days that if I posted a photo of a fat man, you'd just see someone who might be at risk for a heart attack. In 1905 a fat man would have been the picture of prosperity, and robust health.

 Image at the top of this post: Looking west on Washington towards 1st Street in 1905, Phoenix, Arizona.

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