Being fat before the 21st Century


I was talking to a good friend of mine a few years ago about health, fitness, and weight loss, and I finally got fed up with his bragging. He, of course, had no idea what I was being defensive about, but he was talking about how robustly healthy he had always been, even slightly chubby as a kid, and overweight by his thirties. This conversation happened in the 21st Century, and he's younger than me, and really has never had much interest in history, so ya gotta forgive him. He just didn't know!

Being underweight, or skinny, didn't really become associated with health until fairly recently. Before the 21st Century, people who were fat were described as "pleasingly plump". Emil Ganz, in the photo at the top of this post, sitting in his office in 1915 at the First National Bank of Arizona in Phoenix, would not have been described as fat, just prosperous-looking (and he was prosperous!) and healthy. Healthy babies, like puppies, were fat. The only people before the advent of people like Twiggy and Engelbert Humperdinck (you can Google them if you want to see them) who were skinny were people who were ill, or wasting away. Thinness was associated with disease, cheeks were not sunken, they were rounded, and rosey.

Speaking for myself, I was such a sickly kid that it's a wonder that I'm still here. I caught everything that was going around, would get an upset stomach from eating any type of food that I wasn't used to, the list went on and on. I was so skinny and gaunt that by my late twenties I put myself on a "crash weight gain" program, which wasn't easy. I would look around at people who had no trouble digesting who could be strong and robust on the most awful junk food. These people could grab a bag of snacks from a vending machine and be just fine.

If you're the kind of person who is robustly healthy, digests well, and never gives it a thought, all I can say is that you must have superior genetics. These are often called "the thrifty gene", and it's why some populations survived in harsh conditions, and some failed. I sometime wonder how my ancestors could have survived long enough to begat me, but here I am. In a crisis my skinny little young body wouldn't have lasted very long, but I was lucky enough to live in the days of Wonder Bread, and Snickers bars.

Thank you for being fat, and thank you for not bragging about it!
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