I knew the obesity problem was bad, but didn’t realize it was quite this bad.

It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

That’s not “genetics,” not in the sense that most people who say that mean it in. The story examines some possible causes.

It’s weird to me people say they feel better when they are fat. I’ve been fat and I felt like goddamn garbage. I’m not sure what they mean by “better,” exactly. Not having to endure some hunger pangs, what? All I felt was sluggish, slow, and crappy. Didn’t realize quite how bad until I got thin again and started eating better.

This article also mentions that many things groups like the Fat Acceptance people and related think they “know” aren’t really true, such as the below.

Common wisdom today tells us that we get heavier as we get older. But historically, this wasn’t true. In the past, most people got slightly leaner as they got older.

Anecdotally, all the really old people in my family when was a kid were really fucking lean. This was in the early 1980s, and many of them were in their early 80s or 90s, so they would been born around 1890-1905 or so.