In this thread, I am only considering beauty standards concerning obesity.

I am asking because I think that there is truth to both sides of the story. Depending on how you look at it, beauty standards are too high and too low at the same time.

I read a fitness article once where the author talked about how (basically) everybody had a good/skinny physique in the 50s in the USA without intentionally trying (just because cooking was a thing back then and junkfood wasn't) and he showed a black and white picture of people at a pool to show how it (allegedly) was back then.

Well, my first thought was: "You are talking about Germany in the 80s and 90s."

I have seen and can remember the times when almost everybody was skinny. What you would call "chubby" now would have been seen as "really really fat" back then. Most guys didn't have sixpacks, but flat stomachs. I can remember after a game of basketball at school, in the locker room, there was one skinny guy who had a slight patch of fat in the belly region and we all thought: "wtf is wrong with him?" One of the guys was a Judoka and very sportive, but he was chubby. And that basically made him an outcast.

This has changed a lot.

One of my classmates back in the 90s visited the USA and when she came back, she said: "It's strange. There are almost no average people there. They are either totally athletic or really overweight. But only a few people are in-between."

About a decade later I saw the same happening in Germany, too.

Suddenly we have young people who look much better than anybody looked back then because they kill themselves in the gym and know about proper nutrition. On the other hand we have a lot more overweight people.

There really isn't a middle class anymore. Especially with women. I am not saying that men are better or anything, but because of their metabolism and the unfairness that men can usually have a bit more of excessive fat without losing too much attractiveness, the average, non-working out, non dieting man looks better than the average non-working out, non-dieting woman.

So, what I am trying to say is that all the discussions about fat-shaming and unrealistic beauty standards will sound completely different to you depending on whether you have lived in times before the crisis.

When I hear 20somethings say that "it's just bodytype" and should be considered normal when somebody is chubby or overweight, I can't agree (most of the times), simply because I have lived at a time when people of all body types weren't really overweight.

When I hear people say that beauty standards are too high when they are thinking of gym rats and "looking good is my purpose in life"- people, I completely agree.

So: Did some of you live in the golden times, too? And did this affect how you feel about discussions about unrealistic expectations, too?

And if you haven't lived in ancient times and haven't seen how things were before the cisis: Do you belief that there really is an obesity crisis or do you think that "almost nobody was overweight back in the days" is an urban myth?