[dsc]

“When I tell people that I walk 7-10 miles a day”

Walking did not suffice to keep weight off, as I mentioned in my note above.

“what we call “heroic measures” today, with respect to exercise, would have been considered leisure in previous generations.”

I think perhaps many people have an exaggerated picture of the amount of exercise urban people got in the fifties and sixties.

Adults did not run. Adults did not ride bicycles. Adults did not walk extreme distances, except in extreme need. Adults did not go to the gym.

Adults drove their automobiles. It was a symbol of adulthood. If you’d told the average working man that he should ride a bicyle to work, he’d have thought you were crazy.

And we weren’t fat.

[SamAdams76]

I'm not referring to the 1950s and 1960s - those times are not all that different from our own. I was referring to farm life in the 1930s and 1940s and more importantly for the thousands of years before that when we did not have supermarkets, motor transport and economy of scale with respect to food processing.