Want to lose weight like a 1950’s housewife? Try these 1950’s housewife weight loss tips. No fad diets or crazy exercise programs, just solid advice that has worked for years.
In the 1950s approximately 10 percent of U.S. adults were classified as obese. Compare that to approximately 35 percent now you can see things need to change.
There are many contributing factors to the rise in obesity and we can learn a lot by going back to some of the things people did in the 1950s that kept them trim.
I collect vintage cookbooks and magazines and just a quick look at those will give you some ideas of how they stayed so much thinner those days.
Some of their methods weren’t healthy and should be avoided like Cabbage Soup Diet and the Tapeworm Diet. Also, many of the diet drugs were basically speed and are not used now for good reasons. But these were the more extreme methods and just looking at some of the normal habits people had back then can help us now.
1950’s Housewife Weight Loss Tips
Eat More Whole Foods
While processed foods were gaining popularity and things like high fructose corn syrup, chicken nuggets, Spam and Tang were already showing up in stores they weren’t as big of a part of diets as they are now. Most meals still called for food made from scratch.
Desserts were common after dinner but many housewives were still making fruit-based desserts that gained popularity in the 1940s due to sugar shortages during WWII.
Eat Meals at the Table
Mealtime wasn’t commonly TV time, instead, meals were eaten at the table as a family. It’s been shown that we eat less when we aren’t in front of the tv.
Eating at the table leads to more mindful eating and slower eating. It takes about 20 minutes for your brain to know you are full so slowing down can help you eat a lot less.
Clean Your House More
If you have seen the 1950’s cleaning schedule I posted you know that housewives in the 1950s burned more than 1,000 calories a day doing housework and other chores. Now we burn just around 560.
Upping your cleaning routine will mean a cleaner house and a thinner waist. I love any exercise that has double benefits.
Eat Smaller Portions
The blue plate in the photo above is one of my modern plates and the yellow one is a plate my great grandmother served food on. Isn’t it shocking how much bigger plates are now?
Our plates are bigger because our portions are also bigger. Just looking at the portion sizes for a fast food dinner shows how much portions are growing.
| Portion Sizes – 1950s | Portion Sizes – Now | |
| Soda | 7 oz. | 30+ oz. |
| Hamburger | 3.9 oz. | 12 oz. |
| French Fries | 2.4 oz. | 6.7 oz. |
Source: Franciscan Health
If you are eating fast food consider getting kid-sized items that are closer to what all of us should be consuming.
At home, pay attention to your portion size. Using a smaller place can also help. It can trick your mind into thinking you are eating more and helps prevent you from getting too much food.
Note: Many vintage dishes contain lead so choosing smaller modern dishes is often best.
Eat at Home
Fast food was just starting to take off and wasn’t a staple in people’s diets. Eating out was also more of a treat than we often treat it today. UberEats and delivery pizza hadn’t started yet so eating at home was just what you did.
Today we have options to help make it easier. Services like Eat At Home will make your meal plans and shopping lists, Blue Apron will deliver your ingredients and recipes to your door, and people will even do your grocery shopping for you.
With all of these new services eating at home is in a lot of ways easier. If you need time savers, consider using one or more of these services to help.
Drive Less Often
Many families only had one car in the 1950s. Women walked or rode bikes when they needed to go somewhere while their husbands had the car at work.
Before you get in your car think if you can walk or bike there instead. This isn’t an option everywhere but if it is where you are, take advantage of it.
In conclusion, eat less and do more. Diet and exercise advice is always changing but that advice stays the same. For most of us, we don’t need a crazy diet or fad exercise program, we just need to eat less and do something that causes us to move more.
One way to get started is by downloading the 1950’s cleaning schedule below. If you can manage all of that in a day you will be doing a good job moving more!
GIULIA
Some tips are perfect also for this era…I am completely agree with the entire post, thanks for sharing it!!!
Sherry Hill
So very true….I grew up in the 60’s and the portions were smaller and my parents never drove us anywhere. My friend lived 5 miles away and I walked there. I cook from scratch since it is so much healthier. Thanks for posting!
Lisa Sharp
My best friend lived down the street from me and we always walked to each other’s houses. We also often walked to where we kept our horses which was a good walk. Seems to be less and less common.
TexasMomof3
I wish my kids had friends that lived close by so they could walk to their houses like I did when I was little. I rode my bike to my best friend’s house probably daily. We live in a mostly elderly small town neighborhood now and my kids go to a private school that is 8 miles away. Most of the kids from the school commute from other cities.
Julie
Avoid high fructose corn syrup. Contrary to what commercials have said, it is not the same as sugar. The body metabolizes it differently. Obesity rates began to climb outrageously after 1980 when manufacturers began replacing sugar with HFCS. You can see for yourself on page 3 Figure 2 of a CDC report on obesity. It does not mention HFCS but that is when its use became prevalent in foods.
Lisa Sharp
I eat mostly organic and have avoided HFCS for years. 🙂
Milja
Cooking from scratch means avoiding hfcs even if you don’t specifically try to. Just like you happily miss any other unnatural ingredient.
Kim
I think one of the main reasons they gained less weight is that they didn’t wear stretchy comfort clothes or stay in their pjs all the time. Y’all know how miserable it is to be dressed up, bra, pantyhose, no stretchy fabrics, when you’ve gained a few lbs.They would have been very aware of tightening clothes!
Kristi
I’ve already lost about 5 pounds since I started cleaning like a homemaker. I love the work and I love I am doing this so my husband and I enjoy our home more. And portion size, gee whiz. The plates these days are platters.
Karyn M
I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and I remember my mom cleaning A LOT! She was always busy and always dressed beautifully. My sister and I walked or rode our bikes everywhere since mom was too busy cleaning to take us anywhere LOL.
jillian
My parents divorced in 1957 (rare then) when I was seven. My mother rode the bus to work and I had to walk to school in every kind of weather. It was a mile each way. Not so bad, but it sucked on cold snowy days. We rode our bikes every where then, too. Nice of my dad to take the car when he also had a truck. He would not get away with that now.
Miranda
Amusing fact: years ago I decided to ration the bottles of soda I’d buy every week so I that I’d end up finishing a bottle in three to five days instead of one or two days.
Then earlier this month I decided to stick with buying cans – since they’re more recyclable than plastic bottles – and using these small reusable plastic bottles we have to keep the soda in so that I could still ration my servings (half a can a day, since cans are a lot smaller than bottles). I ended up discovering that I was having around 5-7 ounces of soda a day, so I had been having ‘vintage servings’ of soda all along!
It’s been making me wonder why people need to have 12 ounces or more of soda at a time, since I’ve been finding 5-7 ounce portions satisfying enough.