How did people get overweight during the Great Depression?

By eating filler. Like bread instead of meat.

There are many different reasons. People aren’t all fat for the same reason, believe it or not.

Not everyone was poor during the Depression.

Many people were “cash poor”, meaning they didn’t have much money, but they lived on farms and had plenty to eat. My maternal grandmother wasn’t fat, but she came from a family like this. They had no money, but PLENTY of food. MANY more families lived on farms than do today. Not everyone lived through a dustbowl, either.

If they were fat before they got poor, they will likely stay fat. If you drastically drop your calorie count, your metabolism will slow down. Especially since women of “a certain age” during the depression didn’t do a lot of physical labor.

If they had metabolic problems, they’d be fat regardless of their diet.

There are probably plenty more reasons.

I once had depression.
I once heard a theory that during depression the parts of your body just stop working one by one. Maybe that’s why?
And during depression only very delicious food can brings appetite so. For instance, I just order relatively expensive take-out everyday.
Besides, sometimes eating disorder comes along. Some people eat a lot. Like a LOT.

@wsxwh111

Not quite what the TC’s talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

Well, the Great Depression didn’t hit everyone. Some folks still had more than enough, so they continued to eat. And, if they were rich enough, they had folks to do all the physical labor for them (see below.)

All in all, though, in the 20’s, 30’s people were just far more physically active than we are today. They climbed stairs where we take elevators. A great many walked, while we drive cars. They just worked the calories off.

There must have been many kinds of high caloric and otherwise unhealthy food available even to the poorest people and those out of work who did little exercise.
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Research the part. If the woman is from any of the situations mentioned above, you can use that.
Good luck with your audition!

@canidmajor Oh I have researched the part extremely thoroughly. In real life she was a skinny thing. Not sure that matters in community theater though. The show is “Bonnie and Clyde”. I want to play Clyde’s mom. It’s a really great part. Auditions in a week. Thank you so much for the good wishes.

Actually, if you have a steady roof over year head and you can cook – as most of the women of that era could – eating well doesn’t have to be a problem. Starch, in the form of bread, pasta and potatoes, is cheap, easy to prepare and filling. My great grandmother raised 8 kids (most of them through the Depression and WW II) will little support from her husband and there was never a want for food. There was no waste and they ate whatever critter came their way, but there was no want.
I would think that in about any place the inner cities, food would have been one of the easiest things to come by. In rural areas women would have just continued to barter eggs and butter to the local store in return for credit against the other staples they needed.

As @keobooks said, many people lived on farms. My grandmother was a heavy woman. I look at pictures of her from the time my dad was born in 1920 on and she was always heavy. They had a farm and a grocery store during the depression so they weren’t hit as hard. They also had 13 kids that did most of the farm work as soon as they were big enough to help.
When we went over on Sundays and had dinner, there was always 3 kinds of meat, 2 kinds of potatoes, bread, veggies and everything that was friable was fried in lard. I’m sure this was the way they always ate.

They ate lots of potatoes and sat around wondering what the hell was going on and when the hell would it all end?

@ibstubro Good point. I know a lot of people did not have steady roofs over their heads though :(

Eating a lot and eating healthy can be two different things.

Well some areas on the country were hit worse than others. And outside of the Dust Bowl farming was still going on fairly productively. It’s just that the bottom had fallen out of the agricultural market. So while farms were still producing, they just couldn’t sell what they did produce*. That still left them personally with plenty to eat however.

(Of course the tragedy there was that with no one buying the product of those farms that meant that it wasn’t getting out. Huge stockpiles of unsold grain were just just sitting in mounds to rot away, while a nation of people who didn’t farm, and who were out of work, who could have used that food were left to starve along with their families.)

@Darth_Algar Is that what could happen in Greece?

Unlikely. The world is a much different place than it was in the 1920s – 30s and people now understand the potential consequences of letting nations plummet to total or near total financial collapse. The Great Depression in the US kicked off a worldwide depression. Meanwhile, in Germany, not directly caused by, but probably exacerbated by the Depression, the German economy had come to such ruin German money had more worth as kindling than it did as currency. This situation led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party and kicked off the biggest war the world has ever seen.

@Darth_Algar Thank you I have a good laugh about myself

But, @talljasperman, it has been reported that Greece’s economy is in worse shape than the US economy was during the Depression. Scarey stuff. Greece cannot be allowed to fall from the EU – for everyone’s sake. Putin has already been sniffing around Greece, looking for a toehold.

Greece not accepting austerity was not an option, obviously.

My father said they ate pretty good during the depression, owing to my Great Uncle having a tobacco/truck farm. My Grandfather worked as an auto mechanic at the time and they would spend their summers at the farm working. My father quit school to work for Western Union to help bring in extra money to support the family. He didn’t graduate from High School until after his first tour in the Army. Most people had gardens and kept chickens or something in their yards where Dad lived. (Lexington, Ky). He didn’t talk about it much other than in very general terms like that. My thinking is that the human body has a mechanism to store fat when food is scarce. Anything in excess of what it needs it stores for when food is not available. People who skip meals or have an irregular food supply may have a tendency to put on a little fat.

The other extreme: For many American dynastic families, parties helped to escape the reality on the street – and the grander the better.

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That’s pretty pathetic, @ibstubro.