Back to the 1970s?

On last night's Tonight, a programme about a government plan to bribe overweight people in the UK to lose weight, it was stated that in Britain, our caloric intake has actually declined since the 1970s. Yet as we all know, British people in the 70s were much thinner than they are today. The collective weight gain, then, is more because of the lack of an active lifestyle than because of what or how much we are eating.

If this is true, it's extraordinary that so many people are spending their lives engaged in dietary battles, when all they need to do is become more active. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that if faced with a choice between dieting and exercising, most of us would go for exercising.

It's curious, too, how the way we exercise today makes our bodies bigger and stronger rather than the lithe, slender sizes of women in the 70s and before.

My mother recently recalled how in the 1950s, when she was a teenager, women simply did not 'work out' as we do today. The odd woman with muscles, who did a lot of sports, was considered rather freakish. Presumably, though, women were still far more active than today because of walking everywhere, not watching TV for hours most evenings, and not sitting all day at computers. Children of the 70s, like me, ran around and played outside. Today, it seems, they are all indoors, playing computer games and watching DVDs.

Today, we have segmented exercise from the rest of our lives. Like so many others, I work at a computer all day, then go to the gym for an hour a few evenings per week. Many of the most popular classes at my gym involve weight lifting combined with aerobics - there's Body Pump, Circuits, Boxercise, Total Body Conditioning. Or we use the machines - running on the treadmill, rowing, skiing, then lifting weights - we are told that to build muscle is good because it burns fat and raises the metabolism. Women today are muscular - the bulging biceps these classes build are considered sexy, a sign of being fit and toned.

And yet we eat less than in the 70s. In a way, this isn't so surprising when you compare the roast meat and two veg at lunchtimes, teatimes and elevenses and high teas and trifles and creamy sauces we enjoyed in the 70s with the ready meals of today. Although ready meals are typically high in calories and fat compared to homemade food, they are not nutritious or filling and the calories per portion size are usually around 4-500, which is quite a small meal. So there you have it - we are guiltily consuming unsatisfying diet ready meals with quite low calorie counts, doing our workouts, and developing big, muscular bodies, bigger than women's bodies have ever been in this country before. The solution then, the way to get back the pre-1980s bodies we all prefer, is perhaps to sit less, walk more, put the weights down, and eat home-cooked, nourishing meals.