Portion sizes when you were young

Pollycat

I'm going back over 50 years to when I was 11 or 12.
My Grandad had an allotment so we ate lots of vegetables.
A reasonable amount of meat too.
I used to have 2 of the small Yorkshire puddings at Sunday lunch, Dad had 4.
We always had a proper English breakfast on Sunday - eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, black pudding, oatcakes, fried bread.

I think our portion sizes were as big as ours now - but we didn't eat any rubbish.
Fish & chip takeaway on Saturday lunch, that's all.

I had school dinners and ate a lot of potatoes, meat & veg but passed on the puddings.

When I went to grammar school after the 11+, I was 4 foot tall and weighed 4 stone.
Not skinny, just very active and fit.

PenguinOfDeath

My portion sizes as a child were way too big, of course I only realised that as an adult...thanks parents!

No wonder the 'puppy fat' stage lasted a long time for me, looking back I ate bigger portions then than I do now, but it was normal, so I thats OK then...

CRANKY40

It's not just the portion sizes...it's the meals too. I was saying this to my sister the other week. Years ago, my uncle would come in from work and my gran would have given him beans on toast as a meal. My dads mum weighed 7 stone when she married - her evening meal was bread and butter or a cream cake. These days a meal is not a meal unless it's artfully prepared cuisine from an exotic cook book or meat and potatoes with 4 veg, lol. Well you know what I mean...... It's the availability of things that's the problem as well as portion sizes?

culpepper

I think plates are bigger these days. We have one or two from the early 80s and they are still dinner plates but the ones for sale now are bigger. It tricks your eyes into seeing a less full meal .

missyrichards

Portion sizes were probably a lot smaller back when I was younger. Some of my friends are in the US and I'm always surprised at how large the portions are when they post photos of their restaurant food online.

I think people and children used to do a lot more physical exercise. I used to play out after school or just run about in the back garden when I was a child but children stay inside a lot more now.

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

I took my measurements back when I was normal size - so I know I'm supposed to be 36-26-36 (ie because that's what I was).

I used to have almost those measurements as a teenager except my waist was 24, I'm very far from it now.:eek::D

moneyistooshorttomention

pelirocco wrote: »

I was a very poor eater , but you had you. 3 meals a day and that was It, and we only had water to drink anything else was a very rare treat.....and you were never allowed to eat in the street

I was born in the 60s food was very very expensive ( people say it's expensive now. But it's still very cheap as a %of pay compared to back then )

I tend to get a bit bemused by the idea of snacks in between meals. I will have "a little something extra" occasionally in between meals IF I feel I really must (ie feeling pretty darn hungry) - but try not to if I can help it.

I'm early 60s agegroup - and do recall having bottles of orange squash available to flavour water. Otherwise it was builders tea or instant coffee.

Re food being expensive back when....and I did have a budget cookbook from the 1970s until recently. That cookbook had the ingredients costed out and I recall being surprised (only about a couple of years ago) that a lot of the ingredients seemed to be a fairly similar price all those years of inflation later. Daylight dawned that food must be much cheaper in real terms than it used to be (presumably partly down to the supermarkets clobbering suppliers to charge much less than a realistic amount to supply them?? for instance).

Butterfly_Brain

We were brought up in a meat and two veg sort of family, my Mum never did anything like curry or stir fries, bless her.
We had a lot of pies such as mince and potato, shepherds pie, corned beef and potato, cheese and onion, and steak and kidney.

We only had cakes or biscuits at Sunday tea time
The only take-aways were fish and chip shops, which was a very rare treat and it was all cooked in big containers of lard :eek:

I agree that plate sizes were a lot smaller than we have today

Sweets were a once a week treat so we eked them out to last as long as we could. The main drinks were lemon squash or orange squash Smiths crisps with a little blue bag of salt, or chipmunk crisps. We never had fizzy drinks unless we went to the pub with Mum and Dad and you got a glass bottle of coke and a bag of crisps and ran about the beer garden.

We had stodgy school dinners served up by dinner ladies who would be great Sergeant Majors who only had to glance at you with a steely eye to shut you up, and woe betide if you left anything on your plate :eek:

We went swimming three times a week and played out for hours in London until we moved when I was eleven. But then we had green fields and a farm closeby where we went an helped and got fruit and veg as payment.
During school holidays we went out on our bikes with a picnic and explored the whole area and didn't get home until it was just getting dark, in fact we never stopped moving :rotfl::rotfl:.

We were all slim in those days

Happy days

You rarely saw someone who was really big, yes we saw overweight people, but not the sizes they are today.

Farway

GreyQueen wrote: »

Yeah, I can remember a M@rs bar was an occasional treat, to be shared between brother and me. Parents had the wit to let one child cut it in half and the other choose which half to have. You are scrupulously fair when doing cutting in those circmstances,

My young years were during wartime rationing until 1950s, so no choice on portion size

I used the same idea on cutting in half once I had children, one cuts, the other chooses, amazing how accurate a child can be given that choice

[Deleted User]

4 oz of meat off the bone was the maximum recommended portion size and we rarely had anything except the odd meat pie from the butcher that was ready made, my mother cooked from scratch and the only take away available was fish and chips which was not often had and a real treat when we did get it. The portion though was so much smaller than we get now, particularly the amount of chips that seems to be the small portion these days.

I think we live a very different life these days to what we had when I was a child in the 1950s. We didn't have central heating or double glazing and with only a fire in the living room the house was much much colder so we used more calories just keeping warm. We didn't have a car so walking was the norm, I certainly walked 2 miles to get to junior school and back in all weathers. We didn't have a TV so we played outside in the garden or sometmes in the road as there was only 1 car owner in the whole road. We were very much more active when we were small. We also had to our share of the household chores including some of the more strenuous ones like turning the handle on the mangle and were often expected to run errands for Mum.

Typical days food was Porridge for breakfast, egg on toast (only 1 slice) for lunch or school dinner, and Meat and two veg with gravy for our evening meal. Puddings were only on Sundays and we only had water or orange squash which I always hated to drink. Cups of tea were served with every meal and if you were still hungry at the end of a meal you could either have bread and butter or an apple but not both. A different world!

Sally_A

Agree with MrsLurcherwalker..we were taught in the 1970's to allow 100g meat per person. In those days, you bought meat by weight, now you buy it by packet size.

Yesterday we scoffed a 500g pack of 3 chicken fillets in a casserole, truthfully 2 fillets should have sufficed.

Similary with bacon, it used to be 2 rashers each, now with the 3 of us, an 8 or 12 pack just gets eaten, or possibly a couple of rashers saved for sandwiches next day.