Everyday Systems

This weekend I was talking to my Mom about no S. Then I was thinking and remembering Great Grandma and Grandpa who were very very thin and ate 3 meals a day, rarely had seconds, napped daily and enjoyed guilt-free deserts once on a while that they appreciated! Sound familiar? They also lived well into their 90s. By the way, the 4 generations of women since gradually went away from that and we've slowly been getting bigger! I need to stop it for my daughters' sake!!! Do you guys remember your ancestor's eating habits?

As Reinhard mentioned recently, you don't even have to go back that many years to see there were very different snacking and sweeting habits a while back.
As far as I recall, when I was a kid, which was the mid seventies, nobody *ever* had sodas unless it was a special occasion like a birthday party, and same thing for candy.
That was very occasional.
Those aren't actually my personal problems, interestingly enough ( I guess those early habits did stick, as candy and soda normally don't call to me during the week it's usually actual food that does..) but unfortunately most of the kids in the last ten or fifteen years have grown up with soda and snack machines *everywhere*, and it's "normal" to have it whenever they like.

I was a kid in the 50s and my parents pretty much grazed all day (and they were overweight). I only met one set of grandparents, but they didn't eat like that.

I remember sodas, chips, snack cakes and so on being readily available, too. I recall visiting friends in Chicago who were older than my parents, and there was always soda available there -- it was the man's drink of choice. I remember my best friend's family always had Diet Rite Soda to drink.

From my point of view, one needs to go back at least 50 years, probably more. The one thing I'll have to say is that junk food was of a better quality then -- and it tasted better, too!

I, too, was a kid in the 50's, but my experience was quite different from Wosnes. We never had what my mother called "junk" in the house, e.g. soda, potato chips, candy bars, etc. I remember going to a friend's house and being just astounded that soda and chips were an approved before-meal snack -- if we needed anything beyond our three squares, we had carrots and celery.

(You might think that this upbringing would have turned me into a sensible eater, but alas! I was 20 years old when I realized that I could actually walk into a McDonald's and order fries, or walk into a supermarket and buy a bag of chips for myself. And I've swung back and forth between Big Macs and carrots-and-celery, and weight gain and loss, ever since).

No-S has been a big help in smoothing out the highs and lows for me. Being able to have treats (in moderation, of course) on S-Days, rather than banning them altogether, makes N-Days possible and even enjoyable. No-S N-Days are very close to how my family ate, so much so that I sometimes think of them as "Normal" days.

I call the No S Diet "the Grandma Diet" on the home page, but if things keep going the way they are in society at large, I'm going to have to call it the "Great Grandma" or "Great, Great, Grandma" diet instead.

Here's hoping "Grandma" does the trick for most of us,

Reinhard

Has a kid we had 3 meal a day and that is all we had we never had junk food in the house. Eaten between meals just didn't happen. I did not start overeating until I quit smoking about 12 years ago then I put the weigh on before I quit could and would go all day and not even think about food I would have to tell myself to eat because I hadn't eaten. Yes I know I talk to myself.

I was born in 1958. yep I'm 50 almost 51. Anyway, I was a child in the 60s and a teenager in the 70s (13 in 1971) and the eating patterns varied from family to family. I had a traditional family with a housewife mother (who never worked except during WWII) and we ate three meals a day with snacks unless we swore we couldn't wait until dinner. then it was like a stalk of celery or something similar. We ate all meals (except when at school or work) together as a family, sitting down together at the table. My father did the shopping and rarely brought junk food. He would buy potato chips only for church picnics. He never brought pop unless we were eating out (a real rarity). the only time he brought sugary cereals were when they were outrageously onsale. At nght, we sometimes had popcorn as a snack, but it was unbuttered. i was astonsihed when I was first introduced to buttered popcorn at the movie theatre as a teenager. As a child, my dad only brought reg unbutter popcorn.

Sugary cereals were so rare, that one of the things i remember most about having the measles ( and pneumonia, I almost died--even had a near death experienc, so it was serious) was that the morning I woke up sick, they had fruit loops and since I was sick and had to go to the hospital I didn't get any. That's how rare, sugary cereals were in my house. I almost died and I was upset about missing the fruit loops!

On the other hand, my best friend Debbie had a totally differnet household. Her mother worked, as a telephone operator--they actually had real people back then, and was gone all day. Her father didn't work, because he had some sort of back problem, but he was gone much of the day. So, Debbie and her sister were early latchkey kids--if they had a problem all they had to do was pick up the telephone, dial "0" and ask for their mother. Anyway, they had potato chips and pop in the house all the time. And they snacked and their mother loved to cook but mostly made fudge because when she was little she was raised in a house like mine and had to make her own candy--hence the fudge. BTW, it was real fudge made with sugar and syrup boiled to soft ball stage, not the modern stuff made with condensed milk. Debbie was my fudge connection.

So, it's more of a matter of how traditional your household was, not of the decade. Of course, there is a lot more junk food made today and it has high fructose corn syrup not even sugar.

I mentioned the No-S diet to an elderly friend who was raised Amish in the 1940s and he disagreed about deserts. Their pie save (spelling?) was filled daily and they had desert for every meal, including breakfast. Of course, it was a traditonal Amish farm that had 15 hired hands and all work was done with traditonal hand instruments w/only people and horse power to do all the work. So they burned the calories off. . .

My grandparents definitely lived the No-S way. My grandmother kept house by the old mnemonic, Monday is washday, Tuesday is ironing day, Wednessday. .mending, Thursday, marketing --except grandma didn't got to the store every week. It was a small country store and she only brought "dry goods" (flour, sugar, salt, etc) there. My grandparents either raised everything they ate or got it from a neighbor or a relative that raised it. Anyway, Saturday was Baking day--the only day she baked. Any deserts were baked on Saturday and eaten on Sunday--which is when "company" were stop by to visit in the afternoon. Only if there were leftovers was there desert later in the week.

So, while they are exceptions. I would say that for most Americans No-S is fairly traditonal--except for those large Amish farms.

Back in the 1960's, oftentimes the family would have only one car and the father would take it to work. The family only went grocery shopping one day a week - maybe Saturday. Many families didn't have even one car. Thee Original poster's great grandparents in Iowa, possibly?

If families wanted to graze and snack a couple times a day and after dinner, it would quicky deplete the pantry and there would be many more trips to the store needed. Can you imagine a family of say 2 parents and maybe 4 kids (bigger families then) eating 3-4 snacks 7 days a week? There wasn't money for this sort of lifestyle plus there were too many chores to be done so there wasn't time.