On Sep 8, 10:08 pm, Doug Smith W9WI wrote:

I mostly loved gym class other than the fact that it's a drag playing
team sports with a bunch of other girls who don't care. For
instance: When we occasionally played volleyball with the boys. the
rule was that a girl had to hit the ball at least once on a side
before it went over the net. I guess this was to prevent the boys
from monopolizing the game. I'm sure the boys were thoroughly
disgusted and I was personally mortified that many of the girls would
DUCK when the ball came their way, letting it hit the floor. (To be
fair, they did the same thing when we played girls-only.)

I liked gym so much that I would occasionally go for an extra swim
class during my study halls and lunch. I also participated in just
about every intramural sport that was offered -- intramurals being the
ONLY sports (other than synchronized swim, I think) that girls could
participate in in my day. I just double-checked that fact in my
yearbook the other day - there were NO girls' sports teams in my hs as
of 1970. Well, unless you count cheerleading .

Intramurals were a whole lot better than gym class since they were
voluntary and, presumably, the girls who showed up were interested in
participating. I was far from a top female athlete in my class, but I
was tolerably coordinated and liked playing.

Outside of school, there were biking and playing ball and tag and jump
rope and hopscotch and swimming and sledding and roller skating and
ice skating and badminton and tennis and walking and climbing trees.

One of the biggest differences in the net count of calories per day
(leading to weight gain) is the ease and speed with which food can be
made available. Back when I was a kid, we usually had to get out a
bunch of ingredients and actually construct (or COOK) something. A
typical snack for us would be a fried or boiled egg sandwich or French
toast or PB&J. If we wanted something like cookies or cake, we had to
have had the good fortune to have all the ingredients in the house at
the same time or (on rare occasions) a box mix and then cook the darn
stuff. Ice cream was a rarity. The point being that having to work
and wait for food and/or not having much variety is a disincentive to
eating too much.

(Disclaimer: To be fair, we were working class poor and my dad, the
primary grocery buyer, figured if we had milk and eggs in the house,
no one would starve. He wasn't much into variety or extras, and his
idea of fruit was canned peaches.)

BTW, there is good evidence that more food variety is one of the
leading contributors to weight gain. The same food every day gets
boring, and the novelty of new or different foods stimulates our
appetites even if we don't need to eat. I probably never had pizza
until I was in junior high school (and I grew up in a Italian
neighborhood), didn't even know what a bagel was until I was 17, and
didn't experience or even know about many other ethnic foods.

Anyway, today, all kids need to do is get it out of the pantry or
freezer, pop it in the microwave, and they have an easy and tasty
300-600 calories. Probably high in fat.

-KD