The #1 Reason Everyone Was Skinny in the 1950s (The Food Industry Buried This)

I want to show you how your grandmother burned more calories before lunch than most people burn in a full gym workout without ever once calling it exercise.

Picture a Tuesday morning in 1955.

The laundry doesn't wash itself because fewer than half of American homes had an automatic washing machine.

Only about one in five had a dryer.

So washing clothes meant scrubbing them, wringing them, and then doing actually what I did growing up as a kid, hundreds of loads of hauling a wet basket outside, hanging every piece of clothing on a clothesline, allowing the sun to dry it, and then getting it all back in before it rained.

The dishes got washed by hand.

This is how I grew up, not even in the '50s.

Every single meal washed by hands.

The floors got swept and scrubbed on hands and knees, and most families had one car, which the husband usually drove to work or worked on the farm.

So the errands and market trips, those happened on foot if you lived in a town.

Groceries got carried home by hand.

No one called that a workout, but your body was treating it like one.

Scientists have a name for all the calories that you burn outside of normal exercise.

It is called NEAT.

It's an acronym that stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

That is a fancy way of saying every step, every chore, every minute spent standing instead of sitting.

A researcher at the Mayo Clinic discovered something incredible about this concept.

Between two people of the same size, NEAT can differ by as much as 2,000 calories a day simply because of how much more they move during the day.

That's more than most people burn in an entire workout several times over.

And in the 1950s, I definitely know this from my grandmas and my grandpas, everyday chores kept your NEAT sky high.

Scrubbing a floor burns 300 calories an hour.

Walking home carrying bags of groceries burns 400 an hour.

I'm not even getting into farm work.

So run through a normal day in 1955, the laundry, the floors, the dishes, the walking, three meals cooked.

Standing at the stove, for example, you burn several hundred extra calories before dinner without one intentional minute of exercise.