Earlier we were talking about the “good ol’ days,” and how people ate in the 1950s compared to how we eat these days. As a number of you noted, back when gravy-swamped Salisbury Steak and buttery mashed potatoes swam on our plates next to green beans simmered in bacon fat and a slice of pie for dessert, Americans were still more thin.

We aren’t just imagining that, either.

[T]he notion that Americans ever ate well is suspect. In 1966, when Americans were still comparatively thin, more than two billion hamburgers already had been sold in McDonald’s restaurants, noted Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. The recent rise in obesity may have more to do with our increasingly sedentary lifestyles than with the quality of our diets.

“The meals we romanticize in the past somehow leave out the reality of what people were eating,” he said. “The average meal had whole milk and ended with pie…. The typical meal had plenty of fat and calories.”

“Nostalgia is going to get us nowhere,” he added.

No doubt, such nostalgia is part of the lure of Atkins-style diets which tell us we can enjoy that same buttery goodness (albeit with mashed cauliflower in place of the spuds). I know I, for one, find myself often growing sick of munching on celery stalks and the Styrofoam substitutes known as rice cakes and begin thinking that breakfasts of bacon and fried eggs, lunches of burger patties topped with butter pats and slices of Brie, followed by a medium-rare rib eye steak with Caesar salad and roast asparagus for dinner all sounds like a grand way to diet.

Unfortunately, my body has yet to respond well to that kind of diet. In fact, it’s that precise kind of eating — taken up right around the time I got married — that’s packed on the 40 pounds which seemed to appear on my belly, ass and thighs oh, about three days returning home from my honeymoon. (That joke about wedding bands adding 50 pounds to a woman’s body does, unfortunately, hit a bit too close to home for comfort if you ask me.)

One thing I have noticed: the size of my waistline has grown directly in proportion to the amount of time spent at my computer. And, no, that’s not all caloric-related.

I have, on and off through the past 20 years, kept food logs. Being a pack rat of sorts, I’ve also kept the majority of my logs in a huge box in our storage room. While cleaning out some of my husband’s unnecessary crap a little clutter last week, I ran across them. I couldn’t resist the chance to thumb through one or two, secretly hoping to remember just how I used to eat back when I effortlessly remained a size 4.

You can imagine my surprise when I saw, in my own handwriting no less, that I was actually eating quite a bit more back then. Oh, sure, I was also a bit more active: I walked from my parking space at university to my classes and back, and I went out dancing both weekend nights. I hauled hampers of dirty laundry up- and downstairs rather than ferry them from one room to another on the same floor. And I spent my home-bound evenings on the floor in front of the TV doing leg lifts or donkey kicks and crunches — something I don’t do much anymore thanks to all of the Cheerios, Legos and cat hair now covering our carpet wherever our home furniture and my piles of books don’t already occupy.

One thing I did not do much of: sitting behind a computer. Yes, I had one — I was online quite a bit of time, even — but with a 9600 baud modem (something that was state-of-the-art at the time but nowadays would be justifiable grounds for a homicide spree), being “online” really meant getting up and cleaning house or folding laundry whilst waiting for a web page to load.

In other words: I didn’t sit a lot back then. I was up, and I was moving, thanks to both the configuration of my apartment and the slowness of the World Wide Web. My waist was smaller then, too. When I did gain weight — and I admit to yo-yo’ing quite a few times in those years — it settled on my hips and ass but not at all on my waist. Gaining weight meant simply looking more like an hourglass — something not nearly as desirable in those pre-J.Lo days.

Sometimes I wonder if these things aren’t linked: despite the amount of calories being the same then and now (actually, in fact, a bit higher then), does sitting at a computer by necessity lead to big bellies?

Consider, for instance, the number of muffin tops you see on young girls these days. Girls with coltish legs, lithe arms and still relatively flat chests but big, bulging love handles spilling over their waistbands. They are, of course, the reason why those swing tops, Empire waistlines and baby doll cami’s have come back in style: how else to hide the flab that flops over.

It’s not just young girls who experience this, though. I, myself, have gone from the allegedly “healthier” pear-shape to what can most kindly be described as apple-esque. I see it in other women, too: ladies who are equally computer-bound and whose bodies resemble potatoes perched atop two toothpicks. I have to admit: I envy the fact that at least their legs have remained thin.

Is it our computer culture that’s causing this, and not merely our calorie consumption? One has to wonder. I know I do. But I also wonder: what if it is? Would I actually be willing to cut my time at the computer by half (or even more) in return for the effortless size 6 of my past?

Decisions, decisions.

UPDATE: I may be on to something. Bloggrrl shares my plight.