[Article] Los Angeles Times: A weighty subject for the holidays

Millions of people will probably entertain themselves this holiday season by watching TV, playing video games, or surfing the Internet. One thing they likely won’t do is haul the bathroom scale from the bathroom to the dining room and make everyone weigh themselves right after dinner.

Crazy, right? Well, back in the day (the 19th century, to be precise) it was considered quite the amusing parlor game, according to Deborah Levine, an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. She studied the fascination with weight and scales as part of her doctoral dissertation, “Managing American Bodies: Diet, nutrition and obesity in the United States from 1840 to 1920 (She’s currently writing a book about the subject.).

During the early part of the Victorian era, Levine says, babies or sick people were usually the only ones weighed. “If you were an adult you wouldn’t have known what your weight was. It wasn’t common information until the railroads started shipping freight, and people started to weigh themselves at train stations on the public scales.” [ Read full article from Los Angeles Times blogs: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/12/a-weighty-subje.html ]