My other grandmother was a normal weight, and didn't make it to eighty--but she smoked. It was heart, not lungs, that got her.
I had a fat--I am telling you, she was a "didn't move out of the chair, sat-on-her-ass, bossed-her-husband-around" FAT great grandmother. She was quite massive, and quite cheery, too. She lived to 96 or so (might have been more, she was vain and lied about her age). In her youth, she was very tiny but I only saw pictures of her in her slim years.
I had another great grandmother who was "fit." She worked hard all her life, and was neither fat nor thin. She scrubbed the floor, cooked the food, worked, worked, worked--never sat down. She had huge bosoms that made her look bigger than I think she was. She lived to 95 or so--but she might have been a year older because the records weren't too accurate.
All these women have one thing in common--they outlived their close-in-age husbands by anything from twenty to forty five years!
The other thing is, they ate stuff they felt they needed. One of 'em would eat liver every so often--not all the time, but every so often as they had a craving. They also weren't afraid of butter or cream but they didn't eat a lot of any one thing.
They didn't worry about "self esteem" or things of that nature--their entire focus was their families (even the one who sat around bossing her husband all day!). They came up in a different time, when people were less judgmental about others and getting old was just expected and normal and part of the process--not something to pretend to deny. And yeah, they were all pretty happy, and free of envy. They didn't let the little things get to them at all...
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