Did you have sand kicked into your face on the beach?

My mother visited the local welfare clinic weekly to obtain malt, virol, cod liver oil and orange juice which you diluted with water!

But things have gone full circle to an age when many people struggle with the fat they have accumulated, with many women wondering how they have suddenly gone up a couple of dress sizes.

It can be difficult to find a man whose stomach doesn’t enter the room before he does. I also find it difficult to understand why so many health professionals in hospitals are overweight when there are posters everywhere advocating exercise.

But generally fat people eat too much of the wrong things, and don’t get enough exercise. Statistics tell us that is true.

But at one time to be skinny was not something men wanted to be. They all wanted to be like Charles Atlas!

The Great Depression didn’t lend itself to obesity, but once there was more money around British men became interested in advertisements coming out of America promising ‘Let me prove in 7 days that I can make you a new man!’ Charles Atlas proved to be a source of inspiration, having gone from a scrawny kid to what was described as ‘the absolute masculine ideal’ having designed his own exercise programme.

He changed his name to Charles Atlas as being more in keeping with his new body after a friend remarked that he looked like the statue of Atlas.

The Dynamic tension course of lessons were advertised in periodicals showing Charles Atlas in leopard skin speedos, proving to be the longest lasting and most memorable advertisement of all time.

Who can forget Mac having sand kicked into his face on the beach and being taunted as being a weakling?

Or Joe at the fairground who cannot ring the bell on the hammer game? They both sent for the course of lessons and became winners! Attracting women for the first time!

So successful was the advertising that Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, King George V1 and Mahatma Ghandi sent for information.

Charles Atlas became the toast of New York City, becoming friends with President Franklin Roosevelt and Bob Hope.

He won contests in Physical Culture magazine for being the world’s most beautiful man, posed for the George Washington statue in Washington Square Park and the figure of Patriotism at the Elks headquarters in Chicago.

Visiting the UK in 1936 he remarked that English men were in better shape than their American counterparts who usually let their bellies slip down below their belts! That can now be true of many British men although there are also men around with enviable bodies.

Part of the appeal of Charles Atlas, in a moralistic time, was that he was a clean-living man with a clean and healthy lifestyle. He didn’t smoke or drink and was a devoted family man.

The mail order business that Charles Atlas founded has been around for more than 80 years, and still continuing to be successful worldwide.

The Charles Atlas programme was something men ordered, hoping to astound people with the change in their appearance. I only ever knew one man who ordered it and he found it difficult to actually open the package!