Book review: Calories and Corsets

By KATIE LAW
Published on Saturday 28 January 2012 00:00

IT’S a catchy title, so it’s a pity Louise Foxcroft’s history of dieting isn’t more filling.

Perhaps she just had too many facts and not enough room, since much of the book reads like bits of research strung together in roughly chronological order without much analysis.

She begins with Hippocrates, the first real “diet guru”, whose diaita – roughly translatable as way of life and wellness – promoted gentle exercise and light meals but warned against sexual intercourse and self-induced vomiting. Then came the early Christians, for whom gluttony was a deadly sin, while John Hales, MP for Preston during the 16th century, “was extremely worried about gluttony, claiming that more men died from overeating than ever had from the sword or plague”.

Onwards to the 17th century. “When world exploration was in full swing, new foods began to reach the British Isles and were beginning to change some people’s diets as well as their attitudes to different tastes and textures”, Foxcroft mentions sugar but nothing else. The second half of the book, which concentrates on the rise of modern fad diets, health regimes and their inventors, is more interesting. Foxcroft describes how men such as Robert Atkins and Pierre Dukan struck gold after they took their own regimes to the marketplace, while her account of some of the weirder ways to lose weight, from a milk and bananas diet to smoking or purging, only goes to show how gullible slimmers continue to be.

It’s a shame there aren’t any good jokes, though. Fat isn’t necessarily a feminist issue but it can be funny, because jokes contain essential truths. Still, if you’re fascinated by it you’ll lap this up.

• Calories and Corsets

by Louise Foxcroft

Profile, 240pp, £14.99

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