Weight of the world

Calories & Corsets

A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years

by Louise Foxcroft

Profile Books

Even cavemen could have afforded to lose a few.

Obesity can be traced back to the paleolithic era, as man evolved from hunter-gatherers to agricultural settlers 12,000 years ago and diets adapted from animals and wild vegetables to eating a more stable variety of foods that were raised and grown.

From there, our relationship with food has only gotten more bizarre, explains Cambridge University history of medicine professor Louise Foxcroft in her book “Calories & Corsets.”

The first diet guides are traced back to ancient Greece, where scholars recommended healthy lifestyles based on — surprise! — moderate food consumption and exercise. Excluding the more outlandish suggestions (vomiting and no sex, for examples), the Greeks seemed to have gotten it right.

Simple, but not easy. People still struggled with “wanting to be thin but needing to eat. It’s a pickle,” Foxcroft says.

Even during the Renaissance, when hefty girls were called Rubenesque and idolized for their beauty, there always was a line between “desirable flesh and unwanted fat.”

Obesity was almost exclusively a rich people’s problem until the 20th century, when the poor moved away from the fields to urban environments — and sugary, processed foods became the norm.

With the bad food came even worse fad diets. Everything from rib-crushing corsets to eating soap and arsenic were in vogue throughout the years.

Not that we’ve learned anything from these dangerous diets.

Month-long vegetable-juice cleanses, ice baths endorsed by the bestseller “The 4 Hour Body,” and the Master Cleanse (water, lemon, maple syrup and cayenne pepper) are some such diet plans out now.

Yet, we’re still on the losing end in the battle of the bulge. In 2009-2010, one-third of US adults and almost 17% of children were characterized as obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the end, doctors say that 95% of people who follow diet plans regain the weight as soon as they stop, and in some cases even gain more weight back, according to Foxcroft.

“Not much changed, has it?” Foxcroft asks. “During the last century our preoccupation with losing weight has increased, even becoming, according to some psychiatrists, a national neurosis.”

Here are some of the most outlandish diets of all time:

Ancient Greece

Forget carbs and calories. According to the ancient Greeks, sex makes you fat and lazy.

The father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, outlined principles of “diaita,” linking our physical health and weight with the amount of food we eat and exercise.

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