Porky, plump, stout, pot-bellied, beer-bellied, obese and corpulent. Society is often unkind to overweight people as their aspirations, desires, failures and shame are ruthlessly exploited. Fad diets and miracle weight-loss cures have abounded through the centuries and appear to have changed little over time, discovers Dunedin writer Edith Leigh.
Rub away the fat on your hips, belly and chin with a new medicated soap.
Roll yourself thin in a new "reducing machine".
Eat whatever you like - as long as you chew it extremely thoroughly. At least 100 chews for every mouthful in fact.
These were just some weight-loss fads being touted during the 19th and 20th centuries, but how outlandish do they actually sound today?
Would they really look out of place in any modern women's magazine?
If there is one message that stands out in Louise Foxcroft's recent book, Calories & Corsets - A history of dieting over 2000 years, it is that when it comes to fat, food and diets there really is nothing new.
"I was taken aback by the way the diets that are promoted today are just the same old ideas rehashed, recycled and repackaged with some added celebrity and novelty," Foxcroft says.
Take the example of the Atkins diet - after all, everybody knows somebody who has had a go at this one.
The only thing is Dr Atkin's protein-rich, high-fat, low-carbohydrate 1970s "diet revolution" had already swept through the UK and the US the previous century.
The "fantastically popular Banting System", first published in 1863, encouraged meat and fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner - washed down with two or three glasses of good claret, sherry or Madeira. Milk, sugar, potatoes, carrots, puddings, beer and port were to be scrupulously avoided.
It appeared to be followed religiously by all sorts and even turned up in popular novels, such as Agatha Christie's crime thrillers, Foxcroft writes.
But even Banting was not the first to promote a low-carb diet. An 1825 "anti-fat" diet book also advised readers to give up starches, sugars and carbohydrate foods.
The author, realising people may not be so easily persuaded to give up their favourite rolls, cookies and cakes, warns the alternative is to get fat and "become ugly, and thick, and asthmatic, and finally die in your own melted grease".
Along with his diet recommendations, he also promoted the use of his patented "Anti-Corpulancy Belt" to ensure the skin of the stomach retracted when weight was lost.
This was "the early days of what would become the diet industry", writes Foxcroft.
Many fad diets are popularised when celebrities claim to have shed kilos through the latest craze.
The lemonade diet, which has actually been around for more than 50 years, was revitalised when pop star Beyonce Knowles claimed to have lost 9kg for the movie Dreamgirls on this severe detox and fasting plan.
And the "attack" and "cruise" eating plans of the Dukan diet were reportedly how the Middleton family shed kilos for the royal wedding.
Celebrity endorsement of questionable diet regimes is nothing new either, and was also worrying the medical profession back in the early 19th century.
Physicians of the day fretted about the tremendous influence of British poet Lord Byron, as Romantic youth drank vinegar to lose weight and "young ladies lived all their growing girlhood in semi-starvation".
The poet tended towards podge and was a notorious yo-yo dieter in his efforts to maintain the pale, thin and consumptive Romantic male ideals.
He would sweat in layers of clothes, starve himself and then binge on huge meals followed by an overdose of magnesia to settle his stomach, and then eat nothing but potatoes drenched in vinegar.
Thin celebrity was starting to take hold, as a story somewhat reminiscent of Princess Diana from later that century shows.
The Empress-Consort of Franz Joseph I, known to the public as Sisi, was lauded as a great beauty and her lifestyle was big news in the 1860s, writes Foxcroft.
The 170cm-tall royal, who weighed just 48kg, had her waist checked daily by her hairdresser. If it measured more than 49.5cm she would refuse to eat.
"She spent three hours a day dressing - the lacing alone took an hour - and was said to have had herself sewn into her dresses."
Oranges and milk were her favourite foods and she travelled Europe with her own personal cow.
"Her physician diagnosed her as having the telltale breath of an anorexic shortly before she was murdered in Geneva by an anarchist."
Anorexia was categorised by Queen Victoria's doctor and estimated then to affect about four women in every thousand.
The "age of slenderness", which still obsesses society today, dawned in the 1920s with the fashionably flat-chested, boyish flapper girls, writes Foxcroft.
Flappers were said to have "mastered the art of eating their cake and yet not having it, inducing regurgitation after a plentiful meal, either by drugs or mechanical means".
One American doctor warned the "price of a boyish figure" obtained through dieting could turn a sweet-tempered woman into someone petulant and unreasonable, and she "might even end up as a lesbian".
Calorie-counting also arrived in the 1920s, when Dr Lulu Hunt Peters published her runaway bestseller Dieting and Health: With Key to the Calories. Two million copies in more than 55 editions sold during 21 years from 1918.
Dr Hunt Peters told her readers "if there is anything comparable to the joy of taking in your clothes I have not experienced it".
During the past hundred years the dieting business has exploded, writes Foxcroft, and the diet industry is all about exploitation and growth.
Foxcroft admits she is not a dieter herself, but during her research she had a go at the Atkins diet to see how it felt and if she could stick it.
The way she so quickly became "quite obsessed" about it surprised her, she says.
She found herself thinking about food the minute she woke up. What she could eat, when she could eat it and how much she could eat. She began to quietly check on what other people were eating and found herself on the scales several times a day - before coffee, naked, then clothed, and after dinner.
"It explains a great deal about the repetitive nature of fad or crash dieting, and why it is such a big business," she says.
One of the questions she set out to shed some light on in her book was why, if dieting has been around for so long, haven't we found a successful way of doing it that lasts?
The answer is, we have. Even the Greeks defined "diet" as a way of life, as opposed to a narrow, weight-loss regimen, "but the diet industry is worth too many millions to let that stop its inexorable growth."
What's changed?
So what has changed in the 21st century? Very little it would seem. Some modern weight-loss prescriptions sound no less daft than drinking vinegar or eating a bar of soap a night - the fads of yesterday. A google search of the word "diet" brings up hundreds of eating plans all claiming to help dieters beat the bulge. Here is a small selection of what the search engine might throw up.
The baby food diet
Tiny jars of baby mush are substituted for higher calorie snacks and even meals. The theory is the pint-sized portions control calories and over-eating. The basic plan calls for eating 14 jars of bland baby food through the day, with an option to have a normal, adult meal at dinner.
The flexitarian diet
Getting the benefits of a vegetarian diet without having to entirely forgo meat is the basis of this plan. "Flexible vegetarians" skip meat a few days a week, with "experts" sticking to veges for five days out of seven.
The caveman diet (also known as the Palaeo or warrior diet)
As human genetics have barely changed since the dawn of agriculture, this diet is based on the premise our bodies are genetically programmed to eat like our Stone Age ancestors. Only foods that could be hunted, fished or gathered during the Palaeolithic era are allowed, so that cuts out dairy, grains, sugar, salt, legumes, potatoes and oils.
The hCG diet
This plan combines injecting hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), a hormone found in the urine of pregnant women, with a near-starvation diet of just 500 calories a day. The hCG hormone is produced during pregnancy to help nourish the womb. As a mother provides her fetus with calories during pregnancy, promoters of this diet claim the hormone acts as an appetite suppressant, enabling the dieter to get through a day on very little food.
The lemonade diet
This severe detox and fasting plan, which consists of nothing more than a lemon juice concoction, has been around for a while. The "master cleanse elixir" consists of fresh lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper and filtered water.
The three-hour diet
This diet claims to speed up your metabolic rate through portion control and careful timing of when you eat. Dieters eat by the clock, consuming breakfast within an hour of rising, and then eating every three hours after that. They stop eating three hours before bedtime. The theory is the body goes into starvation mode if there are long gaps between meals and holds on to fat.
The Eco Atkins diet
The Atkins diet is back again, but this time in vegetarian mode. It's still high-protein and low-carb, but the high-fat steaks and bacon are replaced with tofu, beans, nuts and the like.