From the ancient Greeks who recommended moderate consumption and exercise - along with wrestling, avoiding sex, walking round naked and vomiting after a meal - to modern low-carb or carb-lover's diets, people have been desperate to find easy ways to lose weight.
The slimming industry makes millions peddling the latest fad diets, pills, injections or restrictive garments, selling hope of easy, fast weight loss, but the interesting thing this book reveals, is how long it's been going on for.
In medieval times, gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins; around the 17th and 18th centuries, fat people were recommended to eat a bar of soap nightly as a laxative.
Others exploited their monstrous size as a curiosity, touring and charging for interviews. In the 19th and early 20th century, Horace Fletcher, known as the Great Masticator, recommended chewing each mouthful of food at least 100 times.
Foxcroft, a medical historian, relates the main trends in slimming advice and the tirades and claims of some of the slimming gurus used to shame people into buying their products or follow their diets, claiming to be able to get their clients into shape fast and without much effort.
Such slimming and self-help gurus become celebrities as much as their clients, like Gaylord Hauser in the first part of the 20th century or James Duigan, founder of "Bodyism", today.
Many of them were once fat but slimmed effectively and went to market with "books, plans, foods and colourful endorsements" touting their successful weight-loss method. Often their slimming plans are recycled from earlier diets.
"New diets come and go but they are always rehashed from the past, and the same goes for some of the flakier slimming products on the weight-loss market" such as hologram bracelets or cellulite-busting tights," Foxcroft writes.
Attention has now turned to hormones and psychology, moods and eating, as part of the medicalisation of society and the development of drugs intended to treat all kinds of behaviours and emotions instead of accepting the wide range of human variation.
Losing weight and keeping it off is not easy, as anyone who has tried will know, although we all hope for a miracle, which is what the slimming industry sells.
This book provides an interesting and readable account of the history of our obsession with fat and the getting rid of it, and ends with the simple advice that it needs a "a handful of the right lifestyle changes" to be effective.
- Charmian Smith is an ODT feature writer.
