We shall fight flab in the pizzerias and bakeries and gyms. We shall never surrender
HERE, in the southern half of the world, we have passed the winter solstice. Although we still have a few weeks of cold to go, we are heading to spring.
It is, therefore, a good time to start getting rid of the weight we have gained while sitting in front of the TV, eating heavy meals just to feel cosy.
Along with the spring, we always get a bunch of new diet books, which vow to teach us how to be slim and fit.
I, like a million others, have had a squiz at the newest, most popular diet books.
Just for the record, the word “diet” comes from the Greek diaita, seen as a balance of health between the mental and the physical. Classical physicians saw being too fat or too thin as a sign of physical and mental imbalance and weakness.
The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, after whom the Hippocratic oath is named, said: “Man cannot live healthily on food without a certain amount of exercise.” He saw a relationship between food and ethics, saying a taste for luxury often led to greed and criminal behaviour.
Right now, in the US, you can choose from at least 40 diet plans. The big seller is Shred by Ian K Smith, which has topped the non-fiction list for several weeks.
Shred combines a low-GI diet and meal-spacing, which means you must eat every 3.5 hours. Not every meal, however, is an actual meal. It could be soup, a smoothie or a shake and three snacks a day, over a six-week programme.
Another bestseller is Wheat Belly by William Davis, with the tagline, “Lose the Wheat! Lose the Weight!”
Hot on its heels is The 5:2 Diet Book, which basically recommends five days of feasting and two days of fasting to counter-balance and reduce the calories.
There’s another book called White Vegetables Are the New Green, which advocates that white vegetables are superior to other colours — a kind of vegetable apartheid.
I started to wonder just how old the “diet wars” really are.
After some scrabbling around on the internet, I found a book Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2 000 Years by Louise Foxcroft, who says in her preface, “The diet industry is all about exploitation and profit.” She writes: “In a study of 31 longterm diet plans, the American Psychological Association found that up to two-thirds of participants ended up heavier than before they started. Some diets are more sensible than others, but any regimen that promises swift and dramatic results will doom most followers to failure.” Through the last few centuries, being fat has been considered to be, in some way, a personal failure. Foxcroft found that during both World War 1 and 2, fat people were seen as traitors because of the rations and the inaccessibility of food.
Foxcroft also looks at the attraction of an extremely slim waist in women. That
World War 1 got rid of corsets …
the army needed the iron
for weapons
started in the 1500s, when Catherine de Medici used her garments — and those of her ladies-in-waiting — as a statement of her power and wealth.
Almost immediately, corsets raced through Europe and a slender waist and upright posture signified how elevated a woman was.
It took World War 1 to get rid of those corsets built out of iron stays, as the army needed the iron for weapons. So the corset died and the bra made its debut. Almost immediately, women had to deal with their weight in a new way, and that’s where “the latest diet” really asserted its power.
But it was in 1863 that the first “lowcarb” diet was proposed, by one William Banting.
The great-godfather of this change, however, was Doctor Robert Atkins, who had become obese in 1963. He made his own body a research project and wrote 17 books between 1972 and 2003.
As you get your body ready for summer, he might just give you a good starting point as the flab wars begin.