Joan Smith
More of Jesus, Less of Me
Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years
By Louise Foxcroft (Profile Books 320pp £14.99)
A book about dieting is almost bound by law to have a picture of a woman on the cover. But Louise Foxcroft's entertaining and occasionally stomach-churning history of the subject is a revelation about the weight problems of men. Daniel Lambert, who was born in Leicester in 1770, was just over five feet tall and weighed fifty-two stone; when he died, at the age of thirty-nine, he was rolled through the streets in a wheeled coffin to his grave: 'Corpulency', it was said at the time, 'constantly increased until the clogged machinery of life stood still, and this prodigy of Mammon was numbered with the dead.'
Dr Johnson struggled with his weight, getting fatter and fatter as he got older. As for Coleridge, I'm not sure I will be able to think of the poet in future without shuddering over his own graphic description of the consequences of over-eating:
Weight, Langour, & the soul-sickening Necessity of attending to barren bodily sensations, in bowels ... the endless Flatulence, the frightful constipation when the dead Filth impales the lower Gut ... to weep & sweat & moan & scream for the parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality.
Unsurprisingly, Dorothy Wordsworth used the phrase 'bad bowels' in her journals when she was writing about Coleridge.
Lord Byron was a classic example of what would now be called a yo-yo dieter, bingeing on food and then using quack diets to get the weight off. He weighed 13st 12lb in 1806 but got down to 9st in 1811; we know this because the wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd installed hanging scales at their establishment in St James's, where both Byron and Beau Brummell had themselves weighed. His own problems didn't make Byron any more sympathetic towards Lady Caroline Lamb, whose dramatic loss of weight from grief over the end of their affair led him to remark that he was being 'haunted by a skeleton'.
I've long suspected that Byron had an eating disorder. Anorexia isn't a subject that features much in Foxcroft's book, although she does present a striking image of Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie von Wittelsbach, Empress-Consort of Franz Joseph I, who refused to eat if her waist exceeded nineteen-and-a-half inches. In 1892, a visitor encountered Sisi, as she was known, suspended from hand rings in the makeshift gym installed in her boudoir: 'She wore a black silk dress with a long train, hemmed with magnificent black ostrich feathers ... Hanging on the ropes, she made a fantastic impression, like a creature somewhere between a snake and a bird.' This isn't something I recommend trying at your local gym but it turns out that Sisi's anorexia had nothing to do with her premature demise; she was murdered in Geneva by an anarchist who wanted to assassinate the King of Italy but couldn't afford the fare.
Foxcroft's book is full of startling anecdotes, but she also has a serious purpose. Over the long historical period she is writing about, obesity stopped being a problem for the affluent and became associated with the eating habits - fast food, high calories, poor nutrition - of the less well-off. Although men are at least as much affected by obesity as women in prosperous societies, food addictions also came to be seen as a largely female problem, with women forming the principal target for a multimillion-dollar diet industry: 'Nobody Loves a Fat Girl', a 1950s advert for Ry-Krisp warned.
If willpower wasn't enough to do the trick, the Vanishette corset promised to 'INSTANTLY Vanish 4 INCHES OF YOUR WAIST'. At some point, evangelical Christianity got into the act and American women were offered volumes with titles such as I Prayed Myself Slim and - guaranteed to cause instant vomiting, I would have thought - More of Jesus, Less of Me. Devotions for Dieters, published in 1967, even offered a special prayer: 'I promise not to sit and stuff/But stop when I have had enough./Amen.'
Foxcroft is sardonic about all this quackery, moralising and misogyny. Her book describes a centuries-old battle as physicians who understood the relationship between consumption and corpulence struggled with charlatans who offered 'easy' solutions. Many of the practitioners who offered sensible advice knew from personal experience that there was no fast route to losing weight and keeping it off: the London undertaker William Banting, whose name became a synonym for slimming in the 1860s, published his diet books after struggling to get his own weight down from 202 to 156lb.
In the twenty-first century, it seems obvious that the commercial diet industry encourages obsessional attitudes to food that make weight loss more difficult. Everyone knows someone who is always on one diet or another, without apparent effect or only to pile weight on again within a few months. At the end of her book, Louise Foxcroft suggests that 'we can't, and shouldn't, remove the story of diets from the story of health, but we can do something about the weight of judgement and the smear of sin and temptation'. Her recommendations are eminently sensible, based on a long-term, balanced, low-carbohydrate approach which would have been familiar to the (healthy) ancient Greeks. It certainly sounds a lot better than putting your faith in either Atkins or Jesus.
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Joan Smith is the author of Mysogynies, and What Will Survive. She blogs at www.politicalblonde.com and tweets @polblonde.
