num_pages: 232
description: This is an enlightening and entertaining social history of how we have tried (and failed) to battle the bulge over two millennia. Today we are urged from all sides to slim down and shape up to shed a few pounds or lose life-threatening stones. The media's relentless obsession with size may be perceived as a twenty-first-century phenomenon but as award-winning historian Louise Foxcroft shows we have been struggling with what to eat when and how much ever since the Greeks and the Romans first pinched an inch. Meticulously researched surprising and sometimes shocking Calories and Corsets tells the epic story of our complicated relationship with food the fashions and fads of body shape and how cultural beliefs and social norms have changed over time. Combining research from medical journals letters articles and the dieting bestsellers we continue to devour (including one by an octogenarian Italian in the sixteenth century) Foxcroft reveals the extreme and often absurd lengths people will go to in order to achieve the perfect body from eating carbolic soap to deliberately swallowing tapeworm. This unique and witty history exposes the myths and anxieties that drive today's multi-billion pound dieting industry - and offers a welcome perspective on how we can be healthy and happy in our bodies.
language: English
title: Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years
publisher: Profile Books