A waist of shame

Britain has the worst obesity rates in Europe, with one in four adults now clinically obese. A friend who works in orthopaedic surgery tells me that at least 80 per cent of knee replacements are, effectively, self-induced: caused by patients being overweight. Same with hips. Another friend, a consultant, had a complaint lodged against him for describing a 17-year-old girl who weighed almost 20 stone as morbidly obese, on the grounds that it hurt her feelings. Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease are burgeoning. What can be done?

According to Calories and Corsets, dieting is not the answer. ‘If you wish to grow thinner diminish your dinner’, announced Punch in 1869. The rhyme was a jokey response to the diet craze then sweeping the land, devised by William Banting. His system was so popular that his name became a verb, still to be be found in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse. Like Atkins and latterly Dukan, Banting promoted weight loss by means of a drastic reduction in carbohydrates. Since eliminating any major food group cannot but make you lose weight, such programmes continue to enjoy considerable success, as well as making fortunes for their devisers. The trouble is that, long-term, they don’t work. No diet does. Louise Foxcroft’s authoritative history is unequivocal on this point. Ninety-five per cent of dieters regain weight when they stop.

The history of dieting is a history of mistakes. Victorians went in for corsets, Vietnam-era Americans for amphetamines. The Romans took emetics. Saints starved themselves. At one point it was believed that increased respiration could cause weight loss. Brillat-Savarin in the late 18th century advised moderation, particularly of what we now know as carbs, while maintaining that ‘A dinner without cheese is like a pretty woman with only one eye’.