Dieting with Hippocrates

There is, apparently, an ‘obesity epidemic’ in the UK, such that two million people could benefit from weight-loss surgery. Ancient Greeks would have argued that they would benefit much more from a dose of self-control.

The ancients associated fatness with a lazy lifestyle. No change there, then. The doctor Hippocrates, well aware that sudden death was associated with obesity, knew that ‘dieting which causes excessive loss of weight, as well as the feeding-up of the emaciated, is beset with difficulties’. The Roman doctor Celsus (1st C ad) advised thin men to put on weight through rest, constipation and big meals, and the fat to take it off through late nights, worry and exercise.

But none of this faced the real problem: as Demosthenes said, ‘there is no difficulty explaining what it is best to do, only in making you actually do it’. Elsewhere he said that emotional reactions, e.g. anger and sexual infatuation, made one act against one’s best interests, as if one’s capacity to deliberate had been overwhelmed by some external force (e.g. a god, like Eros). This is understandable. After all, we cannot actively decide to become e.g. lustful, even if we want to be; and vice versa.

Socrates took a stern line on the problem. His basic assumption was that if we did know what was right, we would not fail to do it because it was so obviously in our interests to do it. To the objection that a person often knew what was right but, driven by e.g. pleasure, did not do it, he replied that such a person did not really know what was right at all; (s)he simply had a view, an opinion, about it, liable to be perverted by passing whims.