When did the madness start? Why is the obesity problem getting worse when there are tens of thousands of diets and products?
And more importantly, how will it end? Keep reading about the often sorry history of dieting in Western Civilization to see if you can separate the fads and scams from the practical and scientific. Be sure to check out our infographic timeline too. This athlete was likely quite full of himself. Do you wonder if the first cavewoman asked the first caveman, "Does this loincloth make my butt look big? The early Greeks and Romans, however, did let us know how they felt about the issue.
If you had a healthy body, the Greeks believed it meant you also had a healthy mind. Being fat was not only ugly, it was also a sign of mental unbalance. The Greeks were into fitness in a big way; in fact, wealthy people with leisure time would spend eight hours a day working out in a gymnasium, usually naked. They also held beauty contests for women. Hippocrates, a Greek physician who lived around BC, believed fat people suffered from unhealthy sleep, aches, pains, flatulence, and constipation, and recommended that they follow a strict diet, increase their exercise, and vomit.
The ancient Greeks admired ideal bodies but luckily, their ideal was chunkier and more muscular than today's tiny skinny ideal. In fact, Venus de Milo would be a hefty 5 foot seven inches, pounds with measurements of 35 inch bust, 30 inch waist and 40 inch hips.
In the first few centuries after Christ, many Christians believed that the physical body was the enemy of the soul. Anthony, St. Augustine, the early Desert Fathers, St. Jerome and St. Basil all struggled with food issues, sometimes starving themselves to be more holy. Their hallucinations and other bizarre mental states may have been a result of "anorexia mirabilis," in slang terms, "holy anorexia.
Around AD Pope Gregory defined gluttony not just as eating too much, but also as eating wildly or eagerly or eating between meals. He said that "picky" eaters and gourmands were also guilty of this deadly sin. Catherine of Sienna took it to an extreme. When her parents wanted her to marry her sister's widower, she found out that she could refuse food to get her own way.
She began to eat only Communion wafers, although she would lick the pus from the sores of the poor. She got so sick that she could not even swallow water. On February 26, , her legs stopped functioning, and she died of starvation on April The idea being fat is a sign of not being spiritual persists today when fitness gurus couch everything in quasi-religious terms.
RUI or riding under the influence put an end to this so-called diet. The world's first liquid diet appeared around A. William the Conquerer grew so fat that he had problems mounting his horse. When he fell off and landed head first, he had to pretend he was kissing the ground in joy. He gave up food and went on a drinking man's diet -- all he consumed was alcohol. When he finally mounted his horse again, the saddle horn caught in his gut, and he died of infection.
The diet was not that successful in that he was too big to fit into his coffin, and when priests stuffed him into it, his intestines burst. The Renaissance began around , and attitudes in the Western World became more secular, sexier, and looser. Nevertheless, it was still considered immoral to be overweight, especially because most people did not have enough to eat. In John Halle advised people to eat simply because, "More die of gluttony than the sword or the plague.
When Renaissance women wanted to look slim, they didn't diet but pulled in their corsets instead. These undergarments bound their breasts as well as their waists.
Women actually died from "straight lacing" in that their corsets cut into their skin , causing sores that would get infected. While today's women are now wearing elastic "shape-wear" or skinny jeans to look thinner, corsets are making a comeback. Kim Kardashian and other celebrities are bringing back "waist training corsets" to achieve a tiny waist. The first actual diet book came out in and is still in print. Luigi Cornaro was an extremely overweight Italian who had an ephiphany when he was around 40 years old.
Tired of being overweight, feeling out of control, and unable to have sex, he limited himself to 12 ounces of food a day and 14 ounces of wine. His book, "The Art of Living Long," advises others to do the same.
Cornaro lived to be almost a hundred years old, and toward the end of his life, he only ate egg yolks. Castelvetro criticized the English for eating too much meat and sugar, and promoted the Italian way of eating fresh vegetables.
His book was a forerunner to today's popular "Mediterranean Diet. In famine swept Europe, and people ate hunger-suppressing foods like potatoes. We know of several famous people from the s who struggled with their weight. Samuel Johnson, the leading intellectual of his day, grew very fat and depressed, and named his obesity "my black dog. Johnson wasn't having it, noting that his fat was strictly a result of his eating too much. The poet Samuel Coleridge was described as fat and flabby, and for years he searched for cures for "bloat and constipation.
George Cheyne in Cheyne was grossly fat. He went on a diet of milk and vegetables but the moment he went back to regular foods, he regained it.
He became a lifelong vegetarian, and wrote that "the nervous diseases of man come from confined animals. In the early s, Thomas Short wrote "The Causes and Effects of Corpulence," in which he put forth the theory that living near swamps makes you fat, so the way to slimness is to move to a desert.
In the mids, the ideal of both masculine and feminine beauty was thin and romantic. The bad news for overweight people was clothing became form-fitting for both sexes. Women's dresses required a tiny laced-in waist from to Men wore tights or breeches with tight-fitting jackets until around the end of the 19th century when looser trousers or pants came in style.
Form-fitting clothing and a slim figure as ideal meant fat people were again fair game to be ridiculed and called immoral. We had multiple kids lose pounds. One of the participants in the first season of I Used to Be Fat was homecoming queen Gabriella Caloiero , whose weight-loss journey resulted in her shedding an incredible 90 pounds via NBC Philadelphia. As Caloiero told Seventeen , the show led her to completely overhaul not just her diet but her lifestyle as well.
As a result, the changes she experienced were profound, extending far beyond simply losing weight. And chances are she had to unlearn a lot of false facts people believe about dieting and figure out what things to give up to keep weight off long term. It's an emotional journey, too," she said. Everyone has bad days, you just have to stay strong.
And it's so important to not let what anyone says get to you. Loving yourself keeps you going. If you didn't love yourself, you wouldn't care about losing weight and making your life better and healthier.
Always remember to give yourself credit even when others may not, and don't rely on others for your happiness. I Used to Be Fat not only entertained viewers, but it also inspired them. That was evident when MTV posted a call on the show's Facebook page asking fans to send along before and after photos of their own weight loss. According to MTV News , "immediately [they] were flooded with some incredible responses," highlighting stories, "along with the jaw-dropping before and after pics!
In addition to photos, fans also shared their uplifting tales. One viewer, Jennifer, revealed that watching Gabriella Caloiero's episode gave her the impetus to follow her lead. Another fan, Ashley, said she was a nun when she saw an episode of I Used to Be Fat , but "knew it was everything that I was not supposed to be doing. Some TV shows focusing on weight loss have faced criticism for promoting too-rapid, unhealthy techniques framed in a weight-loss competition. One former contestant on The Biggest Loser , for example, blasted the show as "a fat-shaming disaster that I'm embarrassed to have participated in," as reported by the New York Post.
While I Used to Be Fat presumably received some similar criticism, the show also received positive feedback from experts. One of his top five was I Used to Be Fat.
Most television shows are teeming with thin, gorgeous celebrities. I Used to Be Fat was not one of those shows. As series participant Kelly Sanders told Inforum , she was "really nervous" about being compared to all those beautiful TV stars. Meanwhile, she learned that old saying about television cameras adding weight was not hyperbole.
I never saw myself like that. It was an eye-opener for me," she admitted. They didn't show this on the episode; my trainer and I did a lot of weight training. For us it was about being healthy, not just the weight. Having maintained her healthy lifestyle after her experience on the show ended, she added, "I don't really weigh myself, but I go by how my clothes fit and how I feel. Today, MTV announced that they are looking for high school seniors who have 40 to pounds to lose to star on the second season of the docuseries.
Prospective participants were given an email address to contact, urging students to "be sure to include a paragraph explaining why you want to be on the show and lose weight before starting college.
I Used to Be Fat helped numerous teenagers lose weight before college, yet the show also provided some unexpected exposure for singer-songwriter Natascha Hagen, whose song "Run" was used on the show. It's all about helping you reach your goals and getting motivated to get off your tail and start working out. She added, "One of the main points that I tried to make when recording this song is that you have to be willing to overcome your personal doubts and fears if you want to succeed.
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