Dieting, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

The Paleo diet, the keto diet, the Atkins diet, the Dukan diet, the Mediterranean diet and many more are supposed to help you live up to your fullest potential. But where did the idea of dieting even come from? And who decides what the beauty standards are? The history of diet culture is more interesting than you think.

I do not know how many of you were avid watchers of The Oprah Show, but my family and I made it our business to watch its every season once we had moved to Belgium. Elevated daytime tv is the best way to describe it, as Oprah had celebrities, writers, philosophers and world leaders drop by her show for a chat. However, this is not how her show began. It all started like any other show on daytime tv, with Oprah interviewing mostly non-celebrities about their lives and experiences. It was also, at least in the early years, a video diary of Oprah’s relationship with her body. She publicly documented the fluctuations in her weight. One of the most memorable moments in this journey happened during an episode in November of 1988, when she walked onto the stage, pulling a red wagon filled with about 30 kilograms of pig fat.

The first best-selling diet guide, published in 1863, suggested a diet regimen that was associated with masculinity, wealth and racial superiority.

The wagon represented the amount of weight she had lost in the past six months. During the episode she and her other guests elaborated on the diets they followed to lose weight. The result was a 45-minute episode about what essentially turned out to be six weeks of medically sanctioned starvation. The video clip is still online to this day and if you have not seen it, I would encourage you to watch it as it is mind-boggling. Oprah is not the only one resorting to strict diets to achieve her ‘goal weight’, we’ve all stood in her shoes. We have all made New Year’s resolutions to finally lose that extra weight, internalising fatphobic messaging and convincing ourselves that a dignified life is only awarded to ones able to fit into society’s mould of the perfect body. One that is white, thin, tall, cis-heterosexual, and able-bodied.

The origins of dieting

Dieting is a common practice today, and the first anti-fat campaign can be traced back to 1670’s Europe, when a small group of medical experts started warning people for the dangers of gaining weight. Their endeavours were fruitless, as thinness used to be closely associated with starvation, illness and poverty. In contrast, fatness was associated with beauty, vitality and health. Nevertheless, in the late 18th century more successful campaigns in Britain started to gain traction as fatness came to be perceived as a medical problem. This coincided with a growing public discourse on conspicuous consumption, leading to the first real dieting craze. Initially, dieting advice only focused on men. Warning pamphlets about the risks involved with overeating and over-indulgence were frequently distributed at gentlemen’s clubs, businesses, and in newspapers. The pamphlets referred to the act of overeating as ‘ungentlemanly, ‘unmanly’ and ‘un-English’. An important distinction, as since the advent of diet culture people who were labelled as fat, were being othered. In a mirror image, racial and ethnic minorities were depicted as overweight and were therefore perceived as less disciplined, more sexual and unfit to exercise any social power.

Historian Roberta Seid situates the first significant shift towards thinness as an aesthetic craze in 1919.

Indeed, in this period, overeating and over-indulgence in general became a problem for the newly wealthy as the people born into money and wealth had long-developed mechanisms against it. In contrast, people who had just come into wealth via better paying jobs, were at risk of overindulging in everything - including food - as they were seen to have fewer distractions, such as hunting or sports, to keep them occupied. Some historians have also suggested that people started to use dieting as a coping mechanism in order to deal with the stress of a rapidly changing society by the increasing industrialisation in Europe and the US.

Moreover, in the 19th century the public discourse on the supposedly growing similarities between men and women evolved. Men were becoming too feminine due to the increase in managerial jobs that required a mostly sedentary lifestyle, while women were becoming too masculine because of their participation in politics and academia, or other previously male-dominated domains of interest and access. Consequently, this led to a flourishing popularity of outdoor male-centred sports, such as cricket, football, and rugby. All this culminated in the first best-selling diet guide, A Letter On Corpulence by William Banting, published in 1863. Aimed towards men, this guide suggested a diet regimen that was associated with masculinity, wealth and racial superiority. Consisting of red meat, fruit and alcohol, the regimen advised men to eat smaller meals four times a day, and engage in sports outside the home, such as cricket. On top of that, Banting strongly believed in self-regulation. According to him, being overweight was a personal problem, a sign of laziness, and an ungentlemanly character trait.

The caricature known as Aunt Jemima, arguably the first mammy in popular culture, was artificially fattened on the products that used her image.

As for women, any dieting advice in this period was largely ignored, because plump, rounded or curvy physiques were glorified. The more exercise was considered as a solely male activity, the more women were expected and even encouraged to sleep in, have fun and spend time with young men. This, of course, only applied to white women of the higher social class. Additionally, curvaceous female bodies were prized as signs of fertility. This is evidenced by a text from 1893, suggesting that women ate one-third less food once they hit the ripe old age of 45. Conventional wisdom of the time stated that ovaries shrivelled up after 45 years and therefore no longer needed to be fed. However, it would be wrong to state that women did not engage in dieting at all. Letters written to popular magazines reveal that women were asking for dieting advice. Since women treated their bodies as vessels of rebellion by using dieting and fasting to show that they were capable of exercising self-control too, a boom in diet culture arose in the late 19th century.

It is important to reiterate that during these developments in Europe and the United States, black people, people of colour, poor people and differently abled people were, however, subject to different conventions. For instance, the caricature known as Aunt Jemima, arguably the first mammy in popular culture, was artificially fattened on the products that used her image. According to author Katharina Vester’s article, this characterisation was a symbol of revisionist history, which subliminally depicted a South that fed and treated enslaved people generously.

Dieting as an aesthetic craze

In the 19th century, dieting was widely associated with good health. But the concept of dieting, only to achieve thinness, really took off in the 20th century. Historian Roberta Seid situates the first significant shift towards thinness as an aesthetic craze in 1919. Undoubtedly, once cultural norms shifted and the slimmer figure became more lauded, the rounder, more voluptuous physique fell out of favour. This move towards thinness is evidenced by the diet culture at Smith College, a women’s college, in the early 1900s. As previously stated, women used to be encouraged to gain weight in the 1800s, because they had to appear healthy to society at large.

The diet industry as we know it today was shaped by the post-war era, the 1950s to 1970s.

For women in higher education, however, looking healthy at all times meant something different. Critics felt that academic life would destroy their health. Using ‘scientific’ methods to back this claim, these critics stated that intensive use of the brain would usurp the body’s finite resources and deplete the female reproductive system. By consequence, college-going women would become infertile and would cause the annihilation of the human race, especially if too many women were admitted to institutions of higher learning. Weight gain, therefore, would balance out the effects of getting an education on the female body. By the 1920s, female students would start focusing on ‘reducing’, the term used for losing weight. They would eat less and refrain from snacking in between meals, diligently keeping track of when and how much they ate.

Rather quickly some of them started overly restricting their diets, causing concern amongst fellow students and faculty alike. In fact, three students wrote a letter to the editor of the college newspaper in 1924, cautioning the faculty: ‘If preventive measures against strenuous dieting are not taken soon, Smith College will become notorious, not for the sylph-like forms but for the haggard faces and dull, listless eyes of her student’s’. The women attending Smith College were not acting out of nowhere. Changing social norms informed their decisions, just as they inform our decisions today. Beauty standards are not just a particular aesthetic, they are a set of implicit metrics that determine one's value in society, which in turn often determine our material conditions and consequently our quality of life. It is therefore not surprising that we fall or have fallen for the grift that is diet culture.

The modern day dieting industry

During the greater part of history, chronic food shortage and malnutrition has plagued the human race. Technological advancements of the 18th century gradually increased our food supplies. Yet, it took us a little over one century to start restricting access to food under the guise of health, which is a very short period of time if we take into account that humans have been on the planet for millennia.

The diet industry as we know it today was shaped by the post-war era, the 1950s to 1970s. Dieting pills, slimming clubs like Weight Watchers and before-and-after photo advertisements became more widespread. Several factors led to this rebirth of dieting in the post-war period. Firstly, through consumerism as the way to rebuild society after the war, the middle class started to grow. Housewives became the primary targets for advertisements, which became increasingly sophisticated. Secondly, the use of processed foods increased due to food technology becoming more prevalent. As a result, artificial sweeteners were present in almost everything, from soft drinks to tv-dinners. Marketing campaigns increasingly depicted heavily processed frozen dinners as an easy alternative to spend time on fresh cooking every day.

While we can easily spot the language of shame used in older advertisements, it is harder to spot the lies in a social media clip of an influencer, who promotes a raw vegan diet in an idyllic location, wearing yoga pants.

Media consumption also increased with the introduction of the television, which had a very big impact on the visibility of weight loss aids, such as diet pills. Advertisers used the now very popular before-and-after template to showcase their products and let ordinary women tell their stories about the benefits of taking said pills to lose weight. Other aids, such as vibrating belts for smaller hips, were also popularised by television. Modern-day diets are no less restrictive than those from the past, they are just marketed better. While we can easily spot the language of shame used in older advertisements, it is harder to spot the lies in a social media clip of an influencer, who promotes a raw vegan diet in an idyllic location, wearing yoga pants. They operate on the social currency of authenticity to sell us extreme diets, like raw food and water-only fasts, as well as new tools, such as waist trainers, detox teas and weight loss supplements that take the 19th century falsehood of individual responsibility to a whole new level.

We cannot talk about fatphobia without acknowledging all the other oppressive structures that make it possible in the first place. It is the distance one has from blackness, fatness, queerness and disability that grants them access to better medical care, housing, representation, education and safety. Fatphobia is systemic, violent and oppressive, and all diet culture does is push the idea of fatness as an individual moral failure. If your 5 times a week and 1 hour per day gym routine and keto diet is fuelled by the desire to be thin, I would invite you to ask yourself: why?