Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2000 Years. By Louise Foxcroft.

After the binge of the holidays, many stumble into January with a hangover, some fragile resolutions and a desire to shed a few pounds. Alas, few will benefit from rigid calorie-counting or cabbage-soup slurping. In a recent study of 31 long-term diet plans, the American Psychological Association found that up to two-thirds of participants ended up heavier than before they started. Some diets are more sensible than others, but any regimen that promises swift and dramatic results will doom most followers to failure. Weight-loss pills and surgery are similarly ineffective—and sometimes dangerous—over time. Yet girth-management is big business, full of charismatic hucksters and fake science (fat-burning lip balm?), earning $40 billion a year in America alone.

“The diet industry is all about exploitation and profit,” writes Louise Foxcroft in “Calories and Corsets”, her slim new book about the history of dieting. Less a banquet than a tasting menu (the tone is breezy, opinionated and occasionally rushed), she chronicles more than 2,000 years of movers, shakers and tummy-tuckers, highlighting both the wise and the wacky.

The word diet comes from the Greek diaita, an approach to health that linked the mental with the physical. Classical physicians saw being too fat or thin as a sign of an imbalance. Man “cannot live healthily on food without a certain amount of exercise”, observed Hippocrates, who believed in breakfast, long walks and prudent vomiting. Philosophers such as Socrates saw a relationship between food and ethics, as a taste for luxury often leads to greed and unjust behaviour.

Unlike the other deadly sins, gluttony is visible and so is often judged harshly, as if heft were always evidence of wanton indulgence or laziness. (The link between genetics and metabolism was not discovered until the 20th century.) In particularly hard times such as the two world wars, fat people were seen as traitors. Greater access to food and a rising stigma against podge helped inspire the fashion for corsets in the 17th century, which caused overlapping ribs, bad breath and the occasional death. When it comes to diets, women occupy a perversely central place, argues Ms Foxcroft. They are condemned for their gluttony, criticised for their vanity, manipulated for their insecurity心神不定 and also blamed for the flab on their husbands and children.

Until the 18th century, ideas on diet were mostly about healthy eating, morality and control. Laxatives and emetics were common, but many philosophers and physicians had sensible ideas about restraint and nutrition. By the early 19th century complaints about fat became rife, as even the working class had moved from the fields to the calorie-rich cities. This created a larger market for dieting solutions, particularly fads such as cold-rain douches, chest beatings, electrode zappings and massages that promised to crush subcutaneous fat globules.

The 19th century saw a chap named William Banting bring the first low-carbohydrate diet to a mass audience. A study in the Lancet later confirmed the value of favouring protein and fat over carbs well before a once overweight cardiologist named Robert Atkins figured this out for himself. Horace Fletcher, otherwise known as “The Great Masticator”, was emphatic about chewing each mouthful of food until it was liquid, and counted John D. Rockefeller and Franz Kafka among his disciples.

There have been other gurus, plans, drugs and devices, but most offer short-lived results and long-term angst. Lasting changes need slow but steady modifications to lifestyle. Inspired by those early Greeks, who wished to achieve personal balance, not an ideal body type, Ms Foxcroft offers a suggestion that sounds enough like a resolution: “make sensible choices and stick to them.”