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Calories & Corsets book cover
Calories & Corsets
A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years
2011
First Published
3.32
Average Rating
274
Number of Pages
This is an enlightening and entertaining social history of how we have tried (and failed) to battle the bulge over two millennia. Today we are urged from all sides to slim down and shape up, to shed a few pounds or lose life-threatening stones. The media's relentless obsession with size may be perceived as a twenty-first-century phenomenon, but as award-winning historian Louise Foxcroft shows, we have been struggling with what to eat, when and how much, ever since the Greeks and the Romans first pinched an inch. Meticulously researched, surprising and sometimes shocking, "Calories and Corsets" tells the epic story of our complicated relationship with food, the fashions and fads of body shape, and how cultural beliefs and social norms have changed over time. Combining research from medical journals, letters, articles and the dieting bestsellers we continue to devour (including one by an octogenarian Italian in the sixteenth century), Foxcroft reveals the extreme and often absurd lengths people will go to in order to achieve the perfect body, from eating carbolic soap to deliberately swallowing tapeworm. This unique and witty history exposes the myths and anxieties that drive today's multi-billion pound dieting industry - and offers a welcome perspective on how we can be healthy and happy in our bodies.
Avg Rating
3.32
Number of Ratings
240
5 STARS
13%
4 STARS
23%
3 STARS
49%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Louise Foxcroft
Author · 3 books

Louise Foxcroft read History at the University of Cambridge as a mature student in the early 1990s. In 2007 she published an academic title, The Making of Addiction: The ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain (Ashgate), which developed the research of her PhD thesis. This was followed by her first general book, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (Granta, 2009) which ranked as Amazon’s No.1 History of Medicine title for some weeks. Broadly as Medical Historian, she has specialised in medical perceptions of the human body and at the way these are related to present day, personal, human experience - this makes for some really in-depth questions and analyses, not to mention the absurdities, of how we live our lives now. An occasional supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Louise Foxcroft has also written for The London Review of Books, The Guardian, New Humanist, Erotic Review, Daily Mail and The Times, and has been a guest on several BBC Radio programmes. As a Non-Alcoholic Trustee on the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous GB since 2006 she has been working on AA literature, and speaking at conferences and press events, both national and international.

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