Alles schon mal dagewesen. Geschichte der Schlankheitskuren (Time Line - link)
NZZ Folio April 2014 - Thema: Diät
Foxcroft, L: Rauchen, lesen, Seifen essen. Seit dem 19.Jahrh. geben Quacksalber Tips zum Abnehmen (Geschichte der Diätindustrie) (NZZ Folio - link)
Kalorien-reduzierte Diäten: F-X-Mayr-Kur (1912); Kalorien-Zählen (LH Peters, 1918) (eBook); Brigitte-Diät (1969); Weight Watchers (1963); Mittelmeerdiät (Kreta-Diät) (1975) Slim Fast (1977) ; Sears- oder Zone-Diät (1995); Ediets.Com (1997, erste Online-Diät); Baby-Food-Diät (2010); 5:2-Diät - Periodisches Fasten (2012) (Intermittierendes Fasten)
Low-Carb-Diäten (viel mageres Fleisch: Banting 1864; Hollywood-Diät (1927) (auch Beverly Hills Diets 1981; "Grapefruits"); Lutz-Diät (1967); Atkins-Diät (1972); Steinzeit- od. Paleo-Diät (1975) Scarsdale-Diät (1978); Dukan-Diät (1978); Montignac-Methode (1987); South-Beach-Diät (2003); Metabolic-Balance (2002)
Vegetarisch (Weltanschauliche Aspekte): erstes vegetarisches Kochbuch - 1874 - The Hygeian Home Cookbook"; 1897 - Makrobiotik (1897): Vegan (1987)
Trenn-Kost (William H Hay) (1911);  Fit-For-Life-Diät (1985); Schlank im Schlaf (Detlef Pape) (2006)
Diet-to-Go (website - amerk.Diät-Freihauslieferant) (1991)
Appetit-Zügler - Diät-Bonbons "AYDS 3" - 1937
Schlank durch Rauchen (1928 - Lucky Strike) "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet"
Blutgruppen-Diät (1996)

Gilman, SL: Diets and dieting: a cultural encyclopedia; 2008
Dosters,A.: Die verrükte Geschichte der Diät. Schlankheitswahn und Schönheitskult. 2013

Louise Foxcroft: „Calories & Corsets. A history of dieting over 2000 years.” Profile Books, London; 2012

Mittags erbrechen Von Thadeusz, Frank (Spiegel Nr.5; 30.1.2012)
Seit über 2000 Jahren mühen sich Menschen abzunehmen. Vorreiter des Diätwahns waren lange Zeit die Männer. Noch in der Antike war es ein Privileg der Männer, sich über die Beschaffenheit ihres Körpers Sorgen zu machen. Der Herrscher Dionysios von Herakleia hatte dazu allen Grund. Der Vielfraß war spektakulär fett und dramatisch kurzatmig. Aus Scham über die eigene Erscheinung mochte der Fleischklops nur noch auf ungewöhnliche Weise mit seinen Untertanen konferieren: Er verbarg seinen Leib in einem mannshohen Turm, aus dem nur der Kopf herauslugte. Häufig fiel der Tyrann in einen komatösen Schlaf, begleitet von gefährlichen Aussetzern der Atmung. Seine Ärzte stachen dann "sehr lange, dünne Nadeln durch seine Hüften und seinen Bauch", berichtete der römische Rhetoriklehrer Claudius Aelianus, um den bedenklich mit Sauerstoff unterversorgten Regenten aufzuwecken. Der Eingriff am verfetteten Leib des Dionysios im 4. Jahrhundert vor Christus gilt Fachleuten als besonders frühes Beispiel einer medizinischen Intervention bei Fettsucht. Ein nachhaltiger Erfolg der rüden Methode ist allerdings nicht verbrieft. Die skurrile Episode markiert den Anfang jener mittlerweile über 2000-jährigen Geschichte irriger und absurder Diätbemühungen, die jetzt von der britischen Medizinhistorikerin Louise Foxcroft zusammengetragen wurde(*). Von der Antike bis in die jüngste Zeit verfolgten Menschen das Ideal festen Fleisches und einer schlanken Figur demnach mit einem unerschöpflichen Arsenal abseitiger Methoden. Überraschend dabei: Der Schlankheitswahn der Frauen nimmt in historischem Maßstab nur vergleichsweise wenig Raum ein. Erst seit etwa hundert Jahren steht das weibliche Idealmaß derart im Vordergrund, als wäre dies immer schon so gewesen. So scherzte 1923 der damals populäre britische Diätarzt Cecil Webb-Johnson: "Ein dicker Mann ist ein Witz. Eine dicke Frau ist ein doppelter Witz - auf sich selbst und auf Kosten ihres Mannes." In den Jahrhunderten davor, so Foxcroft, waren jedoch meist Männer die treibende Kraft an der Abmagerungsfront. Sie ersannen nicht nur mit nie versiegender Kreativität zweifelhafte Kuren, sondern waren zumeist auch selbst Adressaten der Behandlung. Der griechische Arzt Hippokrates etwa gängelte seine beleibten Patienten mit regelrechten Brechkuren. "Übergewichtige sollten sich in der Mitte des Tages erbrechen, nach einem langen Marsch und vor der ersten Mahlzeit des Tages", empfahl der Medicus. Brechmittel der Wahl war ein Ysop-Trunk, gewürzt mit Essig und Salz. Die ersten auflagenstarken Diätratgeber in der Geschichte orientierten sich noch stark an der antiken griechischen Säftelehre. So schrieb der Autor Sir Thomas Elyot in dem um 1540 erschienenen Werk "Castel of Helth", Fisch sei dem Fleisch unterlegen, weil er das Blut verdünne. Butter sei nahrhaft; Käse sei ein Feind des Magens; Früchte könnten ge- fährlich sein, weil sie üble Säfte erzeugten, die faulige Fiebergase aufsteigen ließen. Diätpamphleten von ehemals exzessiven Völlern, die sich zu Asketen gewandelt hatten, war besonderer Erfolg beschieden. Der venezianische Kaufmann Luigi Cornaro etwa wandelte sich als 40-Jähriger vom Lebemann zum Gesundheitsapostel und verfolgte fortan seine Zeitgenossen mit missionarischem Eifer. Im Buch "Vom mäßigen Leben" (erschienen 1558) predigte der Zelot unbedingte Enthaltsamkeit bei Tisch. Sich selbst gönnte der Konvertit zeitweilig nur einen Eidotter zum Mittag. Die Ideen Cornaros blieben bis ins 20. Jahrhundert lebendig. Zum frühen Vorbild und Star aller selbstverliebten und dürren Bürgersöhnchen avancierte insbesondere auch der englische Dichter Lord Byron. Verzückt vom romantischen Ideal des blassen und hageren Poeten, traktierte der zum Übergewicht neigende Schriftsteller seinen Körper dauerhaft mit Hungerkuren. Zwischen 1806 und 1811 magerte Byron von 88 auf 57 Kilo ab. Anders als dem fastenden Cornaro, der rund hundert Jahre alt wurde, nützte dem Dichter seine Schlankheit wenig: Er starb 36-jährig, geschwächt durch Aderlässe. Auch andere Schriftsteller verfielen dem Diätwahn. Die Autoren Franz Kafka und Henry James etwa beabsichtigten zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, mit den Lehren des Amerikaners Horace Fletcher ihren Körper in Gertenform zu halten. Fletcher predigte minutenlanges Kauen der Mahlzeiten. James bejubelte zunächst den "göttlichen Fletcher" - verlor nach einigen Jahren des mühsamen Mümmelns jedoch die Geduld und entwickelte einen "von Ekel gespeiste Abscheu" vor Essen. Womöglich fehlte den Männern in der Mehrzahl letztlich der fanatische Wille zur Magerkeit. Die Zeitenwende im Hungerkampf wurde mit einem Fanal eingeleitet. 1895 berichtete das Fachblatt "The Lancet" über den aufsehenerregenden Fall einer 16-Jährigen aus dem englischen Bristol, die sich bis zur Einlieferung in ein Krankenhaus gehungert hatte. Die Patientin wurde ans Bett gefesselt und alle vier Stunden mit pulverisierter Kost zwangsernährt. Die Bemühungen blieben zwecklos, das Mädchen verstarb. Mediziner verzeichneten den ersten bekannten Todesfall infolge von Magersucht. (*) Louise Foxcroft: "Calories & Corsets. A history of dieting over 2000 years". Profile Books, London; 232 Seiten.

Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years by Louise Foxcroft -  guardian.co.uk, 13.1.2012
The sin of being too thin was a charge levelled at a whole generation of women in the 1920s. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Going on a diet in January is what we are supposed to do, along with feeling guilty about credit card bills and anticipating summer holidays. It is the way in which the natural function of eating has become wedged into an artificial cycle of anticipation, indulgence and penance, Louise Foxcroft says, that makes the whole business such a sick one. We are set up to falter and fail and start again, getting fatter with each turn of the year. Meanwhile, the peddlers of diet books, supplements and DVDs grow sleek on our misery. Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years by Louise Foxcroft Buy it from the Guardian bookshop Search the Guardian bookshop Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book Still, that's no reason not to try to wring some fun – and a book – out of it. Calories & Corsets is a brisk jog through the ways in which women, and men too, have attempted to imagine and regulate their bodies from ancient times to the present. Given that Foxcroft wraps it all up in 200 pages, this is not intended as an account of great depth. Foxcroft's breezy style, spiked with the occasional outraged squeak at the pity of it all, allows her to embed entertaining case histories in a loosely chronological narrative. There is Byron, the most famous serial dieter of them all, who managed to transform himself from a bit of a porker into the satisfactorily attenuated shape required of a Romantic poet. He sipped vinegar, slurped pap and, of course, swam the Hellespont which must have burnt up 4,000 calories in one go. Still, no matter how slender he got, m'lord still retained the exacting eye of the chronically eating disordered. Chased around London by Caroline Lamb, whom no one could accuse of being either sane or pleasingly plump, he shrieked that he was being stalked by a "skeleton". Lady Caroline, then, had committed that other great dieting sin of being Too Thin. It was an accusation that was to be levelled at a whole generation of women in the 1920s. On the one hand doctors awarded the post-first world war generation metaphorical gold stars for having weaned themselves off the bustled bottoms and pouter-pigeon chests of the previously deforming age. But now it looked as though this cohort of small-hipped, flat-chested, crop-haired chits was trying to replace all those young men who had been lost on the Western Front. Get any thinner, said the doctors, peering metaphorically over their half-moon spectacles, and there was a good chance that they would all turn into lesbians. This stuff is battily fun, but Foxcroft does more than simply string anecdotes together for comic effect. She is, for instance, particularly good on the genealogy of diets. Take the Hay diet of the early 20th century. Contrary to what some contemporaries thought, this didn't involve eating dried grass, but decreed instead that you consume your proteins, fats and carbs at separate sittings. All nonsense of course, but Henry Ford swore by it. Tweaked just a little, this monotrophic regime became the all-conquering Beverly Hills Diet of the 1980s. In much the same way, the high-protein Atkins regime which swept all before it in the late 90s, has recently been rejigged, given a seductive French accent, and now shifts masses of product as the Dukan diet. The Hay, Atkins and Dukan programmes all benefit from the important "Dr" prefix, which gives a reassuring stamp of approval, regardless of whether the science holds up. If you don't want to put your faith in clever men, however, you could always try God. One of the most amusing sections in Calories & Corsets concerns the fundamentalist weight loss movement that flourished during the 60s and 70s in the States. At that time you could take your pick from such soulful approaches as "I Prayed Myself Slim", "More of Jesus, Less of Me" and "Help Lord: the Devil Wants Me Fat". And yet this approach identified what the heathen majority is still struggling to believe: that fatness is the result of what happens inside your head as much as your stomach. Take God out of the equation and substitute what used to be called the patriarchy and you have Susie Orbach's Fat Is a Feminist Issue, a book at which it would still be considered rude to snigger. This endless short-circuiting shows how slippery any discussion about the diet industry always becomes. You may start off with the best of intentions, determined merely to describe rather than judge how people have historically tried to manipulate their shape. But before you get very far you find yourself compromised. Indeed, three quarters of the way through the book Foxcroft stops piling up the stories – the fat man whose coffin had to be rolled through the town on wheels, the European empress who wouldn't eat if her waist went beyond 19½in – and starts to sound as if she is employed by a health charity to promote sensible weight loss. In one sense there's nothing wrong with this. You'd be silly (though silly in a normal sort of way) if you thought that a crash diet was the means to physical and psychological happiness. But so pervasive is our diet culture, as well as our anti-diet culture, that Foxcroft never questions whether the "eat sensibly/exercise moderately/think long-term" approach is not in fact simply another cultural specific dressed up as an enduring truth. For what this entertaining book unwittingly reveals is that you cannot write a popular history of dieting without becoming part of the murky industry you are trying to critique. • Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.

Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years By Louise Foxcroft (Profile Books 320pp £14.99) (Literary Review)
A book about dieting is almost bound by law to have a picture of a woman on the cover. But Louise Foxcroft's entertaining and occasionally stomach-churning history of the subject is a revelation about the weight problems of men. Daniel Lambert, who was born in Leicester in 1770, was just over five feet tall and weighed fifty-two stone; when he died, at the age of thirty-nine, he was rolled through the streets in a wheeled coffin to his grave: 'Corpulency', it was said at the time, 'constantly increased until the clogged machinery of life stood still, and this prodigy of Mammon was numbered with the dead.' Dr Johnson struggled with his weight, getting fatter and fatter as he got older. As for Coleridge, I'm not sure I will be able to think of the poet in future without shuddering over his own graphic description of the consequences of over-eating: Weight, Langour, & the soul-sickening Necessity of attending to barren bodily sensations, in bowels ... the endless Flatulence, the frightful constipation when the dead Filth impales the lower Gut ... to weep & sweat & moan & scream for the parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality. Unsurprisingly, Dorothy Wordsworth used the phrase 'bad bowels' in her journals when she was writing about Coleridge. Lord Byron was a classic example of what would now be called a yo-yo dieter, bingeing on food and then using quack diets to get the weight off. He weighed 13st 12lb in 1806 but got down to 9st in 1811; we know this because the wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd installed hanging scales at their establishment in St James's, where both Byron and Beau Brummell had themselves weighed. His own problems didn't make Byron any more sympathetic towards Lady Caroline Lamb, whose dramatic loss of weight from grief over the end of their affair led him to remark that he was being 'haunted by a skeleton'. I've long suspected that Byron had an eating disorder. Anorexia isn't a subject that features much in Foxcroft's book, although she does present a striking image of Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie von Wittelsbach, Empress-Consort of Franz Joseph I, who refused to eat if her waist exceeded nineteen-and-a-half inches. In 1892, a visitor encountered Sisi, as she was known, suspended from hand rings in the makeshift gym installed in her boudoir: 'She wore a black silk dress with a long train, hemmed with magnificent black ostrich feathers ... Hanging on the ropes, she made a fantastic impression, like a creature somewhere between a snake and a bird.' This isn't something I recommend trying at your local gym but it turns out that Sisi's anorexia had nothing to do with her premature demise; she was murdered in Geneva by an anarchist who wanted to assassinate the King of Italy but couldn't afford the fare. Foxcroft's book is full of startling anecdotes, but she also has a serious purpose. Over the long historical period she is writing about, obesity stopped being a problem for the affluent and became associated with the eating habits - fast food, high calories, poor nutrition - of the less well-off. Although men are at least as much affected by obesity as women in prosperous societies, food addictions also came to be seen as a largely female problem, with women forming the principal target for a multimillion-dollar diet industry: 'Nobody Loves a Fat Girl', a 1950s advert for Ry-Krisp warned. If willpower wasn't enough to do the trick, the Vanishette corset promised to 'INSTANTLY Vanish 4 INCHES OF YOUR WAIST'. At some point, evangelical Christianity got into the act and American women were offered volumes with titles such as I Prayed Myself Slim and - guaranteed to cause instant vomiting, I would have thought - More of Jesus, Less of Me. Devotions for Dieters, published in 1967, even offered a special prayer: 'I promise not to sit and stuff/But stop when I have had enough./Amen.' Foxcroft is sardonic about all this quackery, moralising and misogyny. Her book describes a centuries-old battle as physicians who understood the relationship between consumption and corpulence struggled with charlatans who offered 'easy' solutions. Many of the practitioners who offered sensible advice knew from personal experience that there was no fast route to losing weight and keeping it off: the London undertaker William Banting, whose name became a synonym for slimming in the 1860s, published his diet books after struggling to get his own weight down from 202 to 156lb. In the twenty-first century, it seems obvious that the commercial diet industry encourages obsessional attitudes to food that make weight loss more difficult. Everyone knows someone who is always on one diet or another, without apparent effect or only to pile weight on again within a few months. At the end of her book, Louise Foxcroft suggests that 'we can't, and shouldn't, remove the story of diets from the story of health, but we can do something about the weight of judgement and the smear of sin and temptation'. Her recommendations are eminently sensible, based on a long-term, balanced, low-carbohydrate approach which would have been familiar to the (healthy) ancient Greeks. It certainly sounds a lot better than putting your faith in either Atkins or Jesus.