From "Fat Is In" to "Slim-Thick" - A History of Dieting
From the time of the Victorians to the time of the Kardashians, there's always been a body type that's been "in." The only problem? It's always changing, In this episode, we talk to Dr. Katharina Vester of American University about the origins of body ideals and how they have impacted society and culture over time. Having a six pack used to mean you were broke? Only men were allowed to watch their weight? The surprising history of dieting and our bodies. All show notes on our website.
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Guest
Dr. Katharina Vester is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at American University, specializing in cultural theory and power throughout history, including American dieting culture as it intersects with race, gender, and nationalism.
Academic Profile | Publication | Book | Interview
Takeaways
1800 to early 1900s - Corpulence was a sign of wealth / thinness was associated with poverty.
1860s - Rise in the middle class, who assert more control over their bodies through dieting. Dieting is marketed to men.
1863 - William Banting writes the first ever “diet book” for men outlining his drastic weight loss journey. Men are pursuing diets and more athletic physiques, while women are expected to be voluptuous.
1880s to 1890s - First women begin dieting to assert control over their bodies as a form of resistance.
Early 1900s - Rise of the Gibson Girl; She is independent and athletic–the first “It Girl.”
1914 to 1918 - World War I: Any type of fat is considered “unpatriotic” because food resources needed to be allocated to the war. Popular dieting advice spreads. The sender body ideal for women spreads.
1920s - This marks the rise of “flappers,” who have a straight, “boyish” figure.
1930s and 1940s - The Great Depression and WWII: Working class people are starving in the United States, and people are dying in Europe, so there is less dieting advice and portrayal of slenderness as the ideal body type.
1950s to present - Dieting is a more feminine activity. Women diet for appearance. Men diet for health reasons, although often to lesser extremes. Body ideals fluctuate from “thin with curves” to just “thin.”
1950s - more voluptuous (e.g. Marilyn Monroe)
1980s - fitness craze (Jane Fonda)
1990s - heroin chic - very thin body (Paris Hilton)
2010s - Slim-thick (Kim Kardashian)
2020s - Social media can be both toxic (if you follow only slender influencers), or empowering (if you follow diverse bodies who look like “real” people).
Race, class, and dieting - African American and immigrant women are portrayed as overweight which is used to legitimize white “superiority” and white peoples’ “control” over their own bodies, in comparison to oppressed communities’ “lack of control.”
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Juna Hey, guys, it's Juna. If you're enjoying this show, might I ask you the favor to go on to whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on and give us our rating and review? It really helps us out and more importantly, helps other people find the show. Thank you so much. And now to the show. Food We Need to talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, home of Full Plate Living. Eddie, I've got a question for you.
Eddie Hit me.
Juna Do you know what a slim thick is?
Eddie Kind of sounds like an oxymoron.
Juna Okay. No, slim thick is actually this new body ideal that is popularized by none other than the queen herself, Kim Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian I'm excited to be here tonight to show you guys that I'm so much more than just a pretty face.
Kim Kardashian And good hair and.
Kim Kardashian Great makeup and amazing boobs and a perfect butt.
Eddie But wait, wait, wait. So what is it?
Juna Slim, thick is this body ideal that has become really popular now, which is basically about being curvy but only in the right places. So it's basically like having a big butt and like curvy legs, but having a really, really small waist. Meanwhile, when I was growing up, the look that was in was the heroin chic, very thin body type, a.k.a the Paris Hilton body.
Eddie I think I know what you're talking about. It's basically shifting body ideals depending on who's popular at the time. There's a certain body type that people aspire to.
Juna So this got me thinking where did these body ideals come from? Have we always had them? Have they always been the same? How did aspiring to have a certain body even become such a big thing, especially for women? The answer might shock you. I'm Jun Gjata.
Eddie And I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Juna And you're listening to Food, We Need to Talk. The only podcast that gives you the history of the Victorians and the Kardashians in the same episode. Okay. Let's meet today's guest from American University.
Katharina Vester I'm Katharina Vester. I'm an associate professor of history and American Studies.
Juna To start with the history of body ideals and dieting. We're going way back.
Eddie Ooh, like to the 1950s further. World War One?
Juna Further. We are going all the way back to ye olde days of the horse and buggy. The 1800s.
Eddie Oh, you mean really? Way back.
Katharina Vester So in the 18 and early 1900s, Corpulent was seen as a sign of wealth and success. So it was coveted, also meant to be of good health because corpulent would protect people from getting respiratory sickness, which were the diseases that were the most dangerous at the time.
Eddie Oh. So it's like having a layer of fat means that you're more likely to survive a really serious illness because, well, people lose weight when they get sick. So it makes sense that, I guess extra fat or corpulent, as Professor Vester says, means health. You know, at that time, the scourge of infectious diseases like tuberculosis was rampant. Another name for TB is consumption, because your body wastes away due to the disease.
Juna I find this so interesting because while fatness was associated with health and wealth until the mid 1800s, thinness was associated with poverty. So unlike today, you wouldn't be showing off your six pack because a six pack meant you were broke. On top of that, people didn't even think that their body weight was something that they could control.
Katharina Vester People thought that you cannot change your body weight. It's basically something that's beyond your determination. And, well, you can shape it from the outside through corsets. But to change that through diet or through your willpower was completely foreign to this age.
Juna Okay, I'm not going to lie. I still feel like this is the case today. Like, do any of us actually control our bodies? But anyways, that's beside the point.
Eddie Okay, but back then, being fat was in and being thin was not in. Yeah. When exactly did that start to change?
Juna So the shift actually begins somewhere in the 1860s and it starts in England.
Eddie The English, setting the trend.
Juna So in the mid 1800s, we start to see this rise in the middle class.
Katharina Vester The middle class is the new class that asks for participation in power. They ask for leadership and cultural taste making and that the idea is that the middle class needs to prove that they're able to have this kind of power. And they are asked to show this with self-mastery, with control over their bodies. And from Great Britain, it comes to the United States in the 1860s and addresses only men, because women are not considered to be able to master this control the same kind of control over their bodies as men. So dieting arrived in the United States as only addressing a male audience.
Eddie Woah dieting was a male only thing?
Juna I bet you didn't see that one coming. Dieting was starting out as something for men. So in the 1860s, William Banting, a British undertaker, writes the first ever dieting book called A Letter on Corpulence.
Eddie The dude was an undertaking.
Juna Appropriate.
Katharina Vester It's the first self-help dieting book written by a lay person, and it's incredibly popular in the U.K. and also in the United States.
Eddie Does this diet book look anything like the diet books of today?
Juna Funny you should ask. It actually looks like nothing of what we think of as dieting today.
Katharina Vester And so he has three course meals three times a day and then snacks in between. He has meat at every meal. He has alcohol at every meal. So it's very protein heavy. But it doesn't have vegetables. It has starches and has sweets. It's certainly not healthy. And that he was able to lose weight with his diet is actually a miracle.
Eddie Wow. Sounds like quite the meal plan there.
Juna One other important thing that William Banting gave us, besides the stellar dieting regimen, was this idea that his dramatic weight loss was like this big moral achievement. He talks about how he had these horrible health problems due to his weight and then after he conquers it, it saved his life.
Katharina Vester Dieting starts to become a demonstration of his success and willpower. So he is basically presenting this dieting as a feat, as a success that he has achieved in his own life. That reflects that he is actually a very successful person and not a lazy person as people start to associate corpulent person at this time.
Juna The gist of the letter was basically with thinness comes happiness.
Eddie Whoa, whoa. Danger. Danger. I am starting to see some roots of modern day diet culture here. I have a question. How do we know this diet book was only for men?
Juna Well, we actually have some pretty obvious clues within the pamphlet itself.
Katharina Vester The food that he is suggesting would be the food that men would be eating at this time. And women at this time also had more vegetables and more sweets. So this meat heavy diet was very much related to masculinity. But we also know that men were the targeted audience, because all the examples that he is using in his story are men and all the testimonials that he has added to the letter over the editions. So the Banting Men pamphlet goes into 17 editions in almost no time. And so at every addition he is adding some testimonials and they are all written by men.
Eddie Okay. Okay. So definitely directed at men.
Juna Not only that, but this time fatness was also becoming kind of like a gendered thing. It started to be associated with femininity. Oh.
Katharina Vester In the 1860s when men started dieting. This is also the heaviest decade for women, so women at this time become very voluptuous. So the ideal of women becomes very voluptuous. And we start to see this in art, in paintings, in the adoration of certain kinds of actresses. So there were men start to diet. Women are now targeted to actually fatten up, start to have advice, literature that teaches women to how to fatten up to follow the new beauty ideal for women.
Eddie It's almost like as slender ness becomes more associated with masculinity. They need a foil, a counter ideal, so fatness becomes more feminine.
Juna Exactly. So even in the 1880s and 1890s, when women start to be able to go to college, they're actually writing letters home to their parents, bragging about how much weight they've gained.
Katharina Vester The idea is to show that they thrive and they do this via weight and so they write home. So I gained a freshman five, something like that. And it's something that's considered being very positive and reassuring to the families.
Eddie So with inflation, it's now the freshman 15. But back then, imagine the freshman 15 as a goal rather than a failure.
Juna Guys like I know the rest of the 1800s kind of sucks, but low key. Can we bring this back? Because, like, gaining 5 pounds means I'm thriving. I would be so down for that. Like, that sounds awesome.
Eddie But weight loss moves over to women at some point. What are the first signs that we actually see women trying to diet?
Juna So apparently back in the day, there were these things called magazines. Not sure if you've ever heard of them. And then people would write letters or something into these magazines.
Eddie Yeah.
Juna And then they would enter your letters in these magazines. I think it's kind of the 1800 version of a question box on Instagram.
Eddie It had to start somewhere, Juna.
Katharina Vester They start to see this right away. So people write into women's magazines, which we have at this time already to the self-help columns. So they ask for recommendations on Banting. So dieting is called Banting. Back then, because of the letter. And at this time, the editors who answered these letters usually say, Don't do it. Since you're a woman, it's dangerous. Don't do it.
Woman It is a matter of personal concern to me to find out some way of reducing my super abundant flesh. One woman wrote to the Detroit Free Press in 1909, To make matters worse, my husband, who measures six feet, two inches in stocking feet, is very lean. If he goes on thinning and I continue to fatten, I foresee we will look like a barrel and a beanpole whenever we take our walks abroad.
Juna But then a little later, we start to see some people actually giving women advice on dieting. And here is another twist, guys. It's not coming from men.
Katharina Vester We start to see diet advice, addressing women emerging in the 1880s and nineties. And this is usually in places where female doctors write for a female audience, self-help books or advice books. And there we start to see dieting advice emerging, usually because these are activists who are against corsets and think that corsets are harmful to women.
Eddie I don't think you have to be a physician to see how tying fabric or even something metal to your body. And naturally squeezing your internal organs is probably not the best thing for your health.
Juna Probably not. Guys, these female doctors are like ladies. I know the corsets are making your waists look snatched, but it's time to throw them out the window.
Katharina Vester They suggest that women instead start dieting and create a corset of muscles. This is how it's often referenced. And so this is how it starts as a form of activism, where women say, we can we have the same willpower over our bodies like men have, and we have the same right to a healthy lifestyle that men have.
Eddie It seems like this really doesn't have much to do with health.
Juna No, it actually has a lot more to do with dress reform. So women didn't want to wear corsets anymore because they're uncomfortable. It's bad for them. And maybe even more importantly, it's a political thing, a way for men and women to be equal in society.
Katharina Vester So it's really meant to be a women's rights issue. That's because men used this idea of dieting to say, I have self control over my body, so I should have political control. I should participate in the political power of my society. So women did this, too. They said, I also have self-control over my body.
Juna In fact, this is why Professor Vester started to do a deep dive into this topic in the first place.
Katharina Vester And it started with a book that I read well, actually a few books that I read by Kate Chopin, which is a female writer in the late 19th century. And I noticed that all her female protagonists who are struggling with empowerment, freedom and the limitations of society that they get as a woman that they are often. And I thought, you know, so how how surprising that thinness is in these text, a sign of empowerment and modern femininity.
Juna This is why I thought this topic was so interesting, because the traditional narrative is.
Katharina Vester That dieting was introduced to distract women from more important political aims, and that dieting therefore is a form of oppression, which it is. Every norm that tells you how your body should be shaped or what your body should look like is, of course, a form of oppression. But the texts that I saw surprisingly always connected thinness with empowerment.
Eddie Okay, if dieting was seen as a male thing and then women started to do it in the late 1800s as a way to assert their equality, I'm guessing the men weren't too happy about this,.
Eddie. However, did you guess?
Eddie It's an age old theme.
Katharina Vester The first women who dieted in the 1880s or 1890s were criticized. There were severe warnings from hugely male doctors who said, you will be infertile if you continue your dieting, you will be overstimulated. So that which is the fear of hysteria at this time. There is a connection between homosexuality and dieting now so that the slender body is a rejection of heteronormativity. So it's really attacked from all sides for the first 20 years.
Eddie If women are being criticized for dieting, how does the thin body eventually become so popular today?
Juna Well, let's go to the first ever it girl, the Kim Kardashian of the early 1900s, one might say. This girl was called the Gibson Girl.
Advertisement The Gibson girl captured an era with her independence, self-assurance and above all, her beauty.
Katharina Vester The Gibson girl is the first IT girl now. So it's basically the idea that this is a very young girl. She is educated, she is active. She can go out and swim and she can go out and ride the bicycle. So there's a lot of spatial freedom and this comes with a certain look. What we see is that corsets become more flexible to allow for all this activity. So bodies become a little more slender. The exercise that belongs to the Gibson girl also make them maybe a little more toned. Although the Gibson Girl is not like our today's idea of slender. Yeah, so she usually has curves. That's very important. But there we see for the first time a more modern feminine ideal in American society.
Eddie Who would have thought that there were Kim Kardashian's back in the 1900s? I know, but Professor Vester said that the Gibson girl is still not the slender that we see today. So something must have shifted the body ideal even more towards thinness.
Juna Something sure did. And we'll find out exactly what it was right after this very slim break.
Eddie Food We Need to talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, the home of full plate living. Full plate living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples, beans, strawberries and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full plate living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers and better blood sugar management. Best of all, Full Plate Living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at fullplateliving.org.
Eddie And we're back.
Juna So where we left off, the Gibson girl had become all the rage in the early 1900s. The Gibson girl was seen as a more independent, more athletic, beautiful, but not absurdly thin, feminine ideal. But then in the 1920s, we have a new icon that I think we're all pretty familiar with.
Eddie Oh, I know what's coming next. The Flappers. Juna, did you know that my grandma was a flapper?
Juna I had no idea.
Eddie That.
Katharina Vester With a flapper, there's just no freedom of women smoking in public, going to bars, going to restaurants on their own. So that is a very revolutionary form of new femininity around, and that goes along with this very slender body. Ideal curves are no longer wanted and no longer considered to be beautiful. So it's quite a straight line, very boyish figure, which also is related at this point with a resistance of considering femininity as only three products. So the idea that fertility and femininity goes necessarily together is challenged by the flapper.
Juna So if you'll remember back to the idea of fat being feminine in the 1800s, kind of underlying that association implicitly is the link between weight and fertility. Like having a protruding stomach was actually seen as attractive and a sign of being able to have kids, you know, having very healthy children. Mm hmm. So when women's only job in society is to have kids, of course, having excess weight was seen as this, quote, beautiful thing. But then when the idea that women's only job is to have kids becomes challenged, all of a sudden, so does the ideal of fatness as a marker of femininity.
Eddie I have a question. Right before the 1920s is World War One. And obviously during times of war, food and resources there scarce. Do we know if this had any impact on attitudes towards dieting or being overweight?
Juna Okay, so you're 100% on to something at this point. Losing weight almost becomes a patriotic act.
Katharina Vester During World War One because the idea that any form of fat is actually unpatriotic because the United States needed its food resources to send it over to allies and then to their own troops when they started to engage in the war. So this is when you start to have dieting advice like popular dieting advice addressing female audience to. And this then translates in the 1920s in this new form of the Slender Woman as a citizen, as a full citizen of the United States.
Juna I know it's shocking to think about this today, but this is just around the time when women were getting the right to vote.
Katharina Vester And so there is this kind of victory dance where women say, and now we have it all and we want it all. We want also economic equality. We want an equal share in power. And the slender body is basically the embodiment of this new idea of femininity.
Eddie What I find so interesting about this is that the thinness, something that is so oppressive to so many people today, was actually seen as empowering back in the 1920s. It's almost backwards to how you might think the thin ideal arose.
Juna So that's true. But one throughline is that in both of these situations, a body is used as a sign of status. So in the 1800s, being thin meant you were poor. Right. Today, being overweight is a lot more associated with lower status in society. So either way, it's a way to use people's bodies to show where they are in society. But there's an aspect of this that we haven't even talked about yet.
Eddie And what's that?
Juna How incredibly white the thin ideal is.
Katharina Vester Dieting advice is inherently racist. So first, the idea is only white men are able to master this kind of control over their bodies. Then we start to see white women claiming that they have the same amount of self-control as white men. But again, both groups create a foil, and the foil is immigrant bodies and black bodies and bodies overseas.
Juna If being white means control over your body and power and wealth, then not being white must mean the opposite.
Katharina Vester It's only the white body and only the white middle class body that's able to control one's body weight. And this is connected with ideas of being more civilized, having the right to be in power. So in colonial situations, so we start to see it's a complete grotesque binary that the late 19th century presents to us, where everybody of color or of a working class background is considered to be overweight, and it's only the white middle class who can get this kind of control over their bodies.
Juna One example of this is the mammy trope.
Speaker 5 Hattie McDaniel was brilliant performance as Mammy made her the most famous and honored African American actress of her day. But it also put her in the very center of the controversy over racial stereotypes in the movies.
Movie Yes, hold and suck in. My name is. David. All about the kitchen I want. You to buy. Oh, yes, I'm you is.
Movie You want to eat every mouthful of this.
Katharina Vester It's quite disturbing. So as I said, already enslaved people were imagined to be as slender. So because they didn't have the access to the same resources as white people at this time. And this changes now. So we start to see the popping up of grotesquely fully overweight black women in the American popular imaginary. And the same is true for immigrants. So immigrant women are often depicted as grotesquely overweight and as not being able to control their appetites for sweets as being lazy. And so all these racist ideas are projected onto bodies at this point. And any form of copulation in other people's bodies is used to legitimize white superiority.
Eddie This is why it is so important to not ignore history. It gives us such a crucial perspective with which to view the present. The ideas of thinness, whiteness and status have this long history of being tied together. And that should inform our decisions and our understanding today.
Juna 100%. So we're in the 1920s now, and the boyish flapper physique is all the rage and thinness is associated with being white and being middle class. And honestly, the rest of the 1900s, well, it's kind of a fluctuation between really skinny being in and then curvy, but basically still skinny being in.
The 1930s we have the Great Depression. This is when slender ness starts to become less fashionable because now you have working class people starving. 1940s. That's a little more complicated. We have food rationing. We have starving people in Europe. So they are we also see a middle ground. So there is not much dieting advice around in the 1930s and forties. And then in the 1950s, we start to see as a reaction to the starving people of Europe. Again, very voluptuous women think Marilyn Monroe.
Juna We have various other crazes.
Eddie I remember the waif like Twiggy of the 1960s.
Juna And then we had the whole exercise craze of the eighties and then the heroin chic of the nineties.
Eddie What?
Juna The heroin chic? That's like the very skinny. That's what they used to call it. Like the the models then of the nineties and the 2000. But throughout the 1900s, something that remained fairly stable was that dieting had become gendered the opposite way from how it started.
Katharina Vester It starts to become a more and more a female activity. The more it is connected to femininity, the more men start to opt out. There is the fear that a man who is dieting gets feminized. When men diet, it's always for health reasons. When women diet, it's for reasons of appearance. We start to see it's getting more and more polarized.
Juna After talking to Professor Vester about this, one thing that I was curious about was if men and women were both kind of encouraged to diet at different points in history, why did it seem to get so much more dangerous and unhealthy with women than with men?
Katharina Vester Since the 1920s, when that started to become a gender practice for women. It's so much harsher now, so it's so much more micromanaging in terms of if you eat one donut, you have failed as a person. In the 20th century, dieting becomes really a pandemic endeavor.
Eddie Okay. You and I were obviously not there to see all of these changes in body ideals firsthand. But here's what jumps out at me Juna. It seems like aspiring to a certain body ideal is so fruitless because first it's almost unachievable. And even if you achieve the latest ideal, it's just going to change on you.
Juna I know it's true, guys, and I think about the fact that being really, really skinny was and when I was growing up and the thigh gap was such a big thing and that is just such a far point away from where my body has ever been in my life. Right? Like no matter how thin, I never have a thigh gap. And I think about like, oh my God, if I had been born ten years later, would it have not been such a big deal for me to always want to lose weight because the thigh gap wouldn't have been such a big deal.
Katharina Vester So we follow external ideas of ourself. It's not that we grow up and think we should have a certain kind of body, not in terms of shape necessarily from ourselves. It's basically something that is dictated by society. So therefore, to be critical, to get some distance between yourself and the beauty ideal and to think about it. Is it realistic to get this body? Do I really want this body? Is it practical for how I want to live? Very good questions to ask yourself before you start to get on some kind of crazy new dieting manual.
Eddie Well, we all might be a little healthier, happier and probably more sane if we aren't chasing the Gibson girl or Kim Kardashian or whoever is popular at the time. We should always try to find a deeper why for making health changes. Then I want to look like Kim Kardashian because, well, Kim Kardashian is the only one that will ever look like Kim Kardashian.
Juna Also, throughout this episode, we've been talking about traditional media. So magazines, which apparently still do exist. TV shows, movies, all of these media forms that the public doesn't really control. But today we have a new form of media, social media, and we can often see that social media contributes to these crazy body ideals.
Katharina Vester So I have a bit of a TikTok addiction. And so therefore I have to say it's two I'm into Tik Tok. And social media often create the idea that this crazy body ideal that only 1% of society really can easily embody that this is normal because we see it so very often.
Juna But on the other hand, social media is also made by regular people, and regular people have bodies in all shapes and sizes.
Katharina Vester I also feel that social media in the end facilitated a form of resistance where we start to see other body shapes and also start to see that they are beautiful too.
Eddie This may be the one place where we can actually engineer our own social media environments, you know, be selective about who you follow so that your media really shows all different types of bodies. Juna, you know, I don't spend much time at all on social media, but I did take a quick look at your TikTok. Yeah. And to me, it shows you as a normal, happy person who goes to the gym and is very comfortable in their own skin.
Juna Thanks, Eddie. That's really nice of you guys who gave you a shameless plug @JunaGjata on TikTok. And on that note, we're going to wrap things up here. Don't follow whatever body ideal is in fashion because.
Eddie It's just going to change in the next minute. You know that.
Juna Exactly. Exactly. We're going to link to Professor Vester's paper on our Web site foodweneedtotalk.com. you can find us @foodweneedtotalk Instagram. You can find me a normal person on social media, @TheOfficialJuna on Instagram and Juna Gjata on YouTube and Tik Tok, you can find Eddie. Trying to attain the dad bod ideal, which is apparently in now Eddie. Dad bods are in.
Eddie Oh yeah.
Juna So is that your food? We need to talk is a production of PR x.
Eddie Our producer is Morgan Flannery.
Juna Claire Carlander is our associate producer and Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer.
Eddie Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna Food We Need to Talk was co-created by Carrie Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me. Juna Gjata.
Eddie Always remember. Consult with your health professional for your personal health question.
Juna Consult them.
Eddie And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and tell a friend. Thanks for listening.
