The Globe and Mail

One of the commercials in a new campaign to counter childhood obesity in Georgia shows a boy sitting on a folding chair, who says quietly, “Mom, why am I fat?” I was hoping his mom, sitting across from him, might say, “Well, son, let’s talk about how Congress thinks that the tomato sauce on pizza qualifies as a vegetable in school meals …” but she didn’t. She bowed her head in silent shame.

The contentious campaign, called Strong4Life, features a parade of sad-faced, overweight children wondering how they ended up this way. The ads are directed at the kids, and not at the advertisers who push ChoccyMallow Breakfast Surprise, or the restaurant chains that hand them a plate the size of an elephant’s foot and invite them to pile it high for less than the cost of a cauliflower.

My favourite ad – and I say “favourite” in the same way that I have a favourite Friday the 13th movie – is the one featuring a grim girl, her arms folded above the slogan: “It’s Hard to Be a Little Girl if You’re Not.” Why not go all the way, I thought, and borrow the slogan that the manufacturers of RyKrisp used to prey on women’s insecurities in the 1950s: “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl!”

The fat girl volcano is this way, ladies, if you’d like to follow me, and toss yourselves in. The line is long, and stretches through the centuries. I know this thanks to a new book, Louise Foxcroft’sCalories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years, which reveals that our obsession with slimness, and our demonization of fat, has an impressive history. There is no better time to read it than in this month of wretched self-loathing.

As long as people have looked down at their muffin tops (or their suet crusts) and winced, slimming gurus have lined up to profit from the shame. The first diet bestseller was published in the 15th century, writes Ms. Foxcroft, a British historian of medicine. Three centuries later, the noted gourmet Brillat-Savarin was an early proponent of the low-carb diet, a bit like a Reign of Terror Dr. Atkins. Lose weight, he advised, or “become ugly, and thick, and asthmatic, and finally die in your own melted grease: I shall be there to watch it.” I doubt Weight Watchers will be adopting that slogan any time soon.

Dieting, over the years, has been sold as a moral imperative, a patriotic duty, a Christian obligation. In the mid-20th century you could turn to Pray Your Weight Away or Devotions for Dieters, which included this desperate plea to the Almighty to save a sinner from pie: “I promise not to sit and stuff/But stop when I have had enough. Amen.” It wasn’t just that you hated your chunky thighs; God was repulsed, too.

Ms. Foxcroft is very canny about the way health concerns are used to disguise what is essentially an aesthetic distaste for chubbiness. Fat has long been seen as a moral and intellectual failing: “The stupid, heavy, non-intellectual person, or the idiot, is generally fat and flabby,” wrote one 19th-century English doctor.

Not much has changed, even if we now put pillows around our language to guard against offence. “No one wants to be fat,” Tara Parker-Pope wrote recently in a fascinating and much-discussed article in The New York Times Magazine. “In most modern cultures, to be fat … is to be perceived as weak-willed and lazy.”

At the centre of her piece, The Fat Trap, is a paradox: Dieters, including Ms. Parker-Pope, actually work incredibly hard at losing weight. I doubt the physicists at CERN pay as much attention to numbers as the successful dieters she interviews, who weigh every gram of food that goes into their mouths and calculate every calorie burned on their bikes. But maintaining your new slim figure, as science shows, is very difficult and most people regain their spare tires, unless they’re willing to devote every waking moment to banishing thoughts of doughnuts. Losing weight, which is supposed to liberate, instead becomes a prison.

In America alone, the diet industry is worth $40-billion, slightly more than the GDP of Costa Rica. Every person who fails at a diet and embarks on another fattens the pocket of whoever is selling some chimerical notion of beauty. To what end, you have to wonder. For centuries, people in the West have been trying to lose weight – not for reasons of health, but for reasons of status – and it’s a losing battle. Maybe it’s time to refashion the RyKrisp slogan, and spell it out in chocolate chips: “Nobody loves a fat girl … except herself.”