Dieting

“Of course, new latitudes developed at the same time, for example, in the area of heterosexual contact. But this was precisely the point. Constraint, including new constraints urged on eating and body shape, was reinvented to match – indeed, to compensate for – new areas of greater freedom (Stearns, 54). . . . reliance on traditional religious sternness, lost considerable force in the third of the nineteenth century. . . . This set the stage for expressing a new, compensatory need to maintain moral anxiety and the potential for virtue – in this case, through attacks on fat – even for people who enjoy an escalation of consumerism in other aspects of their lives” (57, cf. 122: dieting after WWII “a moral counterweight in a society of consumer indulgence”). . . . By 1900, the body’s testimony to character was explicitly being extended to control of weight. . . . Here, then, in the association of an eating regimen with antidotes to the generalized problems of consumerist excess, was a crucial source both of the moral qualities and of the intensity of the growing hostility to excessive weight” (60). . . . Dieting as a “vigorous moral counterweight to growing consumer indulgence” (60). . . . The clearest single revision of image generated by the turn- of-the-century diet standards applied to middle-aged women whose full figures now testified not to successful child rearing and maternal maturity but to an inability to maintain proper shape. For women concerned, however unconsciously about an untraditional interest in sex and reluctant to imitate their own mothers’ level of childbearing, injunctions to discipline the body by keeping slim even into middle age may have seemed a welcome form of compensatory discipline” (64). . . . Diet concern increased after 1920 because of new commercial pressures and new medical knowledge, but also because there was more to atone for by personal denial or self-criticism” (67). . . . fascination of women’s magazines with the subject of diet and the moral derelictions of fat” (100). . .[after 1920] renewed connections between dieting and moral demonstration, as an economy of abidance increased the need for compensation or guilt regardless of gender (104) . . . [by 1990] the moral content of the war against weight persisted (108) . . . At its base, the need to fight fat remained a matter of demonstrating character and self-control in an age of excess. Here, surely, was the reason that fat was long singled out over other know health problems” (117) . . . the drumbeat of slenderness made the linkage with compensatory morality quite clear” (117) . . . In an indulgent society, reluctant to talk of painful moral obligations lest they distract from consumer pleasures, the moral quality of dieting offered a stern contrast” (121).