Diet another Day

Greek God: NIKON D3000 f/4.5; Exposure 1/60sec; ISO-100

I really cannot bear hearing from friends’ mouths that they are “on a diet”. Sticking to “the diet” today, giving me grief (and quizzing the bored waitress) as to the least destructive option to choose from, on the menu, in front of our noses. Then quite suddenly, a little while later, the very same friend withdraws all connection to any such diet and with great gusto prepares to eat her way through every bread-basket in each Italian restaurant of our city, mopping up all evidence of rich pasta sauce from her bowl of spaghetti puttanesca.

Really; how futile.

The word diet comes from the Greek diaita, an approach to health that linked the mental with the physical. Classical physicians saw being too fat or thin as a sign of imbalance. Man “cannot live healthily on food without a cetain amount of exercise”, observed Hippocrates, who believed in breakfast and long walks. Philosopher Socrates saw a relationship between food and ethics, as a taste for luxury often leads to greed and unjust behaviour.

Acropolis Museum Athens NIKON D3000 f/4.5; Exposure 1/15sec; ISO-100

Unlike the other deadly sins, gluttony is visible and so is judged harshly, as if heft is always evidence of wanton indulgence and laziness. In tough times such as the two world wars, fat people were seen as traitors. Greater access to food and a rising stigma against stodge helped inspire the fashion for corsets in the 17th century, which caused overlapping ribs, bad breath and the occasional death.

Ideal Man Acropolis Museum Athens NIKON D3000 f/4.5; Exposure 1/15sec; ISO-100

Until the 18th century, ideas on diet revolved around healthy eating, morality and control. Lazatives and emetics were common.

By the 19th century the novel idea of a low-carbohydrate diet materialized in the thinking of William Banting. In fact, the Lancet published studies that confirmed the value of favouring protein over carbs well before an overweight cardiologist by the name of Robert Atkins shocked a fat western world with his 1972 best seller The Diet Revolution.

Man: The Agora Museum - Athens. NIKON D3000 f/7.1; Exposure 1/60sec; ISO-200

And we have all heard the advise to chew each mouthful 100 times. Lets give thanks to “The Great Masticator” Horace Fletcher who said it loud to all who would listen the importance of chewing each mouthful till it was liquid.

An endless parade of doctors, nutritionists, gurus, planners, drugs, devises and surgeries offer mostly short-lived results and much heart-ache together with what we all have in our hearts: hope. Hope to be thinner than now.

Ideal Man Acropolis Museum Athens NIKON D3000 f/4.5; Exposure 1/15sec; ISO-100

But lets learn from the early Greeks who wished to achieve personal balance, not an ideal body type (though I am aware that the classical Greeks coveted the ideal body and bestowed upon it garlands and laurels). And to be fair, if I owned the “ideal” physicality, I, too, would be wearing nothing but laurels and garlands. Diet you say? I’ll leave that for another day.