Publisher's Synopsis
I have done a lot of research, reading and studying over the last forty years into the matter of Dieting. Through my own experience with dieting and thus spanning the 6 decades of changes in ideas, beliefs and expertise, I thought that it would be interesting to find out just how long human beings have been concerned with body shape. To my surprise I found that body image has been in human awareness for 10,000 years. Starting with the finds of statuettes from Paleolithic times, depicting a well-rounded female image, we can see that being plump and firm was important in the days of the hunter gatherer to sustain people through times of famine. It was also seen as a sign of being fertile. In the last 10,000 years our diet has changed out of all proportion to the hunter gatherer days, but our bodies have not evolved along with it. The body still acts as if it is expecting a famine, and when we diet it will hold onto every last gram of fat, in order to preserve itself. As we come into the agricultural age and on into the early days of the Europeans it becomes clear that humans have started to take steps to lose the fat. I have looked at how food in general has evolved from different corners of our planet, and along with these changes it is not surprising that the more we came away from eating natural, real, unadulterated food, the more we found it necessary to find ways to combat putting on weight. Yet here in the 21st Century ideas abound with different opinions, diets and scientific research. Some of them pretty sound, some of them ridiculous. From taking pills, to drinking tea. From leaving out essential nutrients to eating far too much of any particular nutrient. But the only thing we know for sure that works when watching our health and weight, is to eat real food, organic where possible and watching our portions. The second most important thing to bear in mind is that the idea of being skinny must stop. Once we learn to eat what nature designed us to and getting our portions right to suit the individual, our body will find the right weight naturally, we will be as healthy as possible. It is obvious to me from the research, study and writing for this book and from my own experience in life of being a chronic dieter for over forty years, that being a healthy weight, with a moderate amount of fat, is the way to go! I have covered the last 100 years of the book, in decades and it is interesting to see that it is in this time span that we have turned to ever more faddy and often dangerous ways, to be not just slender, but skinny. It is an anomaly that although we have this mindset we have reached epidemic levels of obesity. Whether you are in a professional capacity, researcher or someone who thinks that dieting to lose weight is something new to this century, you will find the history of how we reached here with food, interesting and revealing.
