Have you tried thumb-vomits? The disturbing history of dieting

Atlantic Books, £20

Review by Susan Flockhart

You can never be too rich or too thin. The American socialite Wallis Simpson may never have said that, but model Kate Moss certainly did once declare that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”.

The celebrated super-waif made that statement in answer to an interviewer’s question about the guiding mantras by which she lived. And, though she would later express regret for a flippant remark that seemingly endorsed anorexic thought patterns, a young Jessica Hamel-Akre had already been well and truly hooked by the philosophy encapsulated by such slogans – the promise that, “through suffering, you could eventually win”.

What the prize might be was unclear, though it certainly involved the kind of body attainable only through sustained self-denial and Hamel-Akre devoted her teens and early 20s to a torturous quest for slenderness. Later, as an academic, she would go on to conduct a seven-year study on the history of appetite control and her new book, The Art of Not Eating, reveals that contemporary diet culture is extraordinarily deep-rooted.

Indeed, she traces its origins to an early Scottish physician named George Cheyne. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1672, Cheyne studied medicine at the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen before heading south to London and Bath, where he specialised in treating the peculiar malaise then afflicting upper-class Georgians: namely, the consequences of the sedentary lifestyles and rich foods that were among the spoils of colonialism. Having cured his own “corpulency” through an austere regimen of milk, vegetables, exercise, fasting and occasional “thumb-vomits”, he advocated a similar routine to his well-heeled patients.

There's money in dieting (Image: PA)

Another influential Scot of the era was Dr Malcolm Flemyng, whose flesh-reduction method involved swallowing soap in order to restore the body’s “cleanness, sweetness and whiteness”. Reading this took Hamil-Akre back to her teens, when she would scour women’s magazines for willpower-boosting tips such as: “Fill yourself up with water between every bite [and] if the urge to eat comes back to you later that night, soil your leftovers with dish soap.”

Though she doesn’t categorise her adolescent eating disorders, it’s plain the author endured periods of self-starvation and bulimia. And while she writes that her appetite blighted her youth, she clarifies that the real culprit was not her own hunger, but the skewed attitudes of a society that has long valued, judged and condemned women according to their ability to control their desires, which she in turn absorbed from friends, the media and her diet-obsessed mother.

For centuries, she says, thinness had been “a recognisable beauty ideal”, with restraint synonymous with female virtue. The Art of Not Eating chronicles some of history’s most famous food refuseniks, including fasting women such as Ann Moore, who became a Staffordshire tourist attraction in the early 19th century, as visitors gathered around her bed to observe the miracle of a person who claimed to survive on fresh air alone.

We also meet Martha Taylor, the 17th-century “Derbyshire Damsel” who mystified contemporary doctors by apparently living a full year without food, and Hester Ann Rogers, an 18th-century Methodist who substituted praying for eating.

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Literary figures also appear including the heroine of 1748 novel, Clarissa, who starves herself to death. Its author, Samuel Richardson, was a friend of George Cheyne and his eponymous heroine may have been partly inspired by Dr Cheyne’s patient, Catherine Walpole: daughter of Britain’s first prime minister and the real-life victim of a mysterious inability to eat.

Hamel-Akre describes Clarissa as “a tragic story of control, desire and virtue” and for 18th-century medics, females appear to have been considered a volatile lot, prone to “hysterias” that required regulation by supposedly more rational males - which presumably explains why fasting women like Ann Moore were generally observed by “gentlemen watchers” to ensure they weren’t consuming food on the fly.

Born in the mid-1980s, Hamel-Akre suggests the Western world’s preoccupation with dieting was then at an unquestioned height, with eating disorders becoming a feminist concern in the 1990s. Given that Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist Issue was published in 1978, I’d nudge that timescale back a little. But her assessment of the prevailing pre-millennial culture rings true, as does her observation that even when dieting became uncool - at least among the emancipated intelligentsia - the fear of gaining weight remained all-pervasive.

At that time, she writes, the trick was to somehow conspire to remain “effortlessly thin” while feigning indifference to the subject - though sometimes, prejudices slipped out, such as when a professor was heard opining that a plump female student was unlikely to finish her PhD, since “if you can’t even discipline your appetite, how can you discipline your mind?”

The Art of Not Eating (Image: free)

As a mother, Jessica Hamel-Akre clearly worries about attitudes that might be passed on to her young daughter, with good reason. Social media has amplified the West’s disordered narrative around eating and body-shape, and earnest attempts to change the record have so far failed. Right now, campaigners are calling for the regulation of so-called ultra-processed foods, which some say are as addictive as alcohol or tobacco.

That may help, though as Dr Cheyne’s patient list shows, our skewed relationship with food and appetite long predates the monosodium glutamate bogeyman. Hamel-Akre is surely right to dismiss the notion that eating disorders are somehow symptomatic of a spoiled upper-class, but as Cheyne and his affluent contemporaries were among the first to discover, the human appetite – which evolved to cope with extreme food scarcity – is ill-equipped for a culture of culinary excess and in our “just eat” society, obesity and eating disorders are serious health problems. How we tackle one without exacerbating the other is among the biggest challenges of our age.

Jessica Hamel-Akre delves into complex emotional and philosophical territory. Deeply personal as well as highly political, her book dices with the thorny old conundrum about the relationship between mind and body, before reaching an unexpected conclusion about the human soul that, I confess, I didn’t quite grasp. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy The Art of Not Eating: a courageous and beautifully written exploration of a vitally important subject.