Conville & Walsh
literary agency
Calories and Corsets
- Author: Louise Foxcroft
- Category: Non-fiction Diet / Cooking Health
- Publisher: Profile (UK)
- Pub date: January 2012
- Length: 80,000 words approx
About Calories and Corsets
at last, a book on dieting that is sensible and, better still, entertaining
- INDEPENDENT
– William Banting: Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public (1869)
Dieting has been happening for over two and a half thousand years, and CALORIES AND CORSETS is a unique look at the people who first dreamt up diets – and why they did it. As the early church was established, fat was the ink in which temptation and greed were written on the body. But although St Thomas Aquinas denounced the pleasures of the flesh, he was himself so corpulent that his pall-bearers had great trouble fitting him into his own grave. At the other end of the spectrum, the unusually high numbers of young female deaths in the thirteenth century might be attributed what we now call anorexia. Further east, the Persian philosopher Avicenna believed that food should stay in the body for as little time as possible, and invented a crippling regime of hard exercise, bathing and laxatives.
This book will sift through the science and psychology, the sense and the nonsense, from Hippocrates through to Atkins. Casting her eye back over history, Louise Foxcroft will deliver a frank account of the diets that have been proven to work, and those that have made generations suffer without success, culminating in a set of guidelines that people can live by here and now.
About the Author
Louise Foxcroft read History at the University of Cambridge as a mature student in the early 1990s. In 2007 she published an academic title, The Making of Addiction: The ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain (Ashgate), which developed the research of her PhD thesis. This was followed by her first general book, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (Granta, 2009) which ranked as Amazon’s No.1 History of Medicine title for some weeks. Broadly as Medical Historian, she has specialised in medical perceptions of the human body and at the way these are related to present day, personal, human experience - this makes for some really in-depth questions and analyses, not to mention the absurdities, of how we live our lives now.
An occasional supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Louise Foxcroft has also written for The London Review of Books, The Guardian, New Humanist, Erotic Review, Daily Mail and The Times, and has been a guest on several BBC Radio programmes.
As a Non-Alcoholic Trustee on the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous GB since 2006 she has been working on AA literature, and speaking at conferences and press events, both national and international.