The Surprising History of Body Ideals: From Corsets to Kardashians

·32 min·3 clips

In the 1800s, a six-pack meant you were broke—fatness was a sign of wealth and health.

This episode of Food, We Need To Talk is a rebroadcast of a listener-favorite episode in which Una Jada and Dr. Eddie Phillips interview historian Katarina Fester, associate professor at American University, on the history of body ideals and dieting from the 1800s to the present. Fester opens by noting that before the mid-1800s, corpulence was associated with health and prosperity -- tuberculosis and other wasting diseases were so feared that extra fat was seen as protective -- while thinness was associated with poverty. People did not believe body weight was personally controllable; corsets shaped the exterior, but the idea of changing one's body through diet or willpower was culturally foreign. The shift began in 1860s England with the rise of the middle class, which needed to demonstrate its fitness for power through 'self-mastery,' including physical self-control. Crucially, dieting was initially a male-only phenomenon: William Banting, a British undertaker, wrote the first popular diet book in 1863, addressed exclusively to men, featuring three heavy meat-and-alcohol meals per day with no vegetables. Banting framed dramatic weight loss as a moral achievement -- proof of willpower and success -- laying the ideological foundation of modern diet culture. Simultaneously, fatness became feminized: as men began dieting, the ideal female body became voluptuous, and women were actually advised to fatten up. Fester traces how this gendered divergence evolved through the Victorian era, the rise of calorie counting in the early 20th century, post-WWII shifts in women's bodies, the heroin chic thinness of the 1990s associated with Paris Hilton, and the current 'slim thick' ideal popularized by Kim Kardashian -- curvy in specific places but with a tiny waist. Throughout, Fester emphasizes that each era's body ideal has been shaped by class, gender politics, and commercial interests rather than health science.

As heard by us

A brisk history of dieting that ties body ideals to politics, dress reform, and Kate Chopin.

Eddie and Una present this replay as a compact history of dieting, moving from slim thick and heroin chic to corsets, dress reform, and Kate Chopin.

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Want the backstory behind corsets, thinness, and slim thick?

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