If Botticelli's Venus were alive today, she would be shopping in the plus-size department. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, from whose work we have the euphemism Rubenesque, had a good eye for what was beautiful, which at the time was stylish stout. His painting Allegory on the Blessings of Peace, which hangs in London's National Gallery, depicts both a cornucopia and a woman with a healthy appetite. His painting of Bacchus in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg depicts an obese god, no question, but Bacchus's mood is anything but morbid.

This was as it should be. Over most of human history, food was scarce. Fat was the embodiment of conspicuous consumption. Anyone could be thin, but only the very richest people could afford to be fat. The author/historian Alison Weir has suggested that the yeoman warders of the Tower of London earned the name Beefeater not from their diet, since there wasn't enough beef to go around, but from the fact that they guarded the buffet, the royal dishes and cutlery, so that Beefeater is derived from Buffetier.

Beyond that, fat was a symbol of good health. These were times when heart disease and cancer were minor health problems. The greatest concern was getting through the winter. Those people who could store energy with the greatest efficiency had the greatest chance of making it through the next famine or the next locust infestation. For centuries, fat was beautiful.

All this changed in the second half of the 19th century, when the great plains of North America were opened to farming and ranching. For the first time, food was plentiful. Even with the methods of farming available at the time, the grain harvest was great enough to not only feed the population but to overfeed them.

As soon as it became easy to be fat, it became desirable to be thin.

The first weight-reduction products were offered for sale in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps the most notorious product was Kellogg's Safe Fat Reducer. Its purveyor was Frank Jonas Kellogg. Though he wasn't related to William Kellogg, the creator of corn flakes or to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who ran a sanitarium in , Frank Jonas was willing to take advantage of his famous (and legitimate) namesakes by setting up a business in the same city. In 1902, Frank Jonas placed an ad in magazine, with a cartoon of a man who looked rather like a balloon and claimed his product would get rid of fat. Through a combination of aggressive advertising and questionable ethics, Kellogg grew rich from Safe Fat Reducer. The success wasn't to last.

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