It would be hard to find anyone in the United States, or in any other part of the Western world, who has not at one time gone on a weight-loss diet. Perhaps the most long-lived fad of our society, the diet craze has grown and expanded its influence until almost every issue of every popular publication contains at least one diet article and television talk shows regularly feature diet gurus and those offering weight loss testimonials. With little evidence that such diets work, and with quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, a multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around the modern obsession with thinness. Women are the vast majority of consumers in the diet industry, and, though men do diet, it is almost exclusively women who focus a significant portion of their time and energy on the effort to become thin.

Though Americans are constantly bombarded...