As I was throwing out my diet books recently I recalled how frequently Hippocrates — the ancient Greek physician who lived from about 460 to 370 BCE and who became known as ‘the Father of Medicine’ — is used to promote modern weight loss. He is quoted in diet books and plans (a quick and unsystematic search showed his presence in The 17 Day Diet; The Adrenal Reset Diet: Strategically Cycle Carbs and Proteins to Lose Weight, Balance Hormones, and Move from Stressed to Thriving; Flat Food, Flat Stomach: The Law of Subtraction; Fat Loss Factor; Eat Right 4 Your Type: The Individualized Diet Solution to Staying Healthy, Living Longer and Achieving Your Ideal Weight), as well as in academic studies.

Hippocrates is used to promote all kinds of diets, but most commonly to ‘illustrate’ the simple idea that being fat is very unhealthy for you. For example, in Practical Paediatric Nutrition (2013) by E.M.E. Poskitt, we learn that obesity is “perhaps the most obvious situation which provides a health risk and which may be present, and preventable, in childhood. ‘Sudden death is more common in those who are naturally fat than in the lean’ (Hippocrates).”

This is the most frequently quoted line from Hippocrates and it is used to scaremonger: if you are fat you will die. It is a message that is consistent with our society’s prevailing attitudes towards fatness, that it is something to be feared. We are urged to ‘make war on’ obesity as if fat bodies pose an equivalent threat to ISIS, and to ‘tackle’ obesity like one might a home invader. This of course makes a fat person feel at war with — and on guard against — her own self, and it encourages her and others to treat her body like an enemy of the state (which might not be the healthiest way to live either, but more of that later).

Hippocrates may seem like a surprising authority for modern health writers. His prescription for baldness (from On the Diseases of Women) was to apply to the head a mixture of opium, horseradish, pigeon excrement, beetroot, and spices. If that failed, castration was a possible surgical solution — yet you don’t see modern doctors advocating these remedies in a hurry. Nor (thank goodness) are his cures for the ‘diseases of virgins’ all the rage in today’s pediatric medicine. Diets, however, are often sold by appealing to the authority of the past: the paleo-diet craze seeks legitimation from the Paleolithic era, and other diets seek the same from Hippocrates’ legendary status as the first Western doctor.

Would Hippocrates have endorsed the modern Western dieting culture: the restriction of calories in pursuit of a number on a scale, and our obsession with being slim? In a nutshell, no. He did disapprove (e.g. in Affections) of gluttony: the excessive and extravagant consumption of food, drink, and other pleasures. But gluttony was not typically associated with fatness in Hippocrates or other classical writers.

The equation of fatness and gluttony is thought by some scholars to stem from as late as the 17th century, and by others from the articulation of the Seven Deadly Sins by Pope Gregory in the sixth century AD. I’m inclined to suggest, from the material discussed in Mark Bradley’s excellent article ‘Obesity, Corpulence and Emaciation in Roman Art’, that the Romans invented fatness as a state to be decried; but as Bradley stresses, large bodies had many different associations in the Roman Empire. My focus here is on the ancient Greeks for whom ‘fat’ in general terms often had positive connotations of richness, prosperity and thriving, while ‘thin’ often suggested poverty and weakness. (We should note here that translating Greek vocabulary into our own is fraught with difficulties. The Greek adjective pachus that is often translated ‘fat’ can also mean ‘stout’ and ‘stocky’.)

In the Hippocratic Corpus (over sixty texts, likely written by more than one author, that have come down to us under the name ‘Hippocrates’), everyone’s body is considered constitutionally different and is shaped by a variety of factors: geography, environment, bodily humors, diet, and exercise. Crucial for good health is getting these factors in the right balance but, as Susan E. Hill argues in her book Eating to Excess: The Meaning of Gluttony and the Fat Body in the Ancient World (2011) in Hippocrates ‘there is no absolute medical or moral imperative to lose weight if one is fat or fleshy’.

Being pachus could be detrimental to a woman’s fertility (as could living in cities that were exposed to hot winds: Prorrhetic 2.24) and those who are pachus and wish to lose weight are given advice (not to eat while exercising, to eat before they have cooled down after exercising, to drink tepid, diluted wine before exercising, to eat one meal a day, to stop bathing, to eat rich, seasoned food so that they will more easily be satisfied, to sleep on a hard bed: Regimen in Health 4). But bodily balance was key, and advice is also given to those who wish to put on weight.

What of the diet books’ favorite line ‘People who are naturally very fat (hoi pachees sphodra kata phusin) are apt to die earlier (tachuthanatoi yinontai) than those who are thin (ton ischnon)’? This is one of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms (2.44), and is sandwiched between an observation that individuals who have been hanged by the neck, and are unconscious but not quite dead, will not recover if they are foaming at the mouth, and the opinion that epilepsy in young people is most frequently alleviated by ‘changes of air, of country, and of ways of life’. There is no narrative context that expands upon and clarifies the aphorism. The Greek means that people who are naturally very fat will take less time to die, when they die, not that they will die at a younger age or prematurely; we might think this is a good thing.

The Aphorisms also contain other advice that is relevant to, but completely ignored by, modern diet gurus. Aphorism 1.5 advises against restrictive diets for healthy people (breaking this diet is thought to be more dangerous than breaking a less restrictive diet) and Aphorism 2.16 warns: ‘When in a state of hunger, one ought not to work hard.’ Hippocrates’ outlook was considerably more complicated and varied than modern diet books that use him admit. Selecting only quotations that may (and I stress may) present fatness in a negative light distorts the bigger picture in the Hippocratic Corpus, and recruits Hippocrates as a spokesman against obesity, which he was not.

Why does it matter if Hippocrates is misappropriated to serve a modern agenda? I should stress that I am not a purist or pedant when it comes to the modern reception of antiquity. Misquoting ancient texts can be productive and creative (as I have argued in relation to the controversial Virgil quotation on the 9/11 monument in New York). The distortion of Hippocrates bothers me because his writings are being conscripted by the diet industry to promote misery and sickness.

I have been teaching in universities in England and in the US for over twenty years. In my experience one of the biggest challenges to students’ well being, as great as exam stress and financial debts, is disordered eating. One of my students died from a heart attack brought on by chronic bulimia. Others with anorexia have been unable to attend lectures regularly and their grades have suffered. Many students (and colleagues) have confided that they are dissatisfied with their bodies. The unhappiness caused by ‘normal’ dieting, and the mental real estate taken up by obsessing about food, is a staggering waste of time, energy, and talent.

So why have I spent most of my life, since late childhood, on and off diets? It wasn’t for health reasons even though I sometimes said it was, because I’m in pretty good health (I’m lucky enough to have excellent blood pressure and cholesterol). Nor was it to feel more attractive (I didn’t).

I think it’s been for two reasons. The first is that thinness connotes success in our culture, while fatness suggests failure, with laziness and lack of self-control thrown in for good measure. Academic life is fiercely competitive: I wanted to be and look successful. The second is that, whereas the research part of job can be done in private with no one watching you (Derrida famously wrote in his pyjamas), lecturing is a different matter. The spotlight is, quite literally, on you, along with the judging eyes of students. Undergraduates can be merciless in their scrutiny and their scorn.

The system of lecture questionnaires, the student feedback that plays a role in tenure and promotion evaluations, has recently come under attack for its sexual bias: studies have shown that students use different, and less positive, language for female professors. What is less acknowledged is that student questionnaires comment on teachers’ looks, and how, for the fat professor, reading them can feel like being trolled on social media. Faculty also sit in judgment, though few are as overt in their contempt as the associate professor at the University of New Mexico who, a few years ago, tweeted: ‘Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth’. Academia, no less than the rest of society, is a world where stigma and shame are routine.

Would ancient Greece have been much more accepting of people my size than modern-day North America? It is difficult to know because respectable women’s figures were not typically displayed and discussed, because images of people on vases were highly stylized, and because weight per se was not a hot issue. Greek insistence on bodily discipline (athletics for men and, in Sparta, for women too) coupled with frugal food provision must have made fatness far less common than it is today.

It is important to avoid the trap of romanticizing antiquity; there is no evidence that being fat was a mark of beauty in classical Greece as it is in, say, modern Mauritania. However, one good indication of attractiveness is provided in statues of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and lust. She is depicted in different sizes and poses. The statue type known as ‘Crouching Aphrodite’, thought to have originated in the 3rd century BCE, and frequently copied and adapted by Roman artists, shows the naked goddess in a crouching pose, her stomach folded into several rolls of flesh.

Mark Bradley views the voluptuousness of the statue type as “an index of female fertility.” This may be so, but it seems to me that ‘symbolizing fertility’ is often scholar-speak for ‘not terribly sure what’s going on’ (see also: ‘apotropaic’ and ‘ritualistic’). More pertinently, it is an interpretation that de-sexualizes the image of Aphrodite, bringing to mind procreation and childbirth. We should remember that Aphrodite is, above all else, sexy. And while the Crouching Aphrodites are not as large as the fleshy fantasies of ancient goddesses painted by Rubens and Titian, if they were brought to life today, they would be told to go on a diet.

My experience has been that diets don’t work; after every significant weight loss I have gained it all back and more. This is not an unusual story. ‘Results not typical’ declares every commercial lauding a celebrity’s weight loss, and yet we still put our time, money, and faith into diets.

We are told so frequently, and in so many different ways, that being fat equals being unhealthy, that the economic elements underpinning this belief remain concealed. Much modern ‘health’ is driven by what is in the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies. One example: whether or not a person is overweight or obese is commonly determined by reference to the Body Mass Index (BMI). The BMI was set using standards drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO), which relied on recommendations from the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF). At the time, the two biggest funders of the IOTF were pharmaceutical companies that between them had a monopoly on selling weight-loss drugs. Go figure.

The reality is that so-called ‘overweight’ people live longer than so-called ‘normal’ weight people, and that no study has ever proven that weight loss prolongs life (as detailed in Health at Every Size (2nd ed. 2010) by Linda Bacon, and Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight (2014) by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor). Scientific studies on the subject overwhelmingly treat correlation as if it were causation: a poor methodology (see further Ragen Chastain).

There is yet to be a scientific study of the damage caused by doctors’ prescribing diets, shaming of fat patients, misdiagnosing them because they don’t look beyond their own assumptions about fat (this has happened to me), and denying them equality of care. When it comes to fat people the medical profession fails repeatedly to honor the Hippocratic Oath, sworn by all physicians, part of which is to ‘remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings’ (my emphasis), and to abide by the maxim ‘First do no harm’ (this is not, as is often thought, in the oath itself, but an equivalent sentiment is found in Hippocrates’ Epidemics 1).

Even when there’s evidence that being fat in certain circumstances might be beneficial for health, it is explained away. Take the article 2001 article ‘Obesity and Cardiovascular Disease: Risk Factor, Paradox, and the Impact of Weight Loss’. The authors discuss numerous studies that document how overweight and obese people (their terminology) with established cardiovascular disease have a better prognosis compared with patients who are not overweight or obese. They call this the ‘obesity paradox’, which is a pejorative formulation. It might more accurately be described as evidence that contradicts and complicates the mainstream scientific view that obesity is simply, always, and in every way bad for you.

In a short section the authors discuss the correlation between high BMI and risk of stroke. They conclude the section by — and here once again rhetoric substitutes for analysis — quoting Hippocrates: ‘Sudden death is more common in those who are naturally fat than in the lean’. Later they make it clear that ‘mortality after gastric bypass has recently been reported to be higher than expected’ (in other words ‘sudden death is more common in those who have gastric bypass surgery’), but conclude that this shouldn’t get in the way of ‘purposeful weight reduction’.

Relief from the misery of dieting came for me when I began to practice intuitive eating, an approach that teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body, through listening to yourself, and your body’s cues, not to medical ‘experts’. I learned about it through taking an intensive, small group, on-line course called Feast, taught by the brilliant life coach Rachel Cole (http://feast.rachelwcole.com/). It has been truly liberating (and was the reason for throwing away my diet books).

It was with some surprise that I realized that two of the main tenets of intuitive eating, that you should honor your hunger by eating until you’re full, and that, if you do habitually eat until you feel overfull, you should examine why you do this, resonate with the philosopher Aristotle’s discussion of self-indulgence (akolasia) in Nicomachean Ethics. I should emphasize that Aristotle’s language is a far cry from that of intuitive eating; he is strict about moderation and censorious about those who overindulge with eating and drinking (he calls them gastrimargoi, ‘gut-mad’, and characterizes overeating as bestial).

However, he is interested in the psychology of eating to excess (1118b21ff). We now know that there are many answers to why people habitually eat when we are no longer hungry: we use food to cope with overstimulation, to numb emotions, to punish ourselves (a significant number of compulsive eaters are survivors of physical abuse, though this factor has not been studied in any depth by the medical profession). Of course Aristotle did not identify these, but in suggesting that we honor our hunger (no matter our size — he was not bothered by fatness), and in addressing the question of why we overeat, Aristotle may (with a bit of deliberate pressing and suppressing) prove a better path to modern health than Hippocrates.

Choosing which ancient thinkers to hold up as authorities in the modern world, and how we selectively interpret them, is a politicized business with real life ramifications. Classical antiquity is sufficiently rich and varied to provide material that can counter the narratives that we have wrenched from, and built upon, it. Aristotle’s call to eat until satiety, and to reflect on the reasons for overeating, is a better prescription for human happiness and health than Hippocrates’ aphorism, hijacked by the diet industry to scare us all into starving, purging, and doing strange things with maple syrup and cayenne pepper. It is a recipe for approaching our selves with kindness and curiosity — and that is a genuinely good thing.

Helen Morales is Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and editor of Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature. She works largely on ancient fiction and gender, but her most recent book is about being a fan of Dolly Parton: Pilgrimage to Dollywood (Chicago UP, 2014).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.