Retro Diets are the way forward as dieters seek radical new weight-loss regimes, according to a top Diet Guru.
"More and more of the nation's fatties feel trapped in bloated modern lifestyles", says weight-loss expert Sheza Conner.
"It's no longer fashionable to look abroad. Now our sumo-silhouetted salvation-seekers are dragging their omnibus-sized butts aboard the Dietary Time-Machine.
"And this is a True Fat-Busting Time-Warp. Today's wobble-bottoms are weary of modern-era schemes. They're saying 'nuts to the Mayo Clinic, 'Weightwatchers is pointless', 'Atkins doesn't bring home the bacon' and 'let's shake the Cambridge Diet'."
Sheza Conner, on a world tour to promote her book 'Eat Like a Peasant and Live Like a Lord' and upcoming BBC3 series 'Victorian Slum Slimming Secrets', is adamant that the past is the future when it comes to shedding those surplus stones. And that means the distant past.
"Cave-dwellers couldn't stomach flab", she storms. "If you had to run 20 miles across a desert, wrestle a woolly mammoth to the ground, slaughter it with a crude stone axe, drag it back to your cave and cook it, you'd soon be as haggard as Kate Moss. Even the women who stayed at home to keep the fire burning and have children were scrawny - they'd to battle the dogs for the scraps thrown down by the men.
"Medieval peasants kept honed too", drools Ms Conner. "Study their lifestyles as I have, and you'll see much that we can admire and imitate. Out in the mud all day, filthy and drenched to the scabbed and ruptured skin, poxed and ague-ridden, sleeping twenty to a smoke-choked evil-smelling hut, their regime of cabbage-water, dung-contaminated rat-broth and grass-pudding was guaranteed to keep the waistline in check."
With the new BBC series in mind, Sheza Conner also thinks - in a controversial new theory that's sure to ruffle the conventional feathers of trad dieticians and old-school historians alike - that a more recent era can provide rich pickings for desperate dumplings in need of lard-melting illumination.
"Charles Dickens, with his talk of Tiny Tim and Little Nell, has utterly misrepresented the legacy of the London slums," she contends. "Unconsciously, though, he countered his own arguments. Why, all you need do is read the books - his working-class folk were such strong characters - how could they really be unhealthy? Tim and Nell are the exceptions that prove the rule! How many of those folks were overweight?
"A strict regimen of black bread, rotten mutton, laudanum and gin kept them in decent shape. But what really made the difference was the fasting. Women and children regularly went without food for days on end, while the men were spending their stolen money on child prostitutes and beer. And when the men did get back, there was the inevitable fight. Once her man had beaten her black and blue, no woman would be thinking about her stomach for a while!"
Ms Conner hopes that bewildered bloaters will be able to digest her "strong medicine" here, for she will soon up the ante again, in her next book 'Slim the World-War II Way'.
"I'm not just extolling the virtues of powdered egg and rabbit pie. Chapters entitled 'The Belsen Fat-Burner', 'Waspish Waists the Warsaw-Ghetto Way' and 'Learn to be Siege of Leningrad-Lean' will really rock the Diet-Fad world", Sheza Conner proclaims.
"It'll be my Blitzkrieg on Basket-Butts", New Mexico's most combative nutritionist claims. "I'm the Food Fuhrer", she boasts.
Whether there will be a 'Winston Churchill of Obesity' who will rise to combat the frankly-terrifying Ms Conner, history (if it can ever recover from all this mangling) will tell us in its own time.
by Mandy Lyfebotes
