The Fat Person on the Edgware Road Omnibus: Fat, Fashion, and Public Shaming in the British Long Eighteenth Century

Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears in the course of the long eighteenth century. It is part of a shift to an awareness of the public stigma of obesity and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological rather than a purely somatic phenomenon. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the "reasonable" (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere.

Reasonableness comes to define the normal within a cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and lead to the potential for psychological difficulties that come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.