The New Year diet frenzy is over but warm spring weather means skimpier clothes – and all that Easter chocolate is looming. You might be considering another quick-fix diet: the babyfood diet, or the Dukan, perhaps? Think again. Dubious anti-fat remedies have a long, costly and dirty history of self-flagellation and failure.

It wasn't always like this. "Diet" comes from the Greek word diaita, meaning a sensible way of life [see footnote], and a far cry from the fad weight-loss plans we wrestle with now. The Greeks did suggest avoiding sex and walking around naked (surely counter-productive?) to slim down. Oh, and lunchtime vomiting. But nothing's perfect.

It was the early Christians who brought temptation and sin into the mix. The enormously fat St Thomas Aquinas wrote: "Let us not give our minds to delights but to what is the end of delights. Here on earth it is excrement and obesity, hereafter it is fire and the worm." Gluttony was written on the body in abundant flesh – and you can still Pray Your Weight Away, courtesy of writer Charlie W Shedd, while aiming for More of Jesus, Less of Me (Joan Cavanaugh and Pat Forseth).

Excess fat was an early target for philosophers, physicians, politicians and poets – as John Dryden pointed out in the 17th century. "The first physicians by debauch were made," he wrote. "Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade." Many spoke from personal experience: George Cheyne, a maverick, morbidly fat physician of 32st, was ridiculed for dispensing diet advice. His equally fat friend Dr Johnson observed that, "Whatever be the quantity that a man eats, it is plain that if he is too fat, he has eaten more than he should have done."

By the 19th century everyone was getting in on the diet business, moving away from advising plain food and moderate consumption to the mercurial miracle cures of today. And the first dieting celebrities began to emerge. Byron, archetypal romantic aesthete, yet too plump for his own liking, ate potatoes soaked in vinegar and wore layered clothing to sweat off the pounds. He was accused of encouraging wannabe angst, "the dread of being fat weighing like an incubus" on the youth of the day.

Charlatans set themselves up as experts with diets to promote and products to sell, and plenty bought into them. Even Nietzsche, fretting over his size, had a go at a restricted-calorie diet but gave up; the nervous energy of scholarly life required good dinners. The anonymous author of Advice To Stout People (1898) lost seven stone and recommended tobacco, as had Byron, to stave off hunger. Smoking as a slimming aid has not only penetrated popular imagination but has recently been shown to be fact. Early Lucky Strike ads marketed the fear of fat to men and women, and tobacco giants Philip Morris and American Tobacco actually added appetite suppressants to their cigarettes. So yes, it could help shed those pounds – but with the side effect of reducing your life expectancy.

If smoking didn't do the trick, how about masticating yourself thin? Chewing was an Edwardian diet craze promoted by Horace Fletcher, an entrepreneur who boasted that he defecated only once a fortnight with "no more odour than a hot biscuit" – and he carried a sample with him to prove it. Kafka and Henry James were devotees of Fletcherism but, after five years of chewing, James developed a "sickish loathing" of food. Diet foods and drinks proliferated: "Squirt" was an early product, for "grown-up tastes"; by the 1970s we had Carnation's Slender, from Nestlé. To dieters , this infantilising mush was the stuff that dreams were made of.

Body shape, fashion and dieting have always been close bedfellows. The move from the padded hour-glass Victorian figure to the barber-pole Flapper was one of the most extreme changes in trend, and this fashion led doctors to begin worrying that dieting might be dangerous. The press went into a frenzy. Women with boyish figures could turn into lesbians, they screamed, even as they sold advertising space for diet products. All manner of quacks were making themselves a tidy income out of those who could pinch an inch. Sylvia of Hollywood massaged the likes of Jean Harlow and Gloria Swanson, their fat oozing through the pores "like mashed potato through a colander", and she was rumoured to have caused the first Hollywood-induced death-by-diet. Dr Lulu Hunt Peters, 15st 10lb at her heaviest and the best-selling author of calorie-counting diet books, castigated her readers, telling them it was an absolute disgrace to be big.

Dr Gayelord Hauser, diet guru of the 30s, lover of the svelte Garbo, his suave curls more permanent than his doctorate, sold his ideas to "less-fortunate beings" because "there is real tragedy in fat". Weighing machines were everywhere, though the Speak Your Weight variety soon lost their public appeal and went quiet. You could have an apronectomy for your wobbly belly – though even the surgeons thought you must have a "mental twist" to want one. Bile Beans (initially sold as a cure for nausea and flu) might shift the rolls, or perhaps laxative-enhanced Silph Chewing Gum or Elfin Fat Reducing Gum Drops. Skin-macerating rubber knickers enjoyed a vogue, as did fat-bashing trunk rollers, stomach beaters, vibrating chairs and electric shocks.

The authority of science has been a real marketing tool for the diet industry. Hormones were the new hot thing for Edwardian slimmers and thyroid extract became a fast fixer of flab, forming the basis of many popular remedies. Secret ingredients, useless (epsom salts, baking powder) and dangerous (strychnine, arsenic), were packed into products such as Kellogg's Safe Fat Reducer and Dr Gordon's Elegant Pills. You could put them in your bath, too – Lesser Slim-Figure-Bath powders – and then scrub up with a Slenmar Reducing Brush and La-Mar Reducing Soap. By the 1960s in America there were more than 50 products called "Trim" – Trim Beer, Trimfit, Trim-a-Bod – and a scary Two-Way Diet that claimed to "melt the fat off your body like a blow-torch would melt butter".

Diet drugs were increasingly big business, especially dinitrophenol, a wonder-pill of promise for the plump. A carcinogenic dyeing agent used in First World War explosives, it made you sweaty, gave you a rash and even caused blindness if you thought that twice as many pills meant twice as thin, and probably twice as fast. Up to 100,000 Americans were swallowing dinitrophenol before it was suppressed in 1938; at best they lost just 2-3lbs a week – not a spectacular result given the risks. A few slimmers died from taking other drugs, including Slim and Corpu-lean.

The diet preparations available to us now are the latest in a long line of imaginative remedies of varying efficacy, but at least today's drugs benefit from a better scientific basis. Alli, for example, stops your body absorbing some of the fat you eat. Apart from reports of serious liver problems among some who have swallowed this one whole, there are unfortunate and colourful side-effects and some users have found they can't stray too far from a lav. But even this hasn't stopped a rush on the shops.

The lucrative diet industry has always used magic as well as science. Back in 1928, Dr Arthur Cramp was bemoaning fat cures as "shrewd schemes for fooling the overweight", yet even today you can buy slimming hologram bracelets, tights that melt your fat with crystals and fat-burning lipstick. And what about the Fat Whisperer of West Hollywood, a weight-loss guru who quietly commands your fat cells to leave? You'd think a fat shouter would be more effective: "GET THE HELL OUT, FAT!"

And of course diet aids never come without a price. James Duigan will sell you his BodyComplete drink powder for £60, or his Bodyism Exercise Band (£12), today's version of the 18th-century Anti-Corpulency Belt. Fans of his quasi-religious-sounding Bodyism include Elle Macpherson. There is nothing new in dieting history. It is full of photogenic types whose idea of nirvana is having the bum they had when they were 17.

Dieting is an obsessive business, laden with hope, humiliation, effort, self-consciousness and desire, salted with the potential for built-in failure. "With the possible exception of the credulity of the bald-headed man in the field of hair-growers," wrote an exasperated doctor in the 1920s, "there is nowhere to be found such simple trustfulness in the veracity of printer's ink as that possessed by the obese within the realm of fat cures." Yo-yo dieting doesn't work: you might lose 5% to 10% of your weight but you almost always pile it back on. So don't waste your money or make sudden scary changes – a little goes a long way over time.

Determine what your natural "set point" weight is (and learn to like it), make small differences (use stairs not lifts), record your weight loss, plan strategies and share success or setbacks with others. Keep it simple, ignore novelty diets and the weight of judgment, and take a good look at the ancient Greek philosophy of diaita.

Louise Foxcroft's Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2,000 Years (Profile Books), is out now, at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, click on the link or call 0330 333 6846

• The following correction was published on 22 April 2012:

Translation corner. Contrary to "Dieting: a pot-bellied history" (Observer Magazine), the Greek word "diaita" does not simply mean "a sensible way of life", nor is it the basis of a specific philosophy. It means "way of living" and originally had no particular reference to food or drink, being also connected to parliamentary assembly. And in our motoring review "Blowing the doors off" (Magazine) we made "flügeltüren" mean "folding doors". "Flügel" directly translates as "wing".