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Belly Fat Is the Enemy, and So They Say It Truly Is
How we look, where our body stores its reserves, and what is expected of us all seem to funnel down to belly fat, but should that be a concern?
Psychologists in the last two centuries have attempted to zero in on physical features that could reveal the underlying personality characteristics of individuals. We had Franz Joseph Gall who founded the field of phrenology, which aims to predict a person’s intelligence and personality based on an analysis of their skull’s shape.
Gall was convinced that mental processes are confined to particular areas of the brain and that human behavior is influenced by these processes, leading him to believe that the shape of the skull accurately represents the relative growth of the different brain regions. Of course, Gall was correct in some respects regarding internal brain regions but wrong when it came to bumps on the skull, the shape of the face, and its various characteristics. An unfortunate miscarriage of justice resulted in people being seen as criminal types because of the shape of their ears, their noses, or their chins.
Then we had William Herbert Sheldon who created a new kind of somatotypology by dividing people into three types: endomorphic, mesomorphic, and ectomorphic. He felt that each person carried within them varying degrees of the three character…
