New Year, New Year’s resolutions, let the dieting begin! But first, wouldn’t it be fun to look at The History of … Dieting for Weight Control (maybe while enjoying one last slightly stale Christmas cookie…).
The word diet comes from the Greek word diaita meaning manner of living. Today a diet is a way of eating either for preference, for health or to lose weight.
Dieting has occurred throughout history for various religious and health reasons. Among the elite or rich there was always some interest and writing about diet as an overall way of living. This included a desire to combat obesity. However, dieting to specifically lose weight is, for the bulk of humanity, principally a modern phenomenon.
For most of human history the search for food occurred for survival and that was our primary relationship with food. In fact, often being plump or overweight was a sign of great beauty because it meant a person was healthy. However, in the 19th century industrialization produced a large middle class. This had many consequences. Among them was that as people moved from farms to cities they began eating different kinds of foods and could afford more. They were no longer living at subsistence levels so weight gain was possible.
During the Victorian Era in the United States (1837-1901), some members of the growing middle class were wealthy enough to allow mothers to stay at home and care for children. They could also afford mirrors in their homes which were finally being mass-produced at affordable rates and they had some free time for self-reflection. Additionally, disposable income meant the ability to afford some non-essentials, like pretty clothes.
Outside forces contributed, during this general period, to a widespread ideal of what a person should look like. With a bit more leisure time and money people could read newspapers which had pictures and women’s magazines with ads and articles promoting the best figure.
Dresses became mass-produced by the turn of the century as opposed to specifically made for one person’s body. Eventually, by the 1920s, standard dress sizes were introduced. This also happened with bras as they replaced corsets. There was now a model of what a person should look like, the implements to evaluate yourself within your home and now standard clothes a person had to fit into that placed an evaluation on that person (i.e. you are a size 8).
Medical advancements contributed to a population more conscious of diet with the discovery of calories in the 1800s and more wide knowledge about the nutritional value of foods. Additionally, by the early 1900s, weight charts showing average weights based on height were obtained from life insurance companies and published. Several years after that, tables of correct weights for height were created. In the 1870s weighing scale companies began producing machines for people as well as for foods. Penny scales appeared in public. Bathroom scales followed after the First World War.
Now being the right weight was medically, as well as visually, important and knowledge existed about how to achieve your appropriate size. The only thing needed was the right guru to put together the desire to be the correct weight to look good and fit into clothes.
Many such gurus emerged and the modern diet industry was born in the 1800s. Some of the early notables were Banting, Fletcher, Peters and Hay.
The Banting System was introduced to the world by William Banting in an 1863 book called Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public that he self-published. It sold worldwide. It was a precursor diet to the Salisbury Method and then the Atkins diet. William Banting was an undertaker who needed to lose weight. His idea, devised by a local ear, nose and throat Doctor, was to reduce the amount of carbohydrates in his diet. The method was used well into the 1920s, even getting a mention in some of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. The diet was so popular it became a verb. Instead of saying you were dieting you would say you were ‘banting.’
Horace Fletcher (1849-1914) was a businessman whose idea for dieting was to chew each bite of your food until it liquefied. Fletcherism became an activity as well as a diet and was very popular. Notables such as John D. Rockefeller, Franz Kafka and Henry James were devotees.
In 1918 a Doctor named Lulu Hunt Peters published a best-selling book on dieting and calories. She was among the first to popularize the use of calories in dieting in the US. Later she wrote the first calorie counting book for kids. She was a physician from California who had lost weight herself.
The Hay Diet was named for Dr. William Hay who came up with a diet that was the precursor to the Beverly Hills Diet of the 1980s. His 1930s diet involved aspects of Fletcherism, as well as, separating foods (eating protein, fruit, and starches at different meals). It was practiced by Henry Ford.
Inevitably, backlash against this new emphasis on dieting for weight control emerged. Many Doctors spoke out and continue to speak out against fad dieting. By the 1920s, warnings about dangerous dieting were a part of the Progressive Era’s medical programs. The American Medical Association’s (AMA) conference on adult weight met in 1926 to determine what healthy weights were and voiced concern about the ‘barber pole figure’ of the 1920s. While the term anorexia nervosa was first used in the 1800s (and before that existed but was not categorized) it became widely known in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly after the singer Karen Carpenter’s death.
However, despite the warnings, dieting for weight control continued and expanded throughout the 1900s and to today. Cigarettes were advertised in the 20th century as a way to make a person thin. Cosmetic surgery by ‘beauty surgeons’ also grew in the 20th century. The first diet foods were introduced in the 1950s. Weight Watchers was started in 1963. Today, a popular book website has over 100,000 books for sale on diet and dieting.