And in William Banting, he had found the perfect guinea pig.ĭr. Harvey had just returned from a convention in Paris, and was keen to test out the newfound dietary theories of Claude Bernard, one of France’s foremost physicians, which he had heard there. William Harvey.Īs luck would have it, Dr. But just when things seemed hopeless, one of Banting’s doctors took a summer vacation-and in his absence he booked an appointment with another London surgeon, one named Dr.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR ARTOON SKIN
He took to walking downstairs backwards to ease the pressure on his knees and ankles, his sight began to fail, and his skin began to be afflicted with painful boils and lesions. Now middle-aged, Banting was so obese that even tying his shoelaces became a chore. Starvation diets and living “upon sixpence a day” followed, as did daily horse rides, purgative medicines, Turkish steam baths, and trips to medicinal spas all over the country, but still, in Banting’s own words, “the evil still gradually increased.” After years following an array of treatments and remedies, he had succeeded in losing just six pounds. Another advocated brisk walks and exposure to sea air, but it too had little positive effect.
This certainly built up his strength, but had the adverse effect of simultaneously increasing his appetite, leaving him no further forward. The first merely advocated “increased bodily exertion,” as he later recalled, and in response Banting took up rowing on the Thames first thing in the morning. Although his work kept him relatively active-and he claimed not to give in to “excessive eating, drinking or self-indulgence of any kind”-by his mid-thirties Banting was nevertheless struggling with his size, and had begun consulting some of the city’s finest doctors in an attempt to lose weight. The success of the family business paid for a comfortable lifestyle, and Banting lived for much of his life in a four-story Georgian townhouse in Kensington, one of London’s wealthiest neighborhoods. But years before Atkins came along, there was the Banting Diet: a low-carb regimen championed by the most unlikely of health gurus-an overweight London undertaker.īorn in London in 1797, William Banting came from a family of funeral directors in fact, they were the official Funeral Directors to the Royal Household. At the height of the Atkins Diet fame in the early 2000s, 1 in 11 people in the United States were reportedly following Robert Atkins’s directions to cut bread, pasta, and rice from their diets while eating all the meat, eggs, and dairy products they wanted. Nutritionists might be divided over the benefits and detriments of diets that replace carbohydrates with increased proteins and fats, but there’s no denying their popularity. These days, thankfully, people have ceased giving themselves gut parasites and drinking themselves into oblivion in the name of losing weight, but one weight-loss regimen that has survived the test of time is the low-carb diet.
And in the later 19th and 20th centuries, popular solutions to obesity ranged from deliberately infecting yourself with a tapeworm, to spitting out any food that didn’t turn to liquid after chewing it 30 times. Lord Byron famously advocated a diet of vinegar-drenched potatoes to keep himself trim. Between bouts of feasting, the notoriously bulky Henry VIII still observed fast days-although with “soup, herring, cod, lampreys, pike, salmon, whiting, haddock, plaice, bream, porpoise, seal, carp, trout, crabs, lobsters, custard, tart, fritters and fruit” all on his table, even his leaner days were a lavish banquet. According to legend, William the Conqueror went on a liquid diet (of nothing but alcohol, naturally) when he found himself too large to ride his favorite horse. For as long as people have been watching their figure, diet gurus have been there to tell us how best to shed pounds and keep in shape.
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