The History of Diets and Diet Books

Malcolm Gladwell cracked the diet-book code in 1998. In a New Yorker article on the obesity epidemic among the Pima Indians in Arizona, he observed that all the popular advice on weight loss reduced it to “a matter of technique: that the right foods eaten in the right combination can succeed where more traditional approaches to nutrition have failed.”

That led him to The Zone, the most popular diet book of the late 1990s, and from there to other best-selling weight-loss books of the '90s, some still famous (like Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution) and some we’ve forgotten (like The Rice Diet Report and The Rotation Diet).

“They all seem to be making things up,” Gladwell wrote. “But if you read a large number of popular diet books in succession, what is striking is that they all seem to be making things up in precisely the same way. It is as if the diet-book genre had an unspoken set of narrative rules and conventions, and all that matters is how skillfully those rules and conventions are adhered to.”

Here’s the formula he divined:

1. Darkness

The author is lost: obese, lethargic, sick, or the last one picked in playground sports.

2. The Eureka Moment

The author stumbles on the One True Secret that has been forgotten, ignored, or deliberately and nefariously suppressed. It might be long-forgotten research (for Zone author Barry Sears, it was a study published in The Lancet in 1956), a mysterious mentor, or a series of portentous events.

3. The Patent Claim

This is the key, Gladwell wrote, because it “explains how weight can be lost without sacrifice.” Dieters know from past experiences that it’s not easy. But they also believe they lack the discipline to make a strict diet work for them.

So the authors make what Gladwell calls a “540-degree rhetorical triple-gainer,” since it involves making six claims in rapid succession:

• It’s a myth that you must suffer
• Sure, everyone says that
• But of course you don’t believe them
• I was once just like you, convinced I had to suffer to lose weight
• Because it’s true
• Unless you use my diet, which requires no suffering whatsoever

When Suffering Was the Entire Point

The idea of not suffering would’ve seemed strange to early diet-book authors. Take Hippocrates, father of medicine. In Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting Over Two Thousand Years, Louise Foxcroft writes that Hippocrates understood the importance of self-discipline and a balanced lifestyle: “ ‘Man,’ he wrote, ‘cannot live healthily on food without a certain amount of exercise.’ ” For his heaviest patients, he recommended that they exercise to exhaustion, and then eat while out of breath.

That was 2,400 years ago, and for much of recorded history, advice was similarly harsh. For example, in a 1937 book called Weight Reduction: Diet and Dishes, Dr. Ernest Claxton wrote that “the secret of success is to be found in the willingness of the subject to submit himself to a disciplined diet. Shortcuts are no good.” He went on to say that success required willpower, perseverance, submission, and even secrecy.

Yes, secrecy. Because the need to diet has mostly been seen as a source of embarrassment, a moral failure that led to the sin of gluttony. Moral lapses require atonement. Atonement means a harsh and restrictive regimen focused on self-denial.

If there was ever a time for such an idea to take hold in the U.S., it was the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

How History Repeats Itself

Interest in fitness, nutrition, public safety, and even religion waxes and wanes in predictable patterns. The cycle that began in 1880 brought us the Progressive era in politics, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition. We got Christian Science, a new religion with an emphasis on mind-body health, and crusades against drugs, tobacco, and sex that would return in our own lifetimes.

But for the sake of this discussion, the most influential innovation may have been the scale. “Americans, especially women, began to weigh themselves regularly from the late 19th century on,” wrote medical historian Ann La Berge in a paper called “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America.” At first this was done in public, on coin-operated penny scales (some of which played music or even told your fortune). The bathroom scale was introduced in 1913.

By then, La Berge noted, “America had a firmly entrenched dieting culture.” That made Americans susceptible to one of the worst ideas in history: “Bodies should not get heavier with age, and hence men and women of all ages should weigh the same as they had at 18 or 25.”

Following logically from that utterly illogical notion was the idea that a diet low in calories must also be low in fat. The math seemed simple enough; if a gram of carbohydrate has 4 calories and a gram of fat has 9, why would you eat the fat instead of the carbohydrate?

The contemporary push for low-fat diets gained critical mass with Ancel Keys and his landmark study, “Coronary Heart Disease in Seven Countries,” published in Circulation in 1970. What became known as the Seven Countries Study had wide-ranging influence. In public policy, starting in 1977, the U.S. government officially promoted low-fat diets for the prevention of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.

“By 1984,” La Berge wrote, “the scientific consensus was that the low-fat was appropriate not only for high-risk patients, but also as a preventive measure for everyone except babies.”

I’ll give you an example of how completely accepted this idea was: In "Once Around," a movie released in 1991, Richard Dreyfuss played a salesman who’s recovering from a heart attack. When he tries to eat a piece of dark-meat chicken, his wife, played by Holly Hunter, stops him. Why? Because any fat will kill him. (I couldn’t find a clip of that specific scene, so I hope my memory is accurate.)

I started working at Men’s Fitness magazine in 1992. Like every other health and fitness magazine, we promoted low-fat diets for any goal you might have, from heart health to body composition. I remember a colleague writing an article about trying to stick to a 10 percent fat diet for a month. (As I recall, he was unable to do it.)

The Paradigm Shift

The low-fat diet may have been ubiquitous as a media phenomenon, but it always had dissenters. In the 1950s, La Berge wrote, “some scientists had argued that it was the kind of fats—not the total amount—that mattered.”

The low-carb Atkins diet had been phenomenally popular in the 1970s, so much so that in 1979, in a skit on "Saturday Night Live," John Belushi played a fat Elvis impersonator, explaining, “I’m playin’ the latter part of the King’s life, after he discovered carbohydrates.”

Even then, a low-carb diet wasn’t exactly new. More than 100 years earlier, in 1863, a London undertaker named William Banting published Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. In it he detailed his personal story: Just a few years earlier, he was so stout (5-foot-5, 202 pounds, according to Foxcroft) that he couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes. After he cut out “bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, and potatoes,” he lost weight quickly (to 156 pounds), a phenomenal accomplishment for a man in his mid-60s.

The diet became so popular that his name became a verb. A person on a low-carb plan would tell friends “I’m Banting.” If someone lost noticeable amounts of weight, friends would ask, “Do you Bant?”

But let’s return to the Diet Wars of the 1990s. When I joined the staff of Men’s Health magazine in 1998, my colleagues were still on the side of the experts, and perplexed by the re-emerging popularity of the Atkins diet. In the December 1999 issue, in an article we called “Don’t Have a Cow, Man,” we took Atkins apart, noting that “Dr. Atkins is unable to point to any studies demonstrating that a diet high in saturated fat and low in carbohydrates is safe for the heart.”

The experts quoted in that article included Dr. Dean Ornish, a rival author whose books advocated a super-low-fat vegetarian diet, and Dr. David Ludwig of Harvard, who provided us with the ideal alternative to Atkins: “a diet in which 50 percent of calories come from carbohydrates with a low glycemic index.” We now know the glycemic index was never as powerful for weight control as its supporters claimed.

Lou’s Eureka Moment

Now we get to my small and extraordinarily insignificant part in the history of diet books. As I would have predicted, had I read Malcolm Gladwell’s article, it began with a Eureka moment.

It was the summer of 2000. I had just returned from a trip to Muncie, Indiana, where I’d gotten a full workup at Ball State University’s Human Performance lab. I went to Muncie with the idea that I’d write a feature about fitness tests. But the results changed my mind. Almost everything they measured, from blood pressure to lipids to VO2 max, showed that I was in excellent health for a man in his 40s. But to my surprise and disgust, three separate tests showed my body fat was over 20 percent. DEXA was the kindest, at 21 percent, while Bod-Pod and calipers put it just over 22 percent.

That was on my mind when I went into a meeting with the new editor of Men’s Health Books. I brought him a new idea: What if everything we’ve been telling readers has been wrong? What if, instead of telling them to do cardio and eat a low-fat diet to weigh less and look better, we should be telling them to lift weights and eat more fat—which is to say, fewer carbs?

It sounds stupidly obvious now, and is standard advice in Men’s Health and other magazines. But this was just seven months after our anti-Atkins article. Not only were Rodale magazines like MH and Prevention all-in on low-fat diets, we also published Runner’s World and Bicycling, both of which promoted endurance training. Some coworkers fretted that the book, Testosterone Advantage Plan, might undermine the company’s entire mission when we published it 18 months later.

Of course nothing like that happened. The nutrition plan, created by coauthor Jeff Volek, was a modified Mediterranean diet, only with more protein (2 grams per kilogram of body weight). He recommended that the remaining calories be split evenly: half fat, half carbs. In that sense it was barely different from the still-popular Zone diet.

Our readers embraced the book, buying well over 100,000 copies the first year, I was told. At first I wondered why my colleagues didn’t make a bigger deal over the book’s surprising success. Then Rodale published South Beach Diet in early 2003, and I understood. Described as “a kinder, gentler Atkins,” SBD was an instant bestseller, and for a while sold more than 100,000 a week.

Life during Wartime

I thought the Diet Wars were over by the mid-2000s. Low fat was dead, and the public seemed perfectly comfortable with lower-carb, higher-protein diets. Moreover, so many hucksters had moved into the field—including Dr. Phil, author of The Ultimate Weight Solution in 2003, and convicted con artist Kevin Trudeau, who in 2007 published The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About—that I didn’t see how much lower it could go.

Could I have been more wrong?

It’s difficult to even categorize the dizzying range of diets we either love, hate, or ignore. I suspect the most useful to consumers are what I call “theme” diets. “Paleo,” “vegan,” and perhaps “Mediterranean” mean about the same things to most people with casual interest in nutrition. Individuals may differ in their specific interpretations of those themes, or their adherence, but they all have relatively straightforward and easy-to-remember parameters.

The past few years have seen the rise of what I call “lone gunman” diets. These single out one malefactor that, the authors claim, is responsible for outsized (and thus unlikely) damage to our health and waist size. Just off the top of my head, I can think of books that sloth-shamed wheat, sugar, gluten, animal fat and/or protein, or omega-6 fats.

It almost makes me nostalgic for the days when we argued over entire macronutrients, like fat or carbs.

The Greatest Diet Ever

Inevitably, we come to the question of which diet is “best.” The only honest answer is, “It depends.” If you believe a paleo or vegan diet is best for you, you’ll probably do well with it. If you believe that the key to a healthy weight is matching your diet to your blood type, it doesn’t matter if there’s absolutely no evidence to support your belief. As long as you follow the diet, it’ll probably work.

There is no “right” or “wrong.” For the end user, there’s only “works” or “doesn’t work.”

I’ll give you an example from perhaps the greatest weight-loss story in human history:

Celesta Geyer was a circus fat lady in the 1930s and ’40s. Her stage name was Dolly Dimples. If anyone was ever born to be fat, it was Geyer. She weighed 150 pounds in fifth grade. She was 338 pounds, at 4-foot-11, when she started her career. Another fat lady recruited her by saying, “You know, honey, everyone laughs at you now. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to make them pay for their fun?”

She weighed 588 pounds at her peak, and estimates that she ate 10,000 calories a day, including four loaves of bread, two pounds of sugar, and a gallon of milk.

In 1950, when she was 48 or 49, she had a near-fatal heart attack. Her blood pressure was 240 over 132, and she was told she had just a few hours to live. That’s when she decided to go on a diet. In a little over a year, while eating 800 calories a day, she lost more than 400 pounds, and maintained a weight around 120 pounds for the rest of her life. She was 81 when she died.

I learned all this from Diet or Die, her long-out-of-print autobiography and weight-loss manual. (I found it through an interlibrary loan.) Her diet was the opposite of what any of us would recommend today. She started off with baby food, and a limit of six glasses of liquid a day. A quarter of the diet was cereal grains. Instead of exercising, she took hot baths and got massages.

Here’s how she described her approach to weight loss:

“Like every American person I’ve read of speedy routes to losing ten pounds in two weeks, three pounds in two days or forty pounds in two months, and I’m convinced that none, no, not one, can be successful if you do not first take the weight off in your mind before you strip it from your body.”

So if you ask me what’s the best diet, I’d say it was Celesta Geyer’s, because she lost more than 400 pounds and kept it off for 30 years. If you ask me what’s the worst diet, I’d say it’s a 300-way tie between all the diets that follow the recipe Malcolm Gladwell outlined, making fantastical claims based on dubious or cherry-picked science.

Which brings me to The Lean Muscle Diet, my upcoming book. It has no Eureka moments or magical transformations. The diet plan, by coauthor Alan Aragon, is practical and flexible, with more-or-less balanced amounts of protein, carbs, and fat. It doesn’t consecrate or denigrate foods, but instead gives you these guidelines:

• 80 percent of your diet should come from whole or minimally processed foods you like
• 10 percent should come from whole or minimally processed foods you don’t necessarily like, but don’t hate
• 10 percent should come from anything else, even if it’s what Alan calls “pure junky goodness”

We’re betting on an audience that prefers solid guidance over solid waste. Are we right?

Lou Schuler, CSCS, is an award-winning journalist and author, with Alan Aragon, of The Lean Muscle Diet.

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