Excerpts from the book Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CDN
Did you ever think about how dieting came to be? Did you ever wonder why our culture is obsessed with chasing a smaller sized body? The amazing Christy Harrison broke down the History of Diet Culture in her book Anti-Diet and we are here for it!
It all started when William Banding, Britain’s first weight-loss guru arrived on the scene in 1862. He retired from a successful career and wanted to lose weight. He went to a number of doctors to help him but in that time having some extra weight was healthy and expected as one aged. He finally found a doctor who agreed to help him with an experimental diet.
In 1864, Banting published a pamphlet highlighting his diet and weight loss titled “Letter on Corpulence: Address to the Public”. It was so popular it sold out a number of times.
This book became so widespread (along with the excessive weighing) that soon scales to weigh people were found everywhere. The “penny scales” began to pop up everywhere in grocery stores, drug stores, train stations, etc. It fueled people’s self-consciousness about their weight and status. This was the beginning of the change of the Victorian era where plump, pale, round, curvy people were “dignified” and refined.
Fast forward to the early 1900s, magazines started to print pictures of tall, thin women. The flapper generation bloomed with short dresses and low waistlines. It was an era that worshiped youthfulness, not the true grown bodies of women.Harrison writes, “By the 1920s, women had traded in the literal corsets of the Victorian era for what Fraser calls the “inner corset” of self-imposed starvation.”
In the 1920s, women learned to vote which was excellent progress. During this time diet companies began promoting laxatives, soaps that “washed fat away”, the sale of scales and different diets.
“Writer Naomi Wolf argues, the times in history when women have made the greatest political gains – getting the right to vote, gaining reproductive freedom, securing the right to work outside the home – have also been moments when standards for ‘ideal’ beauty became significantly thinner and the pressure on women to adhere to those standards increased. Wolf explains that this served both to distract women from their growing political power and to assuage the fears of people who don’t want the old patriarchal system to change – because if women are busy trying to shrink themselves, they won’t have the time or energy to shake things up.”
In the mid-1800s weight gain was seen as normal with the aging process. By the early 1900s, physicians were starting to get on board with the idea that weight loss was the way to go. Health insurance companies began using the Quetelet index (later rebranded to the body mass index or BMI) to categorize people. “It was created as a statistical exercise, not a medical instrument, and was never intended for clinical use.” It was also first established with European people so it never accounted for varying nationalities and ethnic groups.
In the early days, diets were a measure of someone’s “willpower”. In the 1920s people started other habits like smoking to lose weight, sometimes urged by doctors. People started “jiggling” off their fat at “gyms”. Diet pills with Benzedrine became popular in the 1930s and then amphetamines (aka speed) came in the 1940s.
Bariatric surgeries came in the 1950s, where one physician, Howard Payne, then coined the term “morbid obesity” to make bariatric surgeries look like a life-saving option for people because “morbid obesity” sounds like they do not have much time left.
Many people were not turning to surgery just yet though. In 1961, Weight Watchers was founded after a group of women would gather and talk about dieting in Jean Nidetech’s living room. Nidetech’s had yo-yo dieted for years but never could stick to a diet due to “emotional eating” and thought small groups and support would help people stick to a diet.
After Weight Watchers was founded within five years five million people had enrolled. The emotional eating aspect rang a bell with so many people that a number of “anonymous” groups were founded including Eaters Anonymous, Gluttons Anonymous and Fatties Anonymous in the 60’s. Later that decade, during the second wave of feminism, a 16 year old British model named Twiggy came onto the scene and created a new unattainable standard for women to strive after.
In the 1970’s, came the rise of civil rights, feminism, gay rights, the enrionmental movement, antiwar protests and other countercultural rebellion. People started taking more of a stand in what they believed in. Fat-liberation groups began spreading awareness of the scientific evidence against dieting and intentional weight loss.
Despite that, diet culture prevailed and in 1972 Robert Adkins published his book on his high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet. A few years later, after more research had come out, the government announced its endorsement of a low-fat diet for optimal health. Soon you began to see a wave of “low fat” foods advertised for health.
In 1983, Jenny Craig began her business and dieting continued to grow in popularity.
It wasn’t until 1992 that the National Institutes of Health did research and concluded diets do not work and the vast majority of people who intentionally lost weight had regained most or all of it within five years.
Soon after in 1994, the government made it mandatory for all manufacturers to label the nutrient content on every single food item. This enabled people to now count and watch what they ate even more.
The Washington Post in 1995 reported that “Americans were fatter than ever before” and one of the leading theories was because “a decade of dieting mania has actually made people fatter”. A doctor from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston was quoted as saying, “The more you diet, the worse it gets.” Yet, by the mid 1990s, 44% of women and 29% of men reported they were trying to lose weight and it wasn’t even those who were in the overweight category.
In 1999 Atkins published the third edition of his book and other diet books became popular such as the Zone Diet and South Beach Diet. Nothing new, all similar to the days of William Banting.
It is important to note that even medical professionals at NIH and on the leadership board of the WHO had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies which benefited from them lowering the BMI cutoffs (identifying people as “overweight” at a lower weight point). Industry funding has been shown to significantly and substantially affect the outcomes of research.
In the 1990’s, researcher William Dietz, director of the CDC Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity at the time, came out with the idea that “obesity” was a disease and that people were getting unhealthier because they were gaining weight. Dietz partnered with another scientist to map out the areas of the country who had the highest concentration of those who fell into this “obese” category. “The maps created a powerful sense of an epidemic spreading across the country, and they convinced anyone who saw them that Americans’ increasing body size wasn’t a neutral fact (like the increase in average height that happened during that same period) but a genuine epidemic.”
These maps are incredibly misleading because a few pounds can tip someone into a different classification. Another important note is that dieting has been proven to cause weight gain for over two thirds of dieters in the long term. As the national average weight was increasing, it is at least in part due to the increase in dieting.
In 2013 obesity was deemed a disease, despite the fact that the classification of BMI was deeply flawed and overlooked the vast majority of health factors independent of weight. Framing only exacerbates weight stigma.
“As you can see from this quick trip through the history of diet culture, it’s very much a system of oppression, with its roots in racist, sexist beliefs about food and bodies. Over time, those roots have become increasingly obscured by the ever-changing, ever-subtler and seemingly benign ways that diet culture shows up in the world.” It’s hard to recognize diet culture for the Life Thief it really is.
Source: Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison
