Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public

"I think it’s the first fad diet, that we know of in detail. In the 19th century, this really quite powerful personality, the undertaker to the royal family, was suddenly getting fat. He sought advice, tried all kinds of diets, was rowing up and down the Thames for two hours a day, all the time he just kept getting fatter. Then he decided to go on this diet, which he called after himself—basically a modern day Atkins diet of meat and fruit. And he lost 30 kilograms. As well as writing a book, he also gave out these free pamphlets, which at the time was very important because books were so expensive. He became a real celebrity and lived to the age of 81, which was quite unusual at the time. What it illustrates to me is that he went against the advice of the time, which was that exercise could cure you of anything. Every time he exercised, his muscles would get bigger, but he would get hungrier and his metabolism would slow down. So he was one of the first to disprove the easy solution that you just need to run a bit more to get the weight off. The more you run—or row, in his case—the slower your metabolism, and the more your body tries to fight it. Hormones send signals to say, ‘you should eat more!’ “The more you run, the slower your metabolism” I like the idea, and also just the fact that over 110 years before the Atkins diet it had all already been done. There are also some great quotes in there, and plenty of social history. Because in his day, seeing someone obese was really quite unusual. Kids would point at him in the street, and laugh at the fat man going down the road, which you wouldn’t really get now. Yes. It’s not a new phenomenon, except in those days it was just a very small percentage of the population that suffered from obesity. But he’s a great example of self-experimentation which I’m a big fan of; clearly his metabolism suited a high fit, low carb diet, at a time when his physicians were telling him that calories were the crucial thing."