The Weight Loss Cycle

Every few months, it seems, a new diet trend hits the market. Low carb, high protein, low fat, vegetarian... the combinations seem endless and can leave a dieter confused. Why so many conflicting plans? Is the latest idea the most scientifically sound? Which diet is best for losing weight, and keeping it off?

A lot of the "new discoveries" on the diet scene today are based on ideas that have been around for decades, or even centuries! Take, for instance, the idea that reducing fat intake is the key to losing weight. Over 150 years before the Hawaii Diet, Sylvester Graham was selling his fat free cracker as a diet food and promoting a vegetarian lifestyle.

The truth is, many of the weight loss plans currently marketed as innovative and advanced are the same diets your grandparents or even great-grandparents may have tried.

The Birth of Dieting

Until the mid 1800s, there was little need for weight loss plans. Except in the higher economic classes, not having enough food to eat was a much more common problem than being overweight. Toward the turn of the century slenderness became more fashionable and food more plentiful, and someone concerned about their weight would probably be advised to increase their exercise rather than change their food intake.

Low Carb Diets

Since the early 1990s, diets that call for careful restriction of carbohydrate intake have found increased popularity. Plans like SugarBusters, the South Beach Diet and the Atkins Diet have become bestsellers by promising rapid weight loss and improved cardiac health without giving up steaks, cheese or luncheon meat.

Low carb and no carb programs are nothing new. In fact, they were one of the first actors to enter the weight loss diet stage. In 1863, nearly 150 years ago, William Banting became a celebrity because of his account of losing over forty pounds by limiting his starches and sugars.

"Any starchy or saccharine matter tends to the disease of corpulence," wrote Banting in his pamphlet Letter on Corpulence.

The idea that carbohydrates were the culprits behind obesity quickly caught on. By the turn of the century, ladies' magazines were urging readers to give up potatoes, fruit, sweets and breads if they hoped to achieve the newly fashionable slender ideal.

In 1888, James Salisbury went a step further. In The Relation of Alimentation and Disease, he claimed that not only could starches cause weight gain, but that they were "the enemy of health." He believed that eating too many vegetables would destroy the stomach's digestive abilities. His recipe for good health rested with the eponymous "Salisbury steak", a patty made from ground beef and spices.

By the early 1900s, avoiding carbohydrates was considered sound nutritional advice. In 1913, Dr. Henry Lindlahr openly condemned starches and refined carbohydrates in his book ­Nature Cure: Philosophy and Practice Based on the Unity of Disease and Cure. Starches, Lindlahr claimed, "produce in the process of digestion large quantities of poisonous acids, alkaloids of putrefaction and noxious gases."

Like the current breed of low or no carbohydrate diets, Lindlahr recommended a diet based on proteins, especially meat. "Foods derived from the animal kingdom," wrote Lindlahr, "are necessary to develop and stimulate the positive qualities in man."

Low Fat

Fat as the cause of all weight issues, an idea supported by Dr. Dean Ornish in his Eat More, Weigh Less plan, is also an old weight loss refrain.

In the decades before the Civil War, Sylvester Graham - legendary inventor of the Graham cracker - was one of the most vocal proponents of a low fat, high fiber, vegetarian diet. Not only did Graham believe that avoiding fat, sugar, meat, ketchup and refined flour could help his followers stay trim, he also advised that his plan would prevent heart, lung, stomach and mental disease.

In 1943, author Marion White announced that she had found the secret to losing weight and staying thin. The culprit were fats and oils, she wrote in her book Diet Without Despair. To cut dietary fat, she recommended using mineral oil in order to cook food, but stopped short of describing the resulting painful and dangerous laxative effect.

High Protein

High protein diets such as The Zone, The Atkins Diet, The Abs Diet, and The South Beach Diet are also retreads of old ideas.

Meats, cheeses and beans have been a mainstay of diets in many cultures. Eating foods rich in animal proteins has associated with vitality, energy and health long before the latest generation of weight-loss plans.

In her pivotal 1901 health book, The Four Epochs of Woman's Life, Dr. Anna M. Galbraith claimed that "meat in general has a more stimulating effect upon the system and is more strengthening than vegetable food, and it gives rise to a sensation of energy and activity."

Along with the health benefits of a high concentration of meat in the diet, Galbraith noticed the unexpected, and apparently undesireable, side effect of women enjoying sex too much. The only solution, she advised, was to reduce meat and cheese consumption while avoiding pepper and curry powder. The modified diet, combined with exercise and cold baths, would help bring reduce the patient's urges down to a more seemly occurrence of "not oftener than once in two or three weeks."

Vegetarian, Vegan and Low Protein Diets

Vegetarian and vegan diets rest on the opposite end of the diet spectrum than high protein plans. Although vegetarianism for moral and health reasons is described in ancient texts, the modern root of low protein diets for weight loss can be linked with German nutritionist Arnold Ehret.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, science was abuzz with research to link microorganisms with disease. Ehret was fascinated with the link between bacteria and food spoilage. By the early 1900s, he decided that "all diseases without exception, even the hereditary, are caused - disregarding a few other unhygienic causes - by biologically wrong, unnatural food and by each ounce of over-nourishment, only and exclusively."

Ehret's "unnatural" or "artificial" food included meat, bread, potatoes and rice. He was so convinced about the benefits of eating only fruits and vegetables that he decided that meat should have no part in a truly healthy diet. "Meat is not a foodstuff but only a stimulant which ferments, decays in the stomach."

Calorie Counting and Dietary Exchanges

One of the most popular diet programs today is Weight Watchers. The Weight Watchers plan attempts to help participants lose weight through a food exchange scheme, where foods have points values and dieters must stay within their allotted daily points range.

Ever since scientist Carl von Voit began quantifying how much energy different animals used, and Max Rubner began charting how different food was broken down into chemicals to be absorbed and used by the body, dieticians have been fascinated with calorie counting.

Calorie counting diets took a more scientific approach toward weightloss than previous plans. Wilbur Atwater, an American chemist, was fascinated by how many calories were contained in different types of food. In 1896 he published the first calorie table, accurately calculating that proteins and carbohydrates yeilds four calories of energy while a gram of fat provides nine.

Atwater, Rubner and von Voit ignited a wave of nutritional and caloric research. It wasn't long before physicians, celebrities and nutritionists were releasing their own "scientific", low calorie schemes for weightloss.

Building on earlier nutritious and food studies, Charles Tyrrell, M.D., studied the common ingredients and classified their proportions of protein, carbohydrates, fat and salt. Much like the current Zone diet, Tyrrell's plan called for a constant monitoring of the dieter's food intake in order to keep all the components at levels he considered optimal for good health. The "parts" of each food was carefully counted to make sure each individual didn't eat more than the allotted amount of any component.

In 1919, a small book by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health with Key to the Calories, both entertained Americans while educating them about the role of calories in weight gain. Dr. Peters provided her readers with an equation for nearly every aspect of the weightloss process: finding the optimal weight, estimating daily caloric needs and building a diet within calorie, protein, carbohydrate, fate and mineral restraints.

Over forty years before Weight Watchers revolutionized the diet scene by introducing group support as a weight loss tool, Dr. Peters advocated a similar format.

"Call it the Watch Your Weight-Anti-Kaiser Class," suggested Peters. "Meet once a week to weigh. Wear approximately the same weight clothes, and weigh at the same time in relation to eating."

Calorie counting programs have become more polished and splashy since the late19^th century age of diet exploration. Throughout the decades several weight loss plans have shared a common idea - limit your calorie intake and reduce your waistline.

Fad Diets

Short lived fad diets that rely heavily on a single food or technique have been on the diet landscape since the beginning

The first recorded fad diet was that of William the Conquerer, who decided in 1087 to combat his growing waistline by intaking nothing but alcohol. There is no account of how successful dieting attempt was, but the plan certainly wasn't the last misguided weight loss gimmick.

The idea that other cultures' eating patterns hold the answer to long term weight loss and health (French Women Don't Get Fat, Japanese Women Don't Get Fat) is not new. Arnold Ehret, one of the fathers of modern vegetarianism, attributed healing powers to the vegetable-rich diet of Japan.

"The wounds of the Japanese (heal) much quicker and better in the Russo-Japanese war (than) those of the meat and brandy Russians," Ehret asserted in Rational Fasting.

By 1907 these theories had already become old news, causing Charles Tyrrell to criticize the logic in The Royal Road to Health. "We often have the Eastern peoples (notably the Japanese and Hindus) quoted as examples of physical health and endurance," complains Tyrrell before presenting his own exchange-based diet program. "And the adoption of a vegetarian diet urged on those grounds."

The early 1900s saw the emergence of "Fletcherism" as a weight loss technique. Named because it was popularized by Horace Fletcher, Fletcherism depended on chewing each bite of food as completely as possible. Followers of the plan were urged to count the number of times the chewed each forkful, and not to swallow until they had masticated at least twenty times.

From electrical stimulation to magic potions and pills, physicians, corporations and charlatans throughout the decades continued to promise weight loss, suppressed appetites or better health the easy way.

In 1925, Lucky Strikes touted smoking their cigarettes as an alternative to eating sweets. In the 30s, special soaps were marketed to help wash fat away. By 1935 one of the first diet pills, dinitrophenol, hit store shelves. Although the drug did work to increase the metabolism, it could also cause blindness.

Many dieters are still looking for that magic cure. Diet pills like fen-phen and Redux tend to fly out of the pharmacy, until risky side effects are identified.

Bibliography

Banting, William. Letter on Corpulence. 4^th ed. London: Harrison, 1869.

Ehret, Arnold. Rational Fasting. Beaumont, California: Ehret Literature Publishing Company, 1965.

Fernandez-Arnesto, Felipe. Near a Thousand Tables, A History of Food. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.

Galbraith, Anna M. The Four Epochs of a Woman's Life. 2^nd ed. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1915.

Lindlahr, Henry. Nature Cure. Chicago: 1913.

Mestel, Rosie. "The Diet Carousel." Los Angeles Times February 16, 2004.

Peters, Lulu Hunt. Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories. Chicago: The Reily and Lee Co., 1918.

Pool, Robert. Fat, Fighting the Obesity Epidemic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Stearns, Peter N. Fat History. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Tyrrell, Charles A. The Royal Road to Health. 1907.