Ever wonder why many women fail diets. Beauty Standards
? FREE 6 Week Challenge:
Fat Loss Calculator:
Do you really think that strong or fit is the new beautiful? A little over 100 years ago nobody even knew about diet and exercise and now it’s on the forefront of everyone’s mind. What in the world happened? Well In today’s video I’m going to go over the history of dieting and I promise you once you watch this you’re never gonna look at dieting and exercising the same. So let’s start with a rundown on the history of dieting, so you can better understand exactly where diets came from. In the 1800’s a large body was a sign of health and fertility. Weight was not as important as just maintaining an hour glass shape. And there were no widespread diet regiments or exercise programs to achieve this figure. Oh no…this was a time where corsets were used regularly to make women appear more narrow at the waist and to enhance the size of their breasts. Up until the 1850’s there weren’t really any preservable foods, and obviously around this time there were absolutely zero flavor additives and artificial ingredients in our food. But many believe that it was around the 1850’s when the idea of modern dieting was introduced. Rev. Sylvester Graham was a New Jersey preacher that invented what is believe to be the first diet food, the Graham cracker. The Graham cracker was made from flour that was unsifted and didn’t have additives unlike the refined flour used in white bread that was becoming more popular in the middle class around this time. Graham believed in a strict vegetarian diet, and saw diet primarily as a means to control sexual urges….clearly this guy was the life of every party.
Unlike Graham, William Banting, was from England and was interested in diet for the same reason as most dieters today are: he wanted to lose weight. In 1863, he wrote a pamphlet called Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public. His diet plan that was based on advice given to him by a doctor, had him eating Four meals a day, consisting of protein, greens, fruits, and dry wine. On this diet it was advocated to avoid starch and sugars, while high fat options like milk, butter and meat were all permitted. This was pretty much the first low carb diet and was the precursor to the modern atkins diet that I’m sure all of you have heard of. However dieting didn’t really catch on because Bantings findings were looked down on because they lacked scientific evidence.
Fast forward to the 1890’s and actress Lillian Russel was the most celebrated beautiful woman of the era weighing in at 200 pounds. So, even though you had a couple wacky dieters, most people ignored them during the 19th century. All through the 1800’s and definitely the years before that being heavy and having a large body was respected. It was a sign that you were wealthy and had enough money to afford enough food to hit a higher weight. Basically it was full out bro bulking season… except.. it was… the chicks… that were bulking. Then in 1910 Paris designers created slim sheath dresses and declared that breasts were out. Next the 1920’s brought about the Era of the flat-chested, slim-hipped flapper. So this is when the first real dieting craze, of 20th century began. Flappers and many others started following the Hay Diet which claimed to work by separating food into three groups: alkaline, acidic, and neutral, and urged people to not combine acidic and alkaline foods. This diet was also known as the food combining diet and even though it was very popular in the 1920’s, in a more modern peer-reviewed clinical trial there was no benefit found from the diet in terms of weight loss. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s curvy full-figured shapes like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were what women began aspiring to.
Then in 1967 British model Twiggy came into the picture and changed the dieting world forever. She was 5-6″ a size zero, and weighed 91 lbs. Remember…Marilyn Monroe was the symbol of feminine beauty right before twiggy and she was 5’5, weighing in at 140lbs, and reached as high as a size 12. Twiggy was the flame that lit the fire and caused the diet industry to explode. In the 1960’s there were tons of new diets introduced including the drinking mans diet, weight watchers, and the first artificial sweetners were used in diet sodas, but my absolute favorite is the jiggle machine, which promised to jiggle your fat away. The jiggle machine is like the biggest insult to the whole fitness world and in my book, it ranks highest in useless fat loss products. Seriously this thing might be the only product more useless than body wraps and the shake weight.
