The 1863 Diet is a pamphlet, "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public" by Mr. William Banting, of London, England; published in 1863 with a first printing of 1,000 copies. In subsequent editions, Banting added addenda as well as explanatory remarks by his physician, William Harvey, F.R.C.S.
I came across this diet book, now in the public domain, as an ebook at obooko.com (it is also available as an ebook at gutenberg.org). Mr. Banting's prescribed diet is simple and has a lot of contemporary consensus going for it: No sugar, very little starch, but several ounces at each meal of animal protein (meat and fish, except pork and salmon). Plus, for lunch and dinner, Mr. Banting will add a few glasses of claret.
I thought it worth a try to shed some of the weight I've acquired in the last few years. And was pleased to lose ten pounds or so before hitting my “plateau." While not the thirty-five-pound drop Mr. Banting achieved, we differed in our starting weight.
Mr. Banting first sought out Dr. Harvey because of a loss of hearing he was experiencing. Dr. Harvey, with the intuition of a first-rate physician decided Mr. Banting had no observable disease of the ear but might be suffering from excess adipose tissue (fat) in his throat that was pressing upon his eustachian tubes, to the detriment of his hearing.
Dr. Harvey prescribed the sugar avoidance diet because, once in Paris, he had a discussion of the theory of M. Bernard that proposed sugars and starches were converted by the liver into glucose, which in excess was rapidly stored as fat (adipose) tissue.
That the diet works, I think, owes much to its avoidance of sugar, in many forms. For example, Dr. Harvey advises that no root vegetables are to be eaten because of their higher sugar content (beets and carrots are quick examples of such sweet vegetables.) I thought this an okay prohibition with the added bonus of root vegetables being forbidden in the Jain religion (namely, the harvest of root vegetables kills the plant). I don't drink alcohol, so a pass on the claret for lunch and dinner enjoyed by Mr. Banting was a modification.
One strong point of The 1863 Diet is its strict schedule of when and what to eat. Three meals, a tea, and a nightcap are suggested. In other words, what helped me was avoidance of eating between meals. Those are valuable times to let your body burn up fat stores.
All in all, a diet ebook that's stood the test of time with no tedious calorie counting, only the demonization of sugar!
Image credit: gutenberg.org
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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