The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [72]
William may have conquered England, but he lost the battle of the bulge. In fact, he became so fat in the years after his victory at the Battle of Hastings that King Philip of France (no doubt disgustingly svelte) cruelly described him as “looking pregnant.” William was purportedly hurt, but there was truth to the statement: By that time, he could barely stay on his trusty steed. He took to staying in his rooms, subsisting on nothing but alcohol for days at a time,44 but his self-designed weight loss technique failed him in the end. When William died of abdominal injuries in 1087, after falling off his horse at the Siege of Mantes, he was so fat that he barely fit into his fancy stone sarcophagus. In fact, all the pushing and shoving to get the warrior’s body—horribly bloated from the heat of the day—into the coffin caused it to burst, filling the church with the stench of decay.
William the Conqueror is in good company. Excess flab (not to mention bloating) is hardly a new problem for the human race. Some modern archaeologists believe the ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut was quite heavy and may have been diabetic. Baseball legend Babe Ruth was notorious for his twelve-hot-dog lunches and missed much of the 1925 baseball season with what sportswriters dubbed “the bellyache heard round the world.”45 And U.S. President William Howard Taft infamously gained so much weight while in office that he got stuck in the White House bathtub.
In the latter days of the Roman Empire, people attending sumptuous feasts would gorge themselves on delicacies, and then repair to the vomitorium to purge their bodies of all that excessive indulgence—back when bulimia was cool. Bingeing and purging lost its cachet as the centuries passed, and people turned to complicated fad diets to control their girth. The English Romantic poet Lord Byron struggled mightily with his weight, despite his reputation as a ladies’ man (clubfoot and all). He routinely went on extreme “slimming” regimens like vinegar diets to keep his weight under control.
Around the same time, a Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham—one of America’s earliest vegetarians—introduced the “cracker” diet, eschewing meat, rich spices, coffee, tea, tobacco, and alcohol in favor of whole-grain breads and crackers. In the early twentieth century, a San Francisco art dealer named Horace Fletcher—“the chew-chew man” or “the great masticator”—advocated controlling food consumption by chewing one’s food at least thirty-two times (once for each tooth) until it was liquid, then spitting out any nonliquid residue. He lost over fifty pounds with this method, and felt one could absorb the nutrients without consuming all the calories from food.
Fad diets inevitably spawned a plethora of bestselling diet books. As early as 1727, a man named Thomas Short published The Causes and Effects of Corpulence, in which he advised the obese to move to arid climates, having observed (somewhat unscientifically) that heavier people tended to live near swamps. In 1864, a portly English casket maker named William Banting published his Letter on Corpulence, detailing how he lost fifty pounds by subsisting on lean meats, dry toast, fruit, and vegetables. It sold 58,000 copies, and the practice of dieting was known as banting for decades afterward. In 1919, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published another bestselling diet book, Diet and Health, which introduced mass audiences to the concept of counting calories to control weight. The book sold more than 2 million copies, advocating a strict 1,200-calorie regimen.
Do you think the Aktins and South Beach diets were innovative? Think again. Back in the 1920s, William H. Hay, for example, believed proteins, starches, and fruits should be eaten separately to avoid “acidosis,” claiming it “drained vitality and led to fat.” He also