Background
Origins of Weight Loss as an Aspiration
While terms like "weight loss" might roll easily off the tongue today, requiring no explanation, the idea of weight as something you should desire to lose is a relatively new one. In the United States, author Susan Yager traces the origination of weight loss as a desirable concept not just to a specific decade - the 1880s - but also to a specific group of people: middle- and upper-class Americans (Yager, ix).
This is not to say that weight loss was not being discussed elsewhere in the world by other groups of people, but the available literature suggests that it was of particular concern among westerners with disposable income. Scholar Jenna Applebaum sees a source for this specificity in aristocratic anxiety about the emergence of a powerful middle class, which "helped to foment a hostile stereotype about the physicality of these people" (Applebaum, 1) - a physicality that reflected a new-found ability to consume in abundance. By the 20th century, corpulence was being written about as a source of shame. "The worst of being fat," commiserated diet writer Vance Thompson in 1920, "is that it makes one ridiculous" (Thompson, 22).
Gender and Ability to Control the Body
This new hostility towards corpulence was aimed at both men and women's bodies, though men would be the primary authors and targets of the earliest dieting advice, as "body fat was thought to be a biological difference between men and women" (Vester, 56). This theory centered on the male ability to master their own bodies, which women supposedly lacked. Thus "the original potential of dieting as a form of empowerment" (Vester, 57), which often drives the narrative of dieting advice. "Diet is the dictator, commander, ruler of weight," wrote columnist Antoinette Donnelly in 1921. "You, the power behind the throne, however. Yours, the power to curb the dictator and direct him into a different course if his present course is spelling ruin to your figure" (Donnelly, 28).
This idea of power and control was perhaps particularly appealing to women, who as of Donnelly's writing had only just gained the right to vote in the United States. In a case study of a dieting fifteen-year-old girl in 1926, Joan Jacobs Brumberg explains that "what was new and modern about Yvonne’s adolescent angst was that she focused on weight loss as a solution to her problems" (Brumberg, 102).
Evolution of Advice and Methods
While the idea of weight loss as a positive thing was becoming established, the form that weight loss should take was still - and remains - up for debate. The first method to achieve nation-wide popularity - in first the UK, then the U.S. - was a high-protein, low-fat, modified carbohydrate diet popularized by William Banting in his 1863 Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public (Yager, ix). The diet was so well-regarded, and the concept of diets so new, that the word "banting" was the popular term for dieting for the next fifty years (Yager, xi).
But over the years more and more new weight loss regimes were created and popularized. Some grounded their suggestions in the language of sober science, such as Foods for the Fat; a Treatise on Corpulency and a Dietary for its Cure, published in 1889 by President Taft's dietetic consultant Nathaniel Edward Yorke-Davies. Others utilized the appeal of the exotic, like Vance Thompson's popular 1920s diet guide Eat and Grow Thin: the Mahdah Menus, which "channeled an apparently imaginary diet guru, Mahdah, who spoke French and was wise in the ways of dieting but was otherwise unexplained" (Elias, 67).
Suffice it to say that by the 1920s, banting was far from the only game in town. There were many more diet options, and weight loss was no longer a niche pursuit. In fact it had become so mainstream that when the New York Daily News announced that they were accepting applicants for a "biggest loser"-type contest in 1921, "so many applicants mobbed the newspaper’s offices that police had to be called in to prevent a riot" (Yager, 33).
