LaughingWolfOne

The man who buried the Duke of Wellington invented the low-carb diet, and the medical press told him to mind his own business. William Banting was the royal undertaker. He furnished the funerals of the great, and in 1852 he put on the biggest one London had ever seen, and he was by then a short man, 5ft 5, who weighed over 14 stone and could not bend to tie his shoes. He went downstairs backwards to save his knees. He wore a truss for a hernia. His hearing was going and his eyes were failing, and he was 65. He had tried everything. Three Turkish baths a week. Rowing on the Thames every morning, which made him strong and hungry and heavier. Gallons of physic. A spa. In twenty years of doctors he had lost 6lb. In August 1862 he went to see a surgeon about his ears. William Harvey had just come back from Paris, where he had heard a physiologist lecture on what sugar and starch did to a body, and he looked at the deaf undertaker and said the ears were not the problem. He gave him a sheet. Meat, fish, game, a glass of claret, and no bread, no sugar, no beer, no potatoes. He told him to drop butter and milk too, which was the one thing the century got wrong, and it did not matter. By the end of the year Banting had lost 46lb and 12 inches off his waist. He could hear. He could tie his own shoes. He put on his old suit for his friends and stood inside it like a man in a tent. Then he did the thing no gentleman was supposed to do. He wrote it all down, every stone and every meal, in a pamphlet called Letter on Corpulence, and paid for it himself, and gave the first editions away free. By the fifth edition 63,000 copies had gone, in English and then in French, German and Swedish, where his name is still the word for dieting. The Lancet advised him not to meddle with medical literature again. The profession's view was that the literature on corpulence was tolerably complete. He had cured himself of a condition it had failed to cure for twenty years and it told him to go back to his coffins. Everybody knows low carb began with Atkins in 1972, or with a podcast. It began with a Victorian undertaker's deafness and a surgeon who had sat in a lecture, and the pamphlet has never been out of print. There are about 1.5 million people in Britain on a slimming injection this year. Banting's sheet cost a penny and he gave it away.