The Backstory: Diets: The Hunger . . To Not Be Hungry

Hard to imagine but fad diets go back as much as 5000 years. It was took the Victorians to make it a massive business. These days we all want the new and very expensive weight loss injections, but they used everything from arsenic, to tapeworms, to rubber underwear to get that svelte shape.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, if you're like the vast majority of us, you've
been on a diet or at least plan to go
on one. That's kind of the story for a lot
of us. I mean, who doesn't want to look and
feel good about this body we've been given. We're obsessed
with effortless weight loss these days, especially with the advent
of several prescription injections that promise will lose as much
as twenty one percent of our body weight. But here's

(00:23):
the thing, this hunger to not be hungry has gone
on for thousands of years. I'm Patty Steele, from arsenic
to tapeworms to rubber underwear, just for the perfect body.
That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back. Okay,

(00:43):
I'm not pointing any fingers here except it myself. We
all want to have the best body we can achieve,
and most of us find it to be an exhausting
and often disappointing quest. Look studies show fifty five percent
of Americans want to lose weight, thirty three percent say
they're pretty happy with where they are on the scale.

(01:05):
Over the course of history, there have been diets using tapeworms,
arsenic cigarettes, and less frighteningly grapefruit chew and spit vinegar
and rubber underwear. But now we have these new injections available,
of course for a ridiculous price. The promise we can
lose as much as twenty one percent of our body weight. Okay,

(01:25):
that sounds cool. If you weigh one sixty, this stuff
could get you to one twenty five. It's the magic
pill or needle specifically. But as I said, this desire
to get skinny is nothing new. You have any idea
how long fad diets have been around. First of all,
going way back, obesity was a sign of wealth. Only

(01:45):
rich folks could eat to excess, so it was a
show of status to be chubby. Problem is, they soon
realized how it impacted their health, and so began our
long battle between our bodies and great food. Five thousand
years ago, in China, the fad was drinking lots of
green tea to lose weight. And guess what, that's still

(02:07):
a thing for a lot of dieters. In Greece, the
Spartans became the world's most powerful warriors following a diet
of lean protein fruits, veggies, and whole grains. Voi la
here we are three thousand years later, and it still works.
About a thousand years after that, though still in Greece,
a popular diet involved adding cheese, lots of mustard, and

(02:30):
ground up rocks to your dinner plate. Wow, that didn't
make you feel full. But the Victorians were really the
most amazing when it came to going after fad diets
for purely aesthetic reasons. For women, it was the desire
to reach the goal. Get this of a sixteen inch waiste. Yes,
I said sixteen inches, you'd have tiny that is that's insane.

(02:53):
They tried everything. Diet pills and potions were big business
in the nineteenth century. Of them had some dangerous ingredients
like arsenic and strychnine, but it wasn't illegal. They were
told in ads that it would speed up your metabolism
like emphetamines. Problem is, a number of dieters would take
more than the recommended dosage, thinking they were going to

(03:15):
lose more weight that way, and you know the outcome there.
In the mid eighteen hundreds, Charles Goodyear developed the rubber industry,
and the use of it went way beyond those early tires.
They made rubber underwear and corsets. The idea was rubber
not only held in fat, but it also made you sweat,

(03:36):
leading to weight loss at least waterweight. Right. Men and
women wore this stuff, but it sometimes led to skin
infections due to all that hot moisture. The use of
rubber undies only ended when World War One broke out.
We're talking in the nineteen teens, because all that rubber
was needed for the war effort. Now, if you've ever

(03:57):
been a smoker, you know that nicotine is a pretty
effective appetites appressant, although at what cost. But back in
the day, probably won't surprise you to learn that cigarette
company saw a big opportunity to push their product for
weight loss. In the nineteen twenties, Lucky Strike wanted to
get more women hooked on tobacco, so they had an

(04:18):
ad campaign with the slogan reach for a Lucky instead
of a suite. They said, when tempted to overindulge, reach
for a Lucky Strike instead. Now, eventually the FTC told
them to knock it off and Lucky had to stop
promoting cigarettes as weight loss aids. But of course, by
that time the marketing campaign had worked so well they

(04:40):
had increased their market share by more than two hundred percent.
These days were all influenced by influencers, but that's nothing
new either. Celebrity dieters included the wildly popular poet Lord Byron.
Turns out he was one of the first diet icons,
igniting the public's ofbs session with how celebrities lose weight.

(05:02):
The growing world of media turned people on to the
desire to look like celebrities of their time and like
today's stars. Byron was anxious to maintain his figure. It
was the early eighteen hundreds, and he got people cranked
up about a diet with a whole lot of vinegar.
In order to purge. He would drink vinegar every day
and eat potatoes soaked in it. Of course, side effects

(05:26):
included vomiting and other nasty stuff. Because Byron was such
a huge cultural influence, older folks worried about his impact
on kids. Sound familiar. The kids were eating only rice
soaked in vinegar because they all wanted Byron's ultra thin,
pale look. When naysayer said, our young ladies live all

(05:47):
their growing girlhood in semi starvation. But the vinegar diet
was like child's play compared to this next one. It
was the tapeworm diet, and it was a huge fad.
You can even see ads for it in all old
newspapers and magazines selling pills that supposedly contained tapeworm larvae,
and it was popular for a long time. In fact,

(06:08):
the legendary opera star Maria Kallis is said to have
used a tapeworm to lose eighty pounds in the early
nineteen fifties, but it may also have ruined her singing voice.
She never actually admitted to using it. By the way,
how did it work? Well, Folks looking to lose weight
would swallow beef tapeworm pills and when the larvae in

(06:29):
them hatched, the worm would absorb most of the food
you were eating. Along with weight loss, there was plenty
of vomiting and again those less attractive issues to deal with.
Worst of all, once you hit your goal weight, you
had to get rid of this thing. You'd take an
anti parasitic pill and then excrete the tapeworm, which could

(06:51):
not have been a pleasant experience, seeing as they can
grow to as long as forty feet. Along with that,
folks developed headaches, eye problem, meningitis, epilepsy, and dementia. Now
that's a diet and this is scary. Apparently some people
still illegally sell these pills. You know, at the end
of the day, we pretty much want exactly what folks

(07:13):
in the past wanted to feel good about ourselves, and
like us, they wanted an easy fix that did not
involve too much introspection when it comes to why we
do or don't love ourselves. I hope you're enjoying The
Backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review and follow
or subscribe for free to get new episodes delivered automatically,

(07:36):
and feel free to dm me if you have a
story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty
Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele.
The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis
Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.

(07:57):
Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The Pieces of History
you didn't know, you needed to know.