Take Lots With Alcohol

How Mr. Banting lost 35 pounds in 8 months, even though he drank heavily.

A story in three parts.

"Dr. Banting was a fat man. At the age of sixty-five, five feet five Banting weighting over two hundred pounds.

"I could not bend down to tie my shoes ... or participate in mankind requires little offices without considerable pain and difficulty, which may include the portly, he wrote.

"Banting was recently retired and ... had no family history of obesity, it does not feel lazy, inactive, or given to excessive indulgence at the table.

"Nonetheless, corpulence had crept upon him in his thirties, as for many of us today, despite all his efforts. It took a day of rowing and gained muscular vigor, a prodigious appetite, and even more weight.

"It reduces calories, which does not induce weight loss, but do not let exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding, and manual labor. His weight has increased. He consulted the best doctors ... He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight has increased ... "

Stay tuned.
How Mr. Banting lost 35 pounds in 8 months, even though he drank heavily. Part II
"It reduces calories, which does not induce weight loss, but do not let exhausted and beset by boils. He tried walking, riding, and manual labor. His weight has increased. He consulted the best doctors ... He tried purgatives and diuretics. His weight has increased ... "(Part I)

Part II.

"Luckily for Banting, he consulted a surgeon who was recently in Paris. The doctor had just heard the great physiologist Claude Bernard lecture on diabetes.

The liver, "said Bernard, secretes glucose, the substance of sugar and starch. This glucose accumulates in the blood of diabetics too. It seemed that "a diet of meat and dairy would check the secretion of sugar in the urine of a diabetic.

Banting surgeon immediately formulated a diet for Banting. Indeed, "complete abstinence from sugars and starches.

After all, says the doctor, we know that to fatten the animals, "a saccharine (sugar) and flour (flour) diet is used." He believed that "excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause. .. and if a purely animal diet were useful in this disease, a combination of feed with a vegetable diet that contains no sugar or starch can ... arrest the excessive formation of fat. "

So here's the plan Banting followed the next year:

"He ate three meals a day of fish meat or game, usually five or six ounces at a meal with a toast or two stale or cooked fruit on the side. He had his evening tea with a few more ounces of fruit or stale toast. He scrupulously avoided any other food that may contain sugar or starch, in particular bread, milk, beer, candy and potato. "

"Despite a considerable allowance of alcohol in Banting's regime - four or five glasses of wine a day, a cordial every morning, and an evening tumbler of gin, whiskey or brandy - Banting dropped thirty-five pounds per following May (eight months later) and fifty pounds at the beginning of next year.

"I have not felt better in health than now for the twenty-six years," he wrote. " My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history. "
- Taubes, 2007

Was in 1864. Banting 16 page (free) Letter on corpulence, addressed to the public, has launched the first popular diet craze. In one year, Banting "had entered the English language as a verb meaning" to diet. "

If someone is "obese gout, and nervous, we strongly recommend" Bant "suggested the Pall Mall Gaz.