01/12/2026
The FIRST popular diet was right all along! 1862. London.
William Banting is 66 years old.
Five-foot-five.
Two hundred and two pounds.
He is so heavy he cannot tie his own shoes.
So inflamed that walking downstairs forward destroys his knees.
So swollen with fat that pressure on his Eustachian tubes leaves him deaf in one ear.
This is not a lazy man.
He rows on the Thames at dawn.
Starves himself on physician-approved calorie restriction.
Endures Turkish baths.
Sea bathing.
Medical fasting.
Nothing works.
The more obedient he is to medical advice, the fatter and sicker he becomes.
Then his doctor, William Harvey, makes a suggestion that sounds almost heretical for the time. After hearing new diabetes research out of Paris, he tells Banting to stop eating the foods everyone assumes are harmless.
No bread.
No sugar.
No potatoes.
No beer.
Eat meat.
Eat fish.
Eat vegetables.
No starch. No sugar.
Banting is skeptical. He has been failed too many times. But he is desperate.
He cuts bread completely. Drops potatoes and beer. Eats meat three times a day.
Within weeks, the weight begins to fall.
Within a year, he loses forty-six pounds and twelve inches off his waist.
But the weight loss is not the miracle.
He can hear again.
The pressure in his ears is gone.
He walks downstairs normally.
He ties his own shoes.
At sixty-seven, he feels better than he did at forty.
So he does something radical.
In 1863, he publishes a short pamphlet called Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public.
It explodes.
Over sixty thousand copies sold.
Translated into multiple languages.
In Victorian England, “to bant” becomes a verb. It means eating low carbohydrate.
The medical establishment panics.
They attack him viciously.
They call it dangerous.
Unsustainable.
A fast track to kidney disease.
The backlash is so intense that Banting publishes multiple editions, calmly defending his results and sharing testimonials from others who succeed the same way.
He lives another sixteen years eating meat and avoiding sugar and starch.
He dies in 1878 at age eighty-one.
The autopsy notes a healthy heart.
No kidney disease.
None of the conditions doctors promised would destroy him.
Then history buries him.
By the early twentieth century, calorie counting takes over. The story shifts to “eat less, move more.” It sounds scientific. It feels virtuous. It fails repeatedly.
The approach that actually worked is forgotten.
Until the 1990s, when modern low-carb researchers rediscover Banting and realize something uncomfortable.
He solved obesity one hundred and thirty years earlier.
No powders.
No points.
No calorie math.
Just removing sugar and starch and eating real food.
Banting was not a doctor.
Not a scientist.
Not selling a program.
He was a wealthy undertaker who followed medical advice, got sicker, rejected it, changed his diet, and got his life back.
The medical establishment of his time rejected him.
Modern nutrition ignores him.
But the result remains.
One approach worked.
One created a century of failure.
And we have been pretending ever since that it was complicated.
