'Tis the time for...

[Peikko 1,575]

• The holidays are upon us, which means 'tis the season to overindulge. But once the calendar turns, we'll have to shed some of those pounds, which is why Dr. Sanford Siegel appeared on the Today Show Dec. 14 to tout a mouth-watering diet plan: eat six cookies a day as part of a limited-calorie diet, and watch that extra weight melt away.

Forgive our skepticism, as these aren't snickerdoodles or chocolate chip, but rather protein and nutrient-packed biscuits that stretch the definition of cookie. The cookie meal plan has actually been around since 1975, but the quest for the magic diet solution goes back much further. There's a (possibly apocryphal) story that after becoming too fat to ride his horse, William the Conqueror devised an alcohol-only diet in 1087. The monarch didn't grow thinner; instead, he died later that year after falling from his beleaguered steed, leaving his subjects to struggle with finding a coffin big enough to fit the corpulent king. (See "The Year in Health 2009.")

Despite its dubious beginnings, fad-dieting gained mass appeal in the 19th century. In 1829, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham touted the Graham Diet — centered on caffeine-free drinks and vegetarian cuisine, and supplemented by the eponymous Graham Cracker — as a cure for not just obesity but masturbation (and the subsequent blindness it was thought to cause.) The diet became so popular that the students of Oberlin College were forced onto it for a brief period in the 1830s before they successfully rebelled through mass dissent in 1841. Thirty-five years later, an English casketmaker named William Banting became famous by pioneering the concept of a low-carbohydrate diet, which helped him lose 50 lbs. He published his results in the 1864 "Letter on Corpulance," and the plan became so popular that "banting" became a synonym for dieting across Britain. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

From there, things got a little strange. In 1903, self-taught nutritionist Horace Fletcher became known as the "Great Masticator" for advancing the notion that one should chew food exactly 32 times before spitting it out completely. (Pleasant dinner guests, Fletcher's acolytes were not.) In 1928, dieters could choose between eating only meat and fat (sometimes in trimmings bought directly from the butcher) on the Inuit Diet, or skim milk and bananas on Dr. George Harrop's (aptly named) Bananas and Skim Milk diet. As late as the 1960s, Dr. Herman Taller was touting the "Calories Don't Count" diet, which held that the quantity of food consumed was unimportant provided that you chased it with vegetable oil.

The bizarre early history of planned weight-loss makes recent fad diets seem enlightened by comparison. The Atkins Diet — a modern-day Banting plan that has eaters eschew carbs in favor of protein-rich meals, — was written in 1972 but became, in the 20th century, a weight-loss plan favored by millions. (Critics say it can also cause high cholesterol and bad breath.) Its success spawned imitators like the popular South Beach Diet, a more lenient version that invokes the same low-sugar principle. But other modern diets remain pretty far-fetched. One example is the cabbage soup diet, which promises adherents will lose 10 pounds in a week by only eating cabbage soup. A more challenging competitor might be the lemonade diet, which requires dieters to subsist on a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup, red pepper and hot water for as many as ten days. While it may not rely on sound science, Siegal's Cookie Diet looks that much more appealing by comparison.

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Edited December 15, 2009 by Madame Cleo