Mr Banting's Old Diet Revolution

Charlotte Edwardes reveals how a short, fat Victorian funeral director became a household name with a dietary regime amazingly similar to the most current food fad.

On the August morning that he began his diet, 26 years into the reign of Queen Victoria, the short and very fat William Banting heaved himself out of bed at 8am, hoisted a corset around his bulging stomach and struggled into his three-piece suit. Unable to reach his laces, he gingerly eased his feet into his shoes with a boot hook - taking care as he stooped not to stress the angry boils on his buttocks.

As he negotiated the stairs in reverse (a method, he found, that eased the crushing pressure on his knees), he was looking forward to the cooked breakfast awaiting in the dining room below - but dreading the effect it would have on his ever-ballooning bulk.

Twelve months later, the 5ft 5in Mr Banting had shed more than three stone to be a slightly portly 11 stone. It was 1863 and Banting declared the diet "simply miraculous". So evangelical was Banting in extolling and promoting the virtues of his diet that he became a household name: the verb, to bant, meaning to diet, was absorbed into the vernacular and appeared in the Oxford dictionary until 1963...

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