Lord Byron: The celebrity diet icon
Another New Year and the usual motley crew of celebrity dieters are out in force again, attempting to promote their magic weight-loss plans and fitness dvds – preying on a public ever desperate to shed the guilty festive pounds and hope to emulate in a few weeks, what the celebrity dieter has taken months and years of hard work with personal trainers and dieticians to produce – the hard-earned body of the celebrity thinny.
But the cult of the celebrity dieter and the public fascination with what they eat and what exercises they do, is not a modern phenomenon. Apparently, Lord Byron was one of first diet icons and helped kick off the public's obsession with how celebrities lose weight.
I always considered the culture of celebrity, dieting and thinness, and the public's desire to emulate its idols in their quest to be superslim a very modern (and very unhealthy) phenomenon, that was the reserve of teenage girls and the preoccupation of the writers and readers of celebrity magazines.
However, according to Foxcroft, the obsession with faddy diets can be traced back to Byron and his contemporaries, who one would have assumed spent their time worrying about more lofty matters than the width of his waistband – trying to find something to rhyme with 'Juan' for instance.
Not true, in fact, the description of Byron's revolting diet that Foxcroft gives – 'potatoes soaked in vinegar', which he ate for days on end, or 'biscuits and soda water', which he ate whilst wondering around swathed in woollen clothes in order to become his very own ambulatory sauna, made me feel a lot less ridiculous and vain about some of my more... eccentric... diet plans (cabbage soup diet – I'm thinking of you)... and a lot less imaginative. Well, maybe I don't feel less ridiculous, but I certainly feel in better company.
So, from now on, whenever I'm about to embark on a new diet or exercise plan, I won't be getting my 'thinspiration' from famous lifestyle dieters like Victoria Beckham (lives off edamame beans, steamed fish odour and green tea – according to interviews), or Kate Moss ("nothing tastes better than being thin feels"), I shall think of my new diet hero – the mad, bad, and clearly dangerous to attempt to emulate – Lord Byron.
Below is an edited version of Foxcroft's article:
There has never been any shortage of celebrities who have followed diets, endorsed them or tried to sell us one of their own devising, even back as far as the 1800s.
The "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord Byron was thought of as the embodiment of the ethereal poet, but he actually had a "morbid propensity to fatten". Like today's celebrities, he worked hard to maintain his figure.
At Cambridge University, his horror of being fat led to a shockingly strict diet, partly to get thin and partly to keep his mind sharp. Existing on biscuits and soda water or potatoes drenched in vinegar, he wore woolly layers to sweat off the pounds and measured himself obsessively. Then he binged on huge meals, finishing off with a necessarily large dose of magnesia.
In 1806 Byron weighed 13st 12lbs (88kg), but he was under 9st by 1811 (57kg) - a huge weight loss of nearly 5st (32kg). We know all this from records at Berry Bros & Rudd, a wine merchants of St James's, London.
Here, stylish men-about-town weighed themselves on hanging scales, as personal bathroom scales were an early 20th Century phenomenon. The Regency dandy, Beau Brummell, weighed himself there over 40 times between 1815 and 1822. He went down from 12st 10lbs (81kg) to 10st 13lbs (69kg).
To suppress the inevitable hunger pangs, he smoked cigars. By 1822, he had starved himself into a very poor state of health, even though he knew that obsessive dieting was "the cause of more than half our maladies".
Because of Byron's huge cultural influence, there was a great deal of worry about the effect his dieting was having on the youth of the day. Dr George Beard attacked the popular Victorian association between scanty eating and delicacy of mind because impressionable Romantics were restricting themselves to vinegar and rice to get the fashionably thin and pale look.
"Our young ladies," he wrote, "live all their growing girlhood in semi-starvation." This was for fear of "incurring the horror of disciples of Lord Byron", he added. It didn't help that Byron himself had suggested that "a woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands".
But his cruel double standards were exposed when, on ending his scandalous affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb, who had become gaunt with grief, he quipped that he was "haunted by a skeleton"...
...No diet was too expensive or drastic for ...[celebrities]... or for ...[those]... who desperately wanted to be like them. The same can be said today with the global industry worth billions.
The downside of looking up to someone is being looked down upon. The distorted, even obsessive, thinking that characterises our relationship with celebrity can, it is said, be traced to the limbic system of our brains.
Food, sex and memory are all bedfellows in this, one of the oldest, most deeply buried structures in the cerebrum. It is not hard to see how these three fundamental elements become meshed in our perceptions of the celebrity bodies constantly on parade before us. The glimpse of a fat thigh or a double chin before it is air-brushed away can, after all, mean mass denunciation for those trying to elbow their way into the limelight.
There is always a new diet book in the best-seller lists nowadays. Most of them are recycled, re-hashes of previous fads, each one endorsed by a shiny celebrity or two whose "ideal" bodies betray hours of work and a lot of cash investment.
It is the same old line that we have always been sold - we too could be thinner, younger, more loved, if we would only buy whatever new, improved diet food or regime is on offer. And we still fall for it.
