1. William Banting (William Banting)

In 1862, 65-year-old William Banting had many problems because of his weight. He could not bend down and tie his shoes, he was short of breath and could not climb the stairs easily, and even when going down the stairs, he had to go down backwards to reduce the pressure on his knees.

William Banting tried various methods to lose weight, none of which worked. He exercised and reduced his food, tried different medicines that were available at that time and consulted with different doctors, in short, he knocked on every door but did not get any results from any of them. Little by little, he was suffering from the weight of the audience. For his ear problem, he went to a famous doctor, Dr. William Harvey, who was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Dr. Harvey had recently returned from a symposium in Paris on diabetes and had been exposed to the famous Dr. Claude Bernard's research on liver function. Dr. Bernard proposed the idea that sugars and starchy foods turn into fat in the body. In this way, Dr. Harvey came to the conclusion that Dr. Bernard's idea can also be effective in treating obesity. When William Banting came to him, he diagnosed the cause of his hearing loss as obesity and fat deposits around the Eustachian tube and prescribed a slimming diet. In his slimming diet, starchy foods were limited. By implementing this diet, Banting began to lose weight very quickly, and within a year, his weight went from 202 pounds to 156 pounds.

William Banting improved significantly in every way during this time, going up and down stairs with ease and even regaining his hearing.

Benting decided to share the secret of his success with others. He wrote a small book entitled Letter on Corpulence (Letter on Corpulence) in which he explained his experiences and how he lost weight.

William Banting defines obesity as a major social disease in his book and writes:

Among all the plagues that afflict humanity, I neither know nor can imagine anything more annoying than obesity.

Banting's book was widely accepted by the people, it was printed many times and more than 60 thousand copies of it were sold all over the world and it was the first weight loss diet that had a codified form and was widely accepted, so much so that the name Banting entered the language of the people and the verb to Bant was used to mean losing weight and when people wanted to ask each other: Are you losing weight? They used to say:

?do you Bant

2. Lulu Hunt Peters (Lulu Hunt Peters)

In 1918, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters wrote a book for slimming in America:

Diet and Health with Key to the Calories

In her book, Mrs. Peters provided a definition of ideal weight, stated the cause of obesity is overeating and inactivity, warned about taking slimming drugs, mentioned the word calorie for the first time in her book and taught her readers how to pronounce it (kal'-o-ri) and defined a list of foods with a calorie count of 100. Most of the volume of the book was made up of calorie tables of foods.

Sports lessons were presented in the form of illustrations in this book. The book had an attractive and humorous tone and interesting pictures and drawings.

The book Diet and Health With Key to the Calories became one of the best-selling books in America, two million copies were sold and it was reprinted fifty-five times until 1939.

Mrs. Peters died in 1930. He wrote the first modern diet book and at the same time emphasized the importance of exercise in a practical way. Until a long time later, the approach of less food and more movement with little change and less and more was the dominant solution of weight loss programs. It took almost forty years for two more complementary movements to occur in the world of weight loss.

Forty years later

In the 1950s and 1960s, the next influential figures entered the scene: Albert Stankard and Jane Nidech. These two people each made a big change in the weight loss programs after them and fixed the two big flaws that existed in the weight loss programs until that day.

3. Albert Stunkard (Albert J. Stunkard)

It was the middle of the fifties. Stankard was a young psychologist who was interested in eating disorders. He found out that those who have the problem of overeating at night need extensive psychological counseling and interventions to solve this problem, and they will not get much results just by prescribing a diet.

This is his first article in this field:

The night-eating syndrome – a pattern of food intake among certain obese patients

His subsequent research in this field led to the writing of numerous books and articles.

Dr. Stankard gradually addressed other aspects of the psychology of weight loss and presented valuable works in this regard during the following years. He has had a very prominent presence in the world of weight loss psychology and has described some of the most important topics in this field, such as night eating syndrome and binge eating, for the first time.

His articles are numerous and reach hundreds of titles. The titles of some of his books are as follows:

Eating and Its Disorders

Habits, Not Diets

Obesity

Handbook of Obesity Treatment

I Almost Feel Thin

The Management of Eating Disorders and Obesity

Obesity: Theory and Therapy

Overcoming Night Eating Syndrome: A Step-by-Step Guide to Breaking the Cycle

Obesity, an Issue of Psychiatric Clinics

Pain of Obesity

Dr. Stankard, who started his professional career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1957, worked and researched at this university for more than fifty years and presented and managed a program called the Stankard Weight Loss Program, which was a comprehensive nutrition, exercise and psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania.

4. Jean Nidetch (Jean Nidetch)

The year was 1961. Jane Nidech was a 38-year-old fat, sweet-loving housewife with two sons who had tried one diet after another without much success. This time he had taken a diet plan from The New York City Board of Health and managed to lose twenty pounds in ten weeks, but his energy and motivation were lacking. Mrs. Nidech felt that she needed help and support. He called his friends who were also overweight and asked them for help and arranged a friendly meeting with them. From then on, weekly meetings with the presence of this group were held at Mrs. Nidech's house. Jane Nidech shared a copy of her diet with her friends, and they talked about their successes and failures in following the plan. "I realized that I needed someone to talk to and listen to, and I realized that as much as I needed that connection, so did others," says Jane Nidech. By October 1962, Jane Niditch had lost seventy-two pounds, and her group of friends had all lost weight as well, slowly realizing that weight loss was more than just a diet. They found that weight loss is a matter of changing habits, and changing habits requires companionship, support, and compassionate encouragement from friends and family.

Ms. Nidech's initial group expanded rapidly and within three months forty people had joined her group and it was hard to fit in her apartment. Over the next year, Jane Niditch took charge of similar groups in New York, and when she rented a hall in 1963 to hold her first public meeting, 400 people attended her program, without advertising.

Jane Niditch later founded the world's largest and most popular weight loss program: Weight Watchers, and since 1968, when the Weight Watchers program was made available to the public, tens of millions of people have joined it.

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Jane Niditch's name on the authoritative PBS website in a list of 64 people titled "Who Built America?" He has come alongside people like Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Ted Turner. With the initiative of Jane Nidech, the element of support (Support) entered weight loss programs, and today, every reputable weight loss program uses this factor in some way to improve their results.

Author: Dr. Farid Zaker - designer of Sibita weight loss program