THE RED PILL DIET

From Atkins to keto, fad diets give us what we really want — the illusion of being special

William Banting was overweight and wished to be no longer. He was a high-spirited undertaker whose family had been funeral directors for the Royal Household since the mid-1700s: a rich man, and a proud one. At five-foot-five and over 200 pounds, he was self-conscious and unhappy, tormented by what he called “the sneers and remarks of the cruel and injudicious in public assemblies, public vehicles or the ordinary street traffic.”

But no effort to lose weight seemed to work. He got sea air. He walked constantly, as physicians advised. “I have taken gallons of physic and liquor potasse; riding on horseback; the waters and climate of Leamington, many times, as well as those Cheltenham and Harrogate frequently,” he lamented. “Still the evil gradually increased.”

In January of 1863, at his wit’s end, Banting saw William Harvey, a specialist who had studied the effects of “saccharin and farinaceous matter” on the body. Harvey proscribed him a new diet: beef, mutton, salmon, fruit, red wine and gin. He was to avoid bread, butter, potatoes and beer. Most of all, Harvey advised abstinence from one critical toxin: he was permitted to consume no sugar. Otherwise he could eat and drink as much as he liked. He lost 50 pounds within the first year.

So successful was Banting’s new diet that he felt compelled to proselytize. In 1864, he self-published a guide to weight loss under the title Letter on Corpulence. It sold 60,000 copies in six editions in under two years — by which time “bant” was shorthand for dieting and Letter on Corpulence was an international craze.

Banting’s was not the first dietary regime. Those aspiring to slim down had learned to refrain from indulging in certain foods before. But Banting was among the first to fully apprehend the depth of our desperation to find a better way to live — not so much to merely be thin but to discover and adopt a programme of radical change.

He saw that he could offer a scheme because a scheme is what people were after. They sought to learn from someone with experience and self-professed expertise; they sought the counsel and guidance of the apparently enlightened, whose hard-won know-how would be theirs to easily gain. Banting knew that people wanted leadership, for the same reason people join cults. His programme spoke to them as if it were the sermon on the mount.

We are, as people, already instinctively inclined to seek out and follow the examples of those around us — and the examples of those around us tend to dictate and reinforce our ideas and behaviours in profound ways. A study by French psychologists Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavallon in the late 1960s found that participants placed among a group of people with similar opinions strengthened their convictions after hearing these ideas echoed or reiterated: “group consensus seems to induce a change of attitudes,” the study deduced, “in which subjects are likely to adopt more extreme opinions.” This is how a fervour for fads takes hold.

Sociologists have similarly demonstrated the powerful effect of what’s known as “social proof ” among individuals — that is, our inclination to parrot the actions of others because we defer to the wisdom of the crowd. If a group has fallen under the spell of a diet craze, or indeed any life-changing programme of self-improvement, we are more likely to find it appealing and to imagine it ideal for ourselves.

Banting would not be the last to propose such a programme. In 2003, Greg Critser, author of the book Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, wrote about Banting and what he described as “a late 20th-century American refinement of a system first popularized by a mid-19th century Victorian;” that is, the low-carb diet made temporarily ubiquitous by the late Dr. Robert C. Atkins. Like Banting, Critser observed, Atkins offered not just advice to follow, but a system to buy into. Atkins offered that irresistible thing: a superior approach to life.

This was the Atkins promise: not health, but advantage. “Do you want an edge, a bonus, the odds on your side?” the New Diet Revolution guide teases. “It’s going to literally change your life.” Atkins spoke of his dietary programme in terms that made it sound appealingly secretive — like wisdom to which a select exalted few are privy. And indeed this quality was taken up by its practitioners, which is why Atkins, like so many fad diets, had an air of the cult about it. They understood something others did not. They had figured it out. What they had figured out seemed less to do with results, and more to do with the allure of its dazzling sagacity, its sense of conferring on adherents the status and glory of one who gets it.

It is not the diet-desperate alone who are seduced by herd-think miracles. An identical impulse guides us toward all manner of apparent awakenings: when we open our eyes to the truth about, say, whether jet fuel can melt steel, or whether the earth is really flat, or whether school shootings are orchestrated by crisis actors, or whether vaccines cause autism — pick your preferred conspiracy theory — we are bewitched by the same tantalizing notion of smoking out the hidden reality, the exalted right way.

We have also, crucially, proven ill-equipped to identify false information or realize that such awakenings are a sham. Psychologists have exhaustively chronicled the phenomenon of confirmation bias and the deficient reasoning it betrays: being presented with data that contradicts our beliefs only makes us hold onto those beliefs more avidly, for some evolutionary reason that remains mysterious. It doesn’t matter if the science shows Atkins is ineffective — no more than it matters if it shows that vaccines are safe or that the earth is in fact round. If we are inclined to believe a diet can save us — if we are inclined to want to believe anything at all — little will dissuade us. Facts can’t deter us from fads.

This is a matter of historical precedent, in the case of diets particularly. In the 1930s, it was vaguely determined that grapefruit contained a special enzyme which might have the capacity to burn fat. So grapefruit became the exclusive dish for starlets desperate to shed the few pounds keeping them from fame: the “Hollywood diet,” as it came to be known, is wildly unhealthy, and indeed often dangerous, but its power as the secret solution to the problem of excess fat was too seductive to ignore.

No amount of evidence is enough to keep people away from quick-fix diets if they offer the illusion of brilliance. Witness the regular appearance of fad diets on the cultural landscape, compelling in almost identical ways: the Scarsdale medical diet (whose creator was famously murdered by his lover), the South Beach diet (with its “good” fats and “bad” fats), the Cambridge diet (a British liquid diet from the ’80s similar to SlimFast). They tempt with claims of previously unimaginable privileges. These privileges will be afforded only to those in the know.

A culture that rewards thinness will inevitably produce anxiety around weight. So, it makes sense that lifestyle strategies promising shortcuts to a slimmer figure should capture the popular imagination — everyone wants to look fit because to look fit is to fit in. But what’s interesting is how consistently fad diets not only obviate established principles of good health and nutrition, but actively undermine or contradict them. A diet such as Banting or Atkins propagated may help you lose some weight — perhaps even quickly, and with little effort.

Compared to the oldfashioned method of, say, taking regular exercise and eating nutrition-rich foods in modest portions, though, these diets have been proven over and over to work less well. The people who make the most significant, lasting improvements to their appearance and health do not tend to be the disciples of Jenny Craig. Rather, they make simple, often difficult changes to their lifestyle that typically lack the glamour and exclusivity of the fad.

The problem is that we really want that glamour. (And that nobody gets rich telling people to go to the gym three times a week and eat more greens.) Amid the anguish of one’s private suffering — of feeling alienated and ostracized by one’s weight — the amazing lambent shine of the latest fad can look an awful lot like a beacon of hope. It’s easy to be mesmerized and lured in — much easier than it is to cut back on sweets and hit the treadmill every morning when there’s no catchy name or inspirational pamphlet keeping you engrossed and motivated.

Who can resist the appeal of telling well-wishers and confidants about the amazing new program that at any moment will radically transform your life? Yes, you can beam, that new trend you’ve heard of ? I am among its zealots! Look upon this dismal form whilst you can, for soon I will reap the astonishing rewards.

Over time — too many failed efforts in our wake — we learn to regard such fads with skepticism. Atkins is remembered now, if at all, as ridiculous; other diet crazes have even more embarrassing reputations, and the idea of the fad diet itself is talked about usually with scorn. Banting’s diet was most popular with the nobility and the gentry. Diets such as juice cleansing and macrobiotics are favoured by the middle class. But increasingly the fad diet has become the domain of a type that would have mocked Atkins into oblivion a decade earlier. It’s now the realm of those sophisticated and internet-savvy individuals — most of them young men — who think of bodily health as a technical problem they can cleverly fix. This is the era of “life-hacking,” in which better ways of living are seized upon by those smart enough to figure them out.

If older fad diets took root as a consequence of ignorance and misinformation — the average person didn’t know any better and wanted badly to be told what to do — the new life-hacking diets are a result of the opposite, of universal access to information. It’s now possible to lurk reddit forums for hours seeking the newest and shrewdest advice about the advantages and disadvantages of different dieting protocols.

You can consult message boards to find little-known tips, or watch YouTube tutorials that outline the parameters of a diet that will slim you down fast. Anything you want to know about keto or Paleo or intermittent fasting — or an infinite number of minor variations on each — is instantly and exhaustively available. The most elaborate bodybuilding schedules and dietary regimens imaginable have been chronicled by would-be advocates who, like Banting before them, wish to proselytize. It’s all there to discover — and it’s easier than ever to feel that glamour of being in the know.

So too, of course, exists a wealth of information willing and able to disprove any diet fad or overarching conspiracy. You can find online hundreds of first-hand accounts extolling the virtues of an all-Soylent diet; you can find hundreds too detailing the pitfalls of such a diet and why for certain people it did not work. Our brains are wired to select from this information whichever version accords best with our preconceptions about the subject. If we are eager to hear that Soylent is the right diet for us, those are the accounts we will glom to.

The extent to which we actually understand the science behind these diets (or other matters) has little bearing on the strength of our convictions about their effectiveness. “Strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. They found that ignorance does not prevent us from holding strong opinions about … well, anything at all, from the function of toilets to the need for closed borders. We do not need to really deeply know what a low-carb diet does to the body in concrete scientific terms. Drawn to Atkins, deferential to the craze, we can feel strongly that it’s a great diet all the same.

Whether you are following the Atkins guidebook or the meticulous guidance of an online forum, the psychological effect of your all-encompassing, life-changing action is the same. You feel you have found an answer. A definitive answer, one that if adhered to with steadfast conviction will elevate you to some grander plane of existence, some illustrious zone of better living for the knowledgeable elite. It’s the same impulse that drives suburban moms to make self-help guides bestsellers; the same drive that has made Jordan Peterson an inexplicable star. “Those books show how desperately curious we all are to know all the others are getting on in life,” as Wallace Shawn reflects in My Dinner With Andre. We want to feel our lives will change if only we could stop eating bread or clean our rooms. Most of all we want to feel that we, unlike them, have finally figured it out.

What Dr. Atkins understood about human nature, no matter how much he may have known about nutrition and health, was that we crave an answer deeper than the way to lose weight. A slim figure is the side effect, the added bonus, of the main thing: the sensation of doing more than the norm.

Anyone can eat anything or do anything, can float through the day-to-day mindlessly; it takes a superior person, we feel, to make the kinds of rarefied conscious choices demanded of us by a fad diet. Atkins promised to furnish us with “an edge, a bonus, the odds on your side.” That’s what we all want more than anything. Like Neo in The Matrix, we want to choose the red pill and see at last the world as it truly is. We want an advantage that makes us feel special because we are terrified we are not.