The History Of Dieting & Slimming Clubs: More Than Just Weight Loss – BBC History Magazine
Since they emerged within the Nineteen Forties, slimming golf equipment have supplied emotional succour, drawn criticism from feminists and tried to reinvent themselves as purveyors of wellness – all proof, writes Katrina Moseley, that there’s much more to the historical past of weight-reduction plan than weight reduction
On 16 September 1967, an area paper in Surrey ran a weight-loss story a couple of girl named Stephanie Vaughan. Having struggled along with her physique weight as a toddler and adolescent, Stephanie had grown “fatter and extra hopeless about her weight drawback till, at 21, she reached 14½ stone”. She had tried the whole lot in her willpower to eating regimen. She had even taken a course of slimming capsules, which left her feeling “horrible”. However not too long ago, reported the newspaper, one thing dramatic had occurred. Stephanie had found a brand new slimming technique known as Weight Watchers: “an organisation, not too long ago launched to this nation from America, which helps fatties by way of group remedy – a type of ‘eaters nameless’.”
The article within the Surrey Comet went on to document Stephanie’s exceptional success with Weight Watchers. She had began going as soon as per week to a gathering in a small village corridor in Datchet, the place a brand new department of the corporate had simply been fashioned. Though she had already slimmed right down to 13 stone, she hoped to remain for 5 additional months to lose extra weight. The journalist concluded that Stephanie felt higher in herself and located it simpler to withstand candy temptations. The place as soon as she had been a “fats woman”, “too huge to exit and purchase fairly, off-the-peg clothes”, she had began “taking an curiosity in fashions, now there’s a likelihood of discovering one thing to suit”.
This newspaper story captures an essential second within the late Sixties, when new weight-reduction plan strategies have been rising in Britain. And though as we speak we’re very accustomed to the thought of slimming golf equipment, their historical past is essentially neglected. How did the thought of “group-supported” weight reduction first catch on?
Slimming golf equipment have an extended social historical past relationship again to postwar America. The primary of those teams, the non-profit organisation “Taking Off Kilos Sensibly”, was established in Milwaukee in 1948, and comparable corporations adopted within the Fifties. In 1963, a savvy businesswoman named Jean Nidetch established Weight Watchers Inc. in New York, charging members a weekly attendance payment for the steering that she supplied. This mannequin proved wildly profitable, and 4 years later, an American girl named Bernice Weston purchased an unique franchise to function Weight Watchers in Britain.
Weston’s story is recorded colourfully in her autobiography, A Weight Off My Thoughts. Aged 27 in 1966, she stumbled upon a session of Weight Watchers whereas on vacation in Miami along with her English husband. Having yo-yo dieted all through her life, she vowed to offer the group technique a go. Though her first encounter was an unpromising one (“[We] really arrived… clutching hamburgers dripping with ketchup and relish and consuming triple thick milk shakes”), her dedication quickly melted away the undesirable kilos. She returned to England a number of months later to unfold the phrase about Weight Watchers from her house in Surrey.
However, success was not rapid. Weston struggled to drum up enterprise at first, attracting simply three girls to her preliminary UK assembly in March 1967. Within the autumn of that yr, she organised a “trend present” for former Weight Watchers at a division retailer in Kingston-upon-Thames. The fashions had all slimmed down with the assist of the organisation, and Weston organized to have “large blow ups achieved of their ‘earlier than’ footage” for the needs of promotion.
Throughout this early part, Weston educated every new “lecturer” herself. “Lecturers” have been former members of Weight Watchers: girls who had efficiently misplaced weight on the programme and needed to arrange a brand new class in a close-by space. As soon as coaching was full, these girls known as on buddies to participate of their courses. Like different American imports comparable to Avon and Tupperware, Weight Watchers drew on established networks of feminine sociability and supplied new, income-generating alternatives for ladies.
Over time, the success of Weight Watchers paved the best way for the emergence of homegrown teams in Britain. Silhouette Slimming was established in Northamptonshire in 1968. And a yr later, a girl named Margaret Bramwell established J&M Slimming World in a church corridor in Derbyshire. By 1975 there have been round 570 branches of Weight Watchers throughout the UK and greater than a thousand totally different courses of Silhouette Slimming Membership Ltd.
By the early Eighties, the energy of the slimming-club trade was plain to see. Speaking to researchers in that decade, one girl commented: “I not too long ago had a market analysis job to seek out off the streets of Nottingham 10 girls who had ever been members of a well known slimming membership and interview them. Unimaginable job? On the face of it, sure, to get 10 at random like that. It took me simply three hours – I used to be amazed. At that price I may have gone on pulling them in all day!”
The success of those golf equipment helped their feminine founders rise to prominence, too. Rosemary Conley, who left faculty on the age of 15 and entered secretarial work, discovered large success with a series of slimming golf equipment in Leicestershire within the early Nineteen Seventies. By the late Eighties, she was dwelling in an 18-room mansion within the countryside: all off the again of the slimming trade. By 1991, with e-book contracts and tv offers, she was incomes greater than £1m a yr.
We are able to add Conley to an extended line of enterprising girls – Helena Rubenstein, Madam CJ Walker, Elizabeth Arden and Anita Roddick – who harnessed the facility of feminine consumption patterns throughout the twentieth century to make massive fortunes for themselves. Figuring out a niche available in the market for innovation, these girls helped to rework the masculine face of entrepreneurial management for good.
One of many the explanation why slimming golf equipment have been so profitable on this interval is that they meant extra to girls than weight reduction. As a substitute, they have been areas of feminine “homosociality”, the place friendships have been fashioned and girls may share their issues and secrets and techniques – quite just like the pubs that males gathered in to drink and socialise throughout the early twentieth century. Within the early days, keen to guard these female-only areas, some slimming golf equipment even went so far as to exclude males. Rosemary Conley recalled that her personal courses have been focused at “girls, completely girls. And if males had needed to return, you’d have mentioned no.”
Hold Match courses have been one other house that fostered feminine friendships on this interval, they usually shared many similarities with slimming golf equipment. Fashioned into an affiliation in 1956 by the train guru Eileen Fowler, they grew to prominence within the late Fifties, gaining publicity from Fowler’s motivational appearances on BBC radio and tv. A suggestion to insert “girls” into the title of the Swindon Hold Match department was authorised unanimously upon its founding within the mid-Sixties.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, all slimming golf equipment adopted a easy enterprise format. Every membership generated income by way of month-to-month membership and weekly attendance charges. Courses happened in employed areas, usually village halls, and in return for his or her cash, members acquired a combination of weight-reduction plan assets: tailor-made meals plans, calorie info guides, a weekly “weigh-in” and the emotional assist of fellow slimmers.
This final issue – emotional assist – was essential. In keeping with Bernice Weston, slimming golf equipment have been locations the place non-public issues have been shared and unpackaged as a gaggle: “We’d focus on why we ate, and incessantly we discovered that we have been sad at house… Every kind of issues have been revealed when a member confessed to dishonest: maybe a girl would admit she was dealing with a divorce or {that a} dad or mum was dying, and as common meals grew to become her solely solace.”
Within the early days, Weston would even hand out fridge stickers saying issues like “Who’re you offended with?” explaining “when you find yourself offended with somebody, the very first thing you do is go straight to the fridge”. To guard in opposition to night blowouts, one other signal cautioned girls to “attain for his or her mate, not their plate”. Its tagline? “Make love, not midnight snacks.”
Although these examples could seem comical, the distinctive tradition of slimming golf equipment may serve an essential operate for ladies. The Slimnastics courses based in Richmond within the Sixties mixed health and wholesome consuming recommendation with speaking remedy. As one of many group’s founding members, Diana Lamplugh, later defined, Slimnastics paired collectively girls with comparable private issues: “This has occurred as an illustration with two moms whose infants died in cot deaths, one other the place, sadly, two aged moms share the horror of getting their sons commit suicide.” By encouraging open communication, these golf equipment pre-empted later cultural considerations with stress administration and emotional well-being.
The explanations for attending a slimming membership weren’t at all times this profound. Many ladies maintained a light-hearted angle to participation, viewing their weekly assembly as a welcome alternative to satisfy with buddies, or to flee home drudgery.
Interviewed for a examine on meals within the early Eighties, a housewife from the north of England admitted that her personal slimming membership journey had been a farcical one: “Me and my good friend used to go to the slimming membership on a Thursday night time with about 90p. We used to return out of there, go to the pub and have some fish and chips on the best way house and slim the remainder of the week!” This, she defined, was her “night time out”. It was one thing that she seemed ahead to as a result of her husband at all times insisted on staying in.
On the different excessive, some girls discovered the expertise of attending a slimming membership disturbing and anxiety-inducing. In 1985, on the age of 21, Jackie Lengthy joined a weight-loss membership with buddies in her native city of Congleton in Cheshire. When interviewed later in life, she recalled that conferences may very well be “a bit cringeworthy”. The category chief “would really go across the room, and she or he would ask everyone what they’d misplaced or maintained or placed on… To the purpose the place I can keep in mind feeling fairly type of sick, hoping that I’d misplaced.”
Though slimming golf equipment constructed weight reduction as a optimistic course of, points of the weight-reduction plan expertise may clearly be psychologically damaging. And the ladies’s liberation motion supplied a brand new framework for feminist girls to specific these considerations. Though the motion itself dated again to the late Sixties, critiques of the weight-reduction plan trade discovered fuller expression in the direction of the tip of the Nineteen Seventies, with the publication of Susie Orbach’s e-book Fats is a Feminist Situation (1978).
This seminal e-book on weight-reduction plan linked problems with disordered consuming to patriarchal energy constructions. For Orbach, a British psychoanalyst, beliefs of thinness have been transmitted unconsciously to women from an early age. Somewhat than reproducing such magnificence beliefs, it was the duty of contemporary feminists to outroot them as a part of a broader effort to fight the sexual objectification of the feminine physique.
By the early Eighties, these concepts had trickled down into the novel feminist press. Hassle and Strife journal, launched in 1983, featured an article on the “politics of slimming” in its opening situation. “One factor sticks in my thoughts,” noticed the writer. “[T]he description in Slimmer journal of this yr’s Golden Slimmer of the Yr who’s reworked by her eating regimen ‘from a lump of lard within the nook right into a winner’.” The “hatred” (a phrase used within the article) of this description made her reel.
By the Eighties, the arguments of the American physique positivity motion – which asserted that every one individuals deserved to have a optimistic physique picture, no matter societal expectation – have been changing into evident in Britain. Nancy Roberts’ train courses have been launched in London in 1982, “aimed not at weight reduction however at encouraging huge girls to get pleasure from their our bodies”, in keeping with an article in 1983. And later within the decade, the London Fats Girls’s Group took to BBC tv to create a programme that may “problem the slim best offered by the media”.
Most of the girls concerned in such teams had themselves attended slimming golf equipment up to now. “After years of weight-reduction plan,” noticed the Radio Instances in 1989, “they’re making an attempt to return to phrases with how they’re and wish to problem the oppression they face.” By actions of this sort, bigger girls formed a extra cynical view of the weight-reduction plan trade by way of the Nineties and into the twenty first century.
This brings us as much as the current day. What do slimming golf equipment seem like now, within the 2020s? The messages expounded by weight-reduction plan golf equipment have after all modified form over time, in step with broader cultural shifts. Within the Sixties, there was a variety of speak of magnificence, clothes-sizing and look. However these days, there’s way more of an emphasis on well being. This was mirrored clearly in 2018, when Weight Watchers re-branded itself “WW”, adopting the brand new tagline “Wellness that Works”. And quite than being the only real protect of girls, males are actually welcomed into slimming golf equipment – with extra attending than ever earlier than.
The methods adopted by weight-reduction plan golf equipment have additionally advanced in latest many years, owing to the rise of recent applied sciences. The Nineties marked a brand new visible age for slimming, with the unfold of health movies and tv options. Then got here the rise of the net eating regimen membership – a mannequin that has confirmed notably helpful in latest months. Even previous to the pandemic, Slimming World had established a web-based platform for itself, permitting members to satisfy just about and monitor their weight-loss journey by way of cell apps.
Slimming golf equipment provide us a wealthy historical past of contradictions. Whether or not we facet extra with the arguments of the ladies’s liberation motion, or extra with the notion that “magnificence is energy” is maybe a moot level. For all of those themes – physique politics, sexual oppression, feminine company, and feminine energy – determine someplace alongside the best way.
Katrina Moseley is a social historian of contemporary Britain. She acquired her doctorate from the College of Cambridge in 2020, specialising within the historical past of meals and physique weight. @trina_moseley
This text was first printed within the May 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
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