ARE YOU BANTING?

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 October 1940, Page 2

ARE YOU BANTING?

CRAZE WHICH SWEPT ENGLAND. Forgive me for asking a personal question—are you banting? I suppose there is still a rage today for slimming, and many young ladies (and some not quite so young) run away with the idea that they are being frightfully modern in trying to win or regain that slim figure which fashion decrees at the moment. But bless you, they are really going back 70 years, for did not William Banting do the same? Mr Banting was born in 1797. He made a good living out of undertaking, furnishing funerals in St. James’s Street, London. But life was not all joy and felicity for Mr Banting, for I regret to say that he was small of stature, being no more than five foot five, and yet corpulent withal. Indeed, by the time Mr Banting reached the age of 60 he weighed over 14 stone, and was troubled about it, being unable , as he tells us quite frankly in his tract on corpulency, to fasten his own shoes, and constrained to come downstairs backwards. He admits, for he was an honest Englishman, that he | was for ever puffing and blowing, and ! possibly panting, which was unseem- I

ly in an undertaker called Banting. I He did everything he could to reduce | his volume. He walked and ran and j rowed, but this only increased his ap- • petite. He tried half a hundred baths . with no beneficial effects. But one happy day he met Mr Harvey—not the * great Harvey—and Mr Harvey said,, “Banting, you’re too fat. Knock off\ bread and butter, milk and sugar and beer, soup and potatoes and beans, and I you’ll be another man.” So he did, and he was. He Lost 46 pounds in a few weeks, and saw life as a sweet and lovely thing—Though he may have missed the bread and butter and milk and sugar and beer and soup and potatoes and beans. Anyhow, he wrote a letter to the public, and everybody who was too stout began “banting,” as they said. There was a banting craze which went over to Germany, and Mr Banting was famous till he died in 1878. ————mm