By SIR ROY STRONG

Last updated at 21:06 14 March 2008

There's nothing new about diets. In a unique experiment a historian put three of them - from very different eras - to the test. So which one worked the best?

Hands up those of you who have never attempted to lose weight? Practically no one, I guess, in this era of universal flab-panic.

I took myself in hand at the close of the Seventies, when I was director of the V&A museum and growing so large my trousers were starting to pinch.

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One of the diet guinea pigs is measured up as part of the experiment

Within a few months I had shed a stone by eating less, taking up jogging and joining the gym.

Indeed, the weight loss was so marked that my trousers began to drop off me, and I had to have them taken in by a friendly tailor I knew in the costume department at the Royal Opera House.

Ever since then I've kept a close watch on what I eat, with the result that, although I'm in my 73rd year, a doctor has just told me my metabolic age is only 57 - a full 16 years younger than my age.

I discovered that only when I began making a TV series on the history of dieting.

It is part social history, part reality show, with nine flab-laden members of the public volunteering to enter a fictional "Institute of Physical Culture" where, for 24 days, they are subjected to three of the most extreme diets from history.

My role was to act as the head of the institute, dressed in a frock coat and top hat to preside over the whole process like some Victorian version of Gillian McKeith.

Together with the other "staff" - who were all experts in different aspects of health and wellbeing - I had to enforce the correct food intake and the appropriate exercise programmes from three eras: Victorian, Edwardian and the roaring Twenties.

To do this, we were all incarcerated in a country house in the middle of nowhere from which there was no easy means of escape.

Obesity crisis: Tricia Ford and David Jordan tried the Victorian diet

And looking at the brutal regime our volunteers were subjected to, it's a miracle the rest of them weren't chewing the carpet by the time we let them out.

Although the resulting programmes are hilarious, they are also intriguing and informative - teaching us a great deal about our modern-day attitudes to food.

Until I embarked on these programmes I had no idea that our obsession with dieting went back further than the Fifties, when I recall my mother getting slimming pills from the doctor which only seemed to make her grow fatter.

In fact, dieting goes back to the Victorian age when the new middle classes, waited on by servants, had blown up in size as a consequence of consuming the contents of Mrs Beeton's celebrated cookbook.

So could our modern-day volunteers learn something from the methods used by our ancestors to shift those extra pounds, just as modern- day celebrity chefs still turn to Mrs Beeton for inspiration in the kitchen?

The three dietary regimes I subjected our guinea pigs to all had one thing in common: they demanded extreme commitment and discipline, which was anathema to most of the tubby participants.

For me, that was the most fascinating part of the whole exercise.

For the truth is that we would not need diets at all if people relearned simple discipline.

We've had two generations where there has been little discipline, in the home or the school. And if you want to lose weight, it's fundamental.

Before they entered the "institute", our nine participants had to pledge they would adhere to their strict regimes and observe set meal times, without fail.

Drawn from all ages and walks of life, they included a special needs teacher, Madame Tussaud's guide and gas meter reader.

Yet as soon as they embarked on our rigorous regimes, it became clear that the idea of formal mealtimes was new to them.

They all belonged to the "me" generation: "I have what I want, when I want."

In their normal lives, most of them simply grazed on snacks, or sat munching something from the take-away as they gawped at the TV.

When questioned about what they would normally eat for breakfast, they gave me replies such as "a glass of water and two fags".

The idea of sitting at a table and talking to other human beings came as a total culture shock to them.

That didn't surprise me, ever since I learned from a nursery school teacher that most children arrive in her care never having sat at a table or held a knife and fork.

In fact, some of our participants had to be taught precisely that.

This lack of discipline, combined with the availability of cheap ready-to-eat food, means that most of us eat far more than our ancestors, while exercising less.

They walked, we drive. They did hard manual work; we mostly sit on a chair in an office.

Our sedentary lifestyle extends into the home, where machines do virtually all the tasks that once had to be done by hand.

Similarly, our houses are heated while in the past they were cold. All these changes mean that we burn far fewer calories than the average Victorian.

It's no wonder we have an obesity crisis. But what also struck me was the selfishness of the reasons given by our participants for wanting to lose weight and be fitter.

The answers were without exception self-centred, ranging from "I want to be able to wear skinny jeans", to "I want to look good nude for my wife".

In the past, slimming and fitness was viewed as part of good citizenship so that you would be ready for action in time of war, serve the state in peace and, as a woman, bear healthy children.

It was an era which produced the Boy Scouts, Boys' Brigade, New Health Society and Women's League Of Health And Beauty.

Today, such notions of civic duty have vanished, as not one of our participants said they wanted to be lean and fit so as not to be a burden to their families or avert adding to the cost of the NHS.

What we have is an obesity crisis, but minus the moral framework of our ancestors, who decried fatness as being the result of gluttony and loose living.

It's no use blaming the problem on the food manufacturers or retailers who are going to have to label their food with colour-coded calorie warnings.

As I said, it all comes back to one thing: self-discipline, the ability to control yourself, eat less and, when offered more, utter the words: "No thank you".

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• The Diets That Time Forgot begins on Channel 4 on Tuesday at 9pm.

In1863 an undertaker called William Banting, who had made the Duke of Wellington's coffin, published what was in effect the first book for slimmers.

It was called A Letter On Corpulence and became a bestseller. Indeed right into the 1920s, if you were on a diet you would say that you were "banting".

At 65, Banting had found himself weighing 14st6lb(sylph-like compared with many of today's men).

At that weight, he could only climb upstairs backwards and couldn't reach down to tie his shoelaces.

More seriously, the explosion of fat was putting pressure on his hearing and he had started to go deaf.

Over the years, he tried various methods to shift the pounds: rowing, riding, purgatives and Turkish baths. None succeeded.

So in desperation, he visited an ear specialist - a man who was in contact with his peers in Paris, at that time the centre of advanced medicine.

The specialist prescribed a straightforward diet free from starchy and sugary foods, based on lean meat, boiled eggs and green vegetables.

The result was extraordinary: Banting lost 21/2st in ten months - inspiring him to write his account of how he had done it.

His formula meant eating huge quantities of lamb, beef, poultry and game, even for breakfast.

Alcohol was allowed but the essence of the diet was careful portion control.

By the time of Banting's death in 1878, his book had sold 58,000 copies - in Victorian terms a blockbuster.

But it was another man, Dr Robert Atkins, whose own version of the same dieting concept would become a global phenomenon more than a century later, forming the basis of a diet empire that was at one time worth more than £50million.

Perhaps the most revolting diet in history, this regime from Edwardian times required participants to chew everything precisely 32 times, before tilting the head backwards to allow the masticated food to slide down.

This idea was first put forward by an American, Horace Fletcher - a marksman, athlete and painter, who had become so fat he was refused life insurance in 1895.

By then he weighed more than 141/2st, but after just four months of using the chewchew method, he had shed more than 40lb.

Fletcher believed food must be chewed to be absorbed into the body's system healthily.

Hasty eating, he believed, resulted in undigested food clogging up the system, which led to constipation and the colon becoming a dangerous cesspool of bacteria.

This was an era obsessed by the evils of constipation.

Fletcher's great friend was John Harvey Kellogg, who in 1906 launched the staple of most people's breakfasts even today - cornflakes.

This daily intake of roughage was intended to oil the system and Kellogg's bran was designed to scour the intestines.

Kellogg also ran a sanatorium where people went to lose weight, through cold rain douches, sweating packs and plunge baths, along with rigorous exercise.

Interestingly, on Fletcher's diet you can eat anything - and as much of it as you like - but chewing takes so long, the desire to eat diminishes and you eat less.

Revolting, it may be. But it's certainly effective.

In 1919 an overweight Californian lady called Dr Lulu Hunt Peters published Diet And Health, With Key To The Calories.

This was so successful in the Twenties ran into 16 editions and was still in print in the 1940s.

Initially, Dr Peters advocated a calorie limit of just 1,200 a day but by 1928 she had revised her advice to just 600 to 750 per day (modern guidelines recommend 1,940 calories for a woman, and 2,550 for men as part of a normal diet).

The key to her book's success was that she had compiled a list of the calorie content of particular foods.

Almost 90 years on, this is still the standard means of achieving and maintaining weight loss.

Of our three historical diets, this was undoubtedly the most gruelling. It is an essay in total denial.

No alcohol is allowed at all and breakfast can consist of two apples and tea only.

After a week or so, the mere sight of yet another heap of celery sticks produced

paroxysms in our volunteers.

I pass over the screams which went up at the sight of yet another pile of lettuce and grated carrot.

It may be brutally effective but, in reality, calorie dieting to the extreme degree that Dr Peters suggested is basically just a form of starvation, leading not only to violent hunger pangs but emotional mood swings.

Deprivation on this scale probably explains why, by the 1930s, people were looking for other means of losing weight by taking various forms of amphetamines designed to curb the appetite.

For the first time, cosmetic surgery also began to emerge as another possibility for weight loss, paving the way for today's billion-pound industry.

And the winner is...

The Victorian Undertaker's diet produced a decent amount of weight loss, but who'd want to weigh their food every mealtime or eat lamb chops at breakfast?

More manageable, and more effective in the long term, was the Roaring Twenties calorie-counting programme.

One participant lost 2st and with it his double chin, but you can't do it without a calorie count book and calculator.

No, I'm sorry to say it was the dreaded chew-chew diet that won the day, producing the highest weight loss.

You could eat what you fancied but every meal became a chewing nightmare - like watching cows with the cud.

Ultimately, whichever of the three you choose - if any - I'm sorry to tell you that curtailing food intake has to be a life sentence to be any good. You have been warned.