If you're feeling stuffed with turkey and mince pies and planning to lose weight in 2026, you’re not alone. Last year, a YouGov poll found 27% of Brits planned to make resolutions, almost half of which involved getting fit, eating healthier or losing weight.
But despite the promise of a new calendar year and a fresh slate, the reality is many of us will have chucked in the towel on our diet plans by Blue Monday (the third Monday in January, often cited as the most depressing day of the year). In fact, a 2023 study found that of the tens of millions of Americans who resolve to lose weight at the start of each year, less than half will succeed.
The promise of a diet that works has had us in its chokehold for centuries. As far back as 2695 BC, they’ve promised miraculous results, like when Chinese emperor Shennong recommended drinking green tea for weight loss - a myth that persists to this day with little scientific evidence to back it.
In the centuries since, we’ve been recommended all sorts of silver bullet fads: grapefruit, cabbage soup, cotton balls and tapeworm eggs to name just a few of the least palatable and most dangerous. With such a chequered history, can any diet from the past teach us about healthy eating?
The workhouse diet
While many diets from history were devised for weight loss, some were formulated out of necessity. Workhouses feeding destitute parishioners had to provide cheap food that could be made in bulk several times a day.
There was no single menu, even after the workhouse system was overhauled in the 1830s, says Peter Higginbotham, historian and author of The Workhouse Cookbook. Diets varied by parish and era but there were commonalities, particular in those run by unions.
“The period between 1834 and about 1870 was when workhouse diets were at their plainest and most repetitive,” he says. “Breakfast was typically porridge or gruel, the midday dinner and supper was bread and cheese most of the time, then there was a meat dinner two or three times a week.”
Though there were similarities in what was being served, variations remained. Potatoes, for example, featured more heavily in areas where they were more popular. Recipes also differed, with some workhouses making gruel using three ounces of oats to one pint of water instead of four elsewhere. The quality of the produce was also often questionable, says Higginbotham, for example the meat tended to be cheap cuts and the bread was usually made from less expensive second or third-grade flour.
From a 2026 perspective, the benefits of the workhouse diet are few and far between, according to dietitian Anna Daniels. On the bright side, the breakfast oats would have contained beta-glucens that would lower cholesterol. But adding flour, as some workhouses did, would have turned it into a paste packed with refined carbohydrates.
“It’s almost like prison food - it's ‘how to feed the masses for the least amount of money’,” says Daniels, a spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association. “It is very carb heavy, which is providing inmates with energy, but it’s not rich at all in nutrients. Fruits and vegetables are almost non-existent, it’s very low in protein, high in animal fats and lacking in vitamins, C predominantly.”
Higginbotham points out that records only offer a snapshot of what was being served. More rural workhouses often had large vegetable patches and fed inmates a seasonal diet that was harder to capture on paper.
“It's very easy to look at it from modern standards and say, ‘oh, gosh, there's an awful lot of bread and cheese in that diet,’ he says. “But for people outside the workhouse at the lower end of the social scale, getting a loaf of bread a day was quite difficult. In the workhouse you've got three square meals a day, seven days a week. It may be repetitive, but at least you got fed.”
Analysis of the workhouse diet found it roughly equated to 2,000 calories a day - not dissimilar to modern-day recommendations, he adds. But it’s a menu created for survival, not nutrition, argues Daniels.
“They're using what they had. They're not wasting things. From a sustainability aspect, they're using everything they can. If we’re thinking about the cost of living, you could take from it… ‘right, I’ll [learn to] batch cook some soups’. But it’s not a brilliant diet.”
The Banting diet
William Banting’s career as one of London’s top funeral directors made an unexpected pivot in the 1860s when he became an accidental authority on the low-carb, high-fat diet that took his name.
At 14st (202 pounds) he had been advised by his doctor to forgo his regular diet of bread, butter, beer and potatoes and instead eat four meals a day of meat, fish, vegetables and a little fruit. So far, so sensible, until you learn it also recommended between five to seven glasses a day of claret, sherry or madeira.
Despite the excessive alcohol consumption, Banting shed 3st (46lbs) and wanting to share his success with the public, wrote a pamphlet entitled Letter on Corpulence, which sold tens of thousands of copies. But was his diet really something to recommend?
“You’ve got high protein content coming from the fish and meat, which is going to make you feel fuller for longer. The tea is giving you antioxidants and it’s without milk which is good in terms of the uptake of polyphenols. It’s quite low in refined sugar and in terms of the amount it's providing, everything is actually aligned with today's portions,” says Daniels.
But the diet was also very restrictive, allowing for only 25-30g of carbohydrates a day. It also recommended moderating dairy, pulses, nuts and vegetables like squash, and restricting gluten and grains, according to BBC Good Food.
“It’s definitely not an adequate diet and it is going to be contributing to nutrient deficiencies,” warns Daniels. “The vitamins and minerals are quite low, the meal variety is low, and there’s things that you're limiting, like grains, that have health benefits.”
The alcohol content is also a concern.
“I can imagine people would be like, ‘oh, I quite like this diet - I can drink loads, brilliant’,” she jokes. “But five to seven glasses of alcohol a day, without really specifying the amount, can make someone quite intoxicated and [add] a lot of liver strain.”
The lack of carbs would likely lead to energy dips too, Daniels adds, explaining that it’s better to strive for balance.
“If someone's goal is to lose weight, then modifying and slightly reducing the carbohydrate they're having in a portion and increasing the vegetables for fibre and nutrients is going to have positive benefits.”
Fletcherism, aka the Great Masticator
As far as fad diets go, Horace Fletcher’s advice in the 1890s has got to be some of the strangest. The American businessman advocated eating only when hungry and chewing each mouthful 100 times - a method that helped him shed almost 3st (40lbs), write a best-selling book, and earned him the nickname “The Great Masticator”.
Daniels very much doubts the chewing itself helped Fletcher lose the weight - more likely it was because he slowed down and changed the way he was eating.
“There probably are things that we can learn from Fletcherism in terms of not being rushed - that aspect of being mindful and appreciating our food,” she explains. “If you're not chewing properly and you're rushing your eating, your digestion will be impacted, you can swallow air, it can make you feel more bloated and your gut has to work harder to break down that food.”
But the chewing?
“I wouldn't be advocating chewing your food 100 times, it’s completely excessive and unnecessary,” she adds.
The Atkins diet
Devised in the 1960s, the low-carb high-fat Atkins diet has more than a passing resemblance to Banting’s version that came a century before it.
It heavily restricts the body’s favoured energy source - carbohydrates - forcing it to burn fat stores for energy. However, this can cause high levels of ketones in the body which can be dangerous - and it’s not the only unwanted side effect, warns Daniels.
“If you've got fewer fat stores, your body turns to breaking down muscle, so you end up breaking down what you don't really want to - and that's not helpful,” she says. “[Atkins] does lead to weight loss but in terms of that long-term sustained loss, is it the best? No. There are far better diets.”
Daniels wouldn’t recommend following any of these diets in isolation. But that’s not to say we can’t learn from them.
“I would take elements: the porridge from the workhouse diet without the flour, some of the lean fish from the Banting, even the Great Masticator, that element of slowing down,” she says.
But she cautions against following any diet that seems extreme because ultimately, they’re not sustainable or successful in the long term.
“Any diet that says it will ‘change your life in three days’. where it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. It isn’t going to lead to sustainable habit changes. You need to do those for life,” says Daniels.
As for 2026 diet trends we should be wary of - taking the advice of unqualified social media influencers tops her list.
“They’ve got millions of people following them and they're promoting and advocating [certain diets] and advising people on gut health with no formal training, that feels quite dangerous,” she says. “I think over time we'll go, "what? How could we allow this?"
Perhaps the only temptation any of us need to avoid in January is not the leftover Christmas chocolate but the fad diet that’s likely round the corner.