The Diets That Time Forgot

100 years ago, the average woman's waist was around 10 inches smaller and the average man was a stone and a half lighter. Sir Roy Strong champion of the age of elegance and former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, thinks history holds the answer to the nation's obesity epidemic. To prove it, he's conducting an experiment. He's taken a magnificent Victorian Country House and transformed it into a health spa of period. Sir Roy reveals history's secrets to getting slim, keeping fit and looking beautiful. If the volunteers hold their heads high and stand up straight, they get to find out what it means to keep fit and feel sexy using a corset. The weigh-in results produce smiles all round. But the big question is, which plan works best?

Offal's on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner, along with cold plunges and exercise in this second phase of Sir Roy Strong's historic slimming experiment. Under his tough love regime, nine volunteers compete to lose weight on diet and keep fit regimes that were popular with the Victorians, Edwardians and the flappers of the 1920s. As the volunteers groan with hunger, Sir Roy decides it's time to test their powers of self restraint. There are gasps of horror as one of the volunteers gives in to temptation. The calorie trader arrives to demonstrate how the cost of a bar of chocolate can be offset by a five mile run. But the results of the weigh-in prove Sir Roy's point, when it comes to losing weight and keeping in shape, nothing beats discipline.