‘The Drinking Man’s Diet’ was the 1960s ancestor to Atkins and paleo—and it was a boozy bestseller
Eat and drink like Don Draper, lose weight like Betty Draper
In the early 1960s, a woman handed Robert Cameron a slip of paper. “You’ve been wanting to lose weight. Try this,” she said. Cameron decided to give her diet a try and told his friends to do the same. “Within a few days the people closest to us, our wives and fellow golfers, were watching bug-eyed while we kept pulling in the notches on our belts,” he said. “[I] was never hungry and never missed a martini.” What was his secret? Meat and booze, simply put.
Cameron reported his findings to the world in his self-published 1962 book, The Drinking Man’s Diet. It quickly became one of the most popular diets in the country, selling 2.4 million copies in 13 languages. Cameron had initiated a “carbo-craze” by suggesting that weight watchers count carbs not calories. When Atkins released Diet Revolution nine years later, Cameron responded, “Revolution? My foot!” He had been proselytizing against carbs for a decade already.
The Drinking Man’s Diet was just around 50 pages, something that could be tucked into your jacket pocket and surreptitiously examined in a restaurant booth. “Did you ever hear of a diet which was fun to follow?” Cameron wrote. “A diet that would let you have two martinis before lunch, and a thick steak generously spread with Sauce Bearnaise, so that you could make your sale in a relaxed atmosphere and go back to the office without worrying about having gained so much as an ounce?”
Cameron was offering “rapture and champagne,” while others suggested cabbage, or weight-loss meal replacements and apple cider vinegar. Of course Americans chose the martini and filet instead.
Cameron was neither a nutritionist nor a doctor. He was a cosmetics executive and an aerial photographer, but according to his book, he consulted a nutritionist (and a lawyer) before publishing. Not surprisingly, other nutritionists were unconvinced, and some were outright hostile to his ideas.
Cameron was on a book tour when he got a tearful call from his mother in Des Moines. She had read a startling headline: “Drinking Man’s Diet ‘Mass Murder,’ says Harvard Nutritionist.” (The nutritionist later retracted the “mass murder” part but remained highly skeptical of the diet because of its implications for heart health). Dr. Frederick J. Stare, the founder of the Harvard School of Public Health, called the diet “ridiculous.”
The 1960s marked the beginning of America’s obsession with diet fads. “Face it, you’ve got to stop eating,” an ad campaign read. Weight Watchers was founded in 1963, and Metrecal, a shake meal replacement that looked like Pepto Bismol was reporting record sales, while diet sodas proliferated on grocery store shelves. But dieting was considered the province of housewives. Cameron was offering something for men.
Of calorie counting, Cameron wrote, “Your fingers twitch spasmodically in the direction of any peanut butter bar lying around. You snap at your secretary, you insult your best friend … you are roused to fury by the sight of the plump smiling faces on the TV screen, you have agitated dreams at night in which you are drowning in a vat of sauce Espagnole. And there is nothing you can do about it. Because the social drink on which you rely to cut down your tension is forbidden.” Cameron broke with the discipline and deprivation model, and told people they could indulge in their vices.
A typical “Drinking Man’s” lunch might be a dry martini or whiskey and soda, two glasses of wine, broiled fish or steak or roast chicken, green beans or asparagus, lettuce and tomato salad with french or Roquefort dressing.
Though men were clearly the target, women used it too. One testimonial from a homemaker read, “I used to be like other women and struggle through lunches of cottage cheese and fruit salad. Now I order pork chops and creamed spinach, and I get a great kick out of watching the faces of my friends knowing that I am losing weight and they are not.” Other indulgent fad diets soon followed, known by increasingly outlandish names such as, “The Martinis and Whipped Cream Diet.”
In our diet choices, our fantasies and anxieties are on full display. Savvy marketers know that discipline doesn’t sell, but a swanky lifestyle does. Cameron’s book provided a window into the male mind of the swinging ’60s. After describing a typical, low-calorie diet of veggie burgers and cottage cheese, Cameron writes, “You are having the most beautiful woman in the world over to dinner. Imagine sitting down with her to a dinner like that. ‘Do you think you can afford a quarter cup of rhubarb juice, darling?’ … Romance does not fly very far on such wings.” Instead, he was offering this: “So, drinkers of the world, throw away your defatted cottage cheese and your cabbage juice; and sit down with us to roast duck and Burgundy. You have nothing to lose but your waistlines.”
Cameron’s diet can be seen as a precursor to other “man diets” such as the caveman and paleo diets of today. Implicit is the idea that men can eat their way to manhood, that what fuels us defines us. Cameron’s depiction of the cottage cheese-eating, calorie-counting dieter oozes with anxiety about the loss of masculinity. While today’s caveman diets suggest that we may crave a more primal manhood, Cameron conjured a Mad Men-esque suave dealmaker with a keen sartorial sense in a low-lit bar who was offering you a highball and your dignity. Say what you will for the health costs of knocking back three drinks at lunch, Cameron was right about one thing: The Drinking Man’s Diet was more fun and life-affirming than cabbage juice.
Perhaps because of his diet, or perhaps because genetics is a crapshoot, Robert Cameron enjoyed his roast duck and Burgundy until the advanced age of 98.
