The Fat Doctor Podcast Wellness Influencers: A 400-Year History of the Same Old BS
Feb 18, 2026
A fast-paced history lesson tracing wellness influencers back centuries. Stories of 18th and 19th century health fads, from anti-meat pamphlets to calorie-counting crusades. Examination of how moralizing language turned larger bodies into public threats. A critique showing modern wellness trends as recycled ideas dressed up as new.
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Wellness Culture Is Centuries Old
- Wellness influencer culture predates social media and traces back centuries to figures like George Cheyne.
- Their playbook (diet rules, moralising bodies, emotional advice) remains remarkably consistent over 400 years.
George Cheyne: The Early Self-Help Doctor
- George Cheyne wrote bestselling self-help manuals in the early 1700s based on his own experience as a very fat physician.
- He promoted vegetarianism, fasting, walking and framed emotions as part of health decades before modern wellness tropes.
Wadd's Poetic Pathology
- William Wadd published Cursory Remarks on Corpulence in 1810 and described autopsies showing fat around organs in poetic terms.
- His moralising language fed fascination and alarm about internal fat as evidence of disease.
