Around 1850 there lived a man in England whose name was William Banting. Banting was so obese that he needed to descend stairs backwards because the pain in his ankles and knees was too much to go down forwards. He couldn't even tie his own shoes. So he tried starvation, purgatives, diuretics, hot Turkish baths, and rigorous exercise. These were all unsuccessful and disappointing. He consulted with doctors, but they only told him that obesity was simply incurable.

After much failure in trying to lose weight, Banting consulted with Dr. William Harvey for a totally unrelated medical condition. Dr. Harvey recommended that Banting change his eating habits by cutting sugars and starches out of his diet. Banting followed the doctor's advice and ate no root vegetables, no potatoes or bread, no sugar, no sweetened drinks, and no pastries or desserts. As a result of following this low carbohydrate plan, Banting dropped fifty pounds.

Banting was overjoyed and wanted to share this discovery with others. He wrote what turned out to be the world's first diet book named Letter On Corpulence Addressed to the Public. The first edition was published in 1862 and later went into four editions, achieving worldwide circulation after being translated into French and German. Some 68,000 copies of the booklet were sold over a five to six year period.

One of Banting's correspondents told him that this diet plan had "long been recommended" to men who were training for running or boxing, but had never been applied to unhealthy or overweight people. Banting declared that "by proper diet alone, the evils of corpulence may be removed without the addition of those active exercises, which are impossible to the sickly or unwieldy patient."

Around a hundred years later in 1951, Robert C. Atkins graduated from the University of Michigan and went on to specialize in cardiology. In 1955 Dr. Atkins received his medical degree from Cornell University Medical School. He was the founder and medical chair of The Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine, in New York City.  In his more than 40 years of practice, he cared for more than 65,000 patients.

Dr. Atkins championed the natural healing arts as a safe and effective alternative to pharmaceutical drugs and surgery for many debilitating illnesses. He stressed the importance of proper diet in concert with nutritional support to prevent and combat heart disease, diabetes and obesity, all of which have grown to epidemic proportions. As a pioneer in complementary medicine, Dr. Atkins helped to bring national attention and credibility to its practice. In more than 30 years at The Atkins Center, he offered patients "the best of both worlds," integrating the latest conventional medical techniques with alternative therapies.

Dr. Atkins was the author of a number of books that promote controlled carbohydrate nutrition and complementary medical techniques. His original Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution, published in 1972, introduced the Atkins Nutritional Approach^TM. Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution (1992, 1999) has sold in excess of 10 million copies worldwide, is one of the top 50 best-selling books of all time and has remained on The New York Times bestseller list for five years.

In recent years, many new controlled carbohydrate diets have been released. Low carb products are becoming increasingly popular and add variety to the Low Carb Lifestyle.