15 hours ago
Ryvita, cottage cheese and aerobics twice a week – I lost 5lb following a 1980s diet
The intro to Jane Fonda 's classic workout starts with impossibly limber people in thong leotards and leg warmers over tights doing moves that make my vagina hurt to look at. I can barely lift my leg to waist height let alone sink effortlessly into the splits.
Still, I'd like to look like one of them – all swishy hair, toned limbs and exuberant good health. I'm not the only one: the past couple of years have seen a proliferation of 1980s-themed exercise options, from aerobics classes at trendy London gym chain Frame to the runaway success of Mum Dance, a 1980s-themed dance fitness class that runs in school gymnasiums throughout the country. Which is why I have embarked on a new health mission for the month: to follow a 1980s fitness and diet regimen in a bid to shed a few pounds. And I'm starting with Jane.
Fonda released her workout in 1982, having started doing aerobics after fracturing her foot during filming for her movie The China Syndrome. She'd already published Jane Fonda's Workout Book the previous year with an accompanying audio tape with music to pair with the exercises, which became a bestseller. A video was a no-brainer; it became the highest-selling home video of the next few years, selling over 17 million copies worldwide, and is credited with starting the fitness craze among baby boomers.
In this country, we had Rosemary Conley, who had founded her own slimming business in 1972, which offered both diet and exercise advice, and whose Hip and Thigh Diet, published in 1988, sold more than two million copies (it was later followed by 1990's Inch Loss Plan, a diet and exercise programme that promised to transform your shape in 28 days). Conley's success, which was predicated on gentle aerobic movement à la Fonda, accompanied by a low-fat diet, followed on from the F-Plan diet by the journalist Audrey Eyton, which first ran as a series in the Daily Express and was published as a book in 1982: allowing 1,500 calories per day, it focused on low fat and high fibre as the way to lose weight and stay healthy. In 1983, the Government introduced national dietary guidelines that recommended reducing overall dietary fat consumption to 30 per cent of total energy intake, and saturated fat to 10 per cent; in 1985, the frozen food brand Findus introduced a new 'Lean Cuisine' range to its UK offerings, in which each ready meal contained under 300 calories. Meat and two veg was out; calorie counting, cottage cheese, baked potatoes (no butter) and bran on everything was in.
Still, in the 1980s, obesity was not the general problem that it is today. In Britain in the 1980s, the average weight for men was 73.6kg (11st 8lb) and for women, 62kg (9st 10lb); today, men weigh on average 85.8kg (13st 7lb) and women 72.8kg (11st 6lb), according to the latest data from NHS Digital, collected in 2022. 'It was a different world,' says Conley today when I speak to her, aged 78 and still going strong. 'We walked to school, we were much more active, we didn't drink as much – you only had a drink when you went out or if you were celebrating something special.'
Nevertheless, the national guidelines combined with new diet and fitness trends pioneered by the likes of Conley meant that eating healthily in the 1980s became about regulating one's calorific intake and restricting 'bad' foods such as fat of any kind. The majority of the diets I researched restricted milk, for example, to a maximum of half a pint of skimmed milk per day, plus a little unsweetened orange juice; alcoholic drinks were restricted to a single small glass of wine or sherry per day. The emphasis was on beauty, rather than strength: 'We want to really look a lot slimmer,' wrote Conley; Fonda explained that we should do her exercises to avoid ending up with a 'scooped posture' as it looks 'less attractive'. At its worst, most faddy end were the crash diets that became all about one thing (and usually had adherents piling the pounds straight back on as soon as they stopped): the Cabbage Soup diet (where you only ate low-calorie cabbage soup for a week); the Cambridge diet, which involved replacing meals with shakes, soups and bars, and the Beverly Hills diet, a 35-day diet that required you to eat only fruit for the first 10 days, in a specific order.
I wasn't prepared to subject my family to the consequences of a cabbage-based diet and I'm not sure my own intestines would have coped with the Beverly Hills option. Instead, I devised my own 1980s diet plan that was a combination of Conley and the F-Plan, and accompanied it with aerobic exercises from all over the place. Here's what the 1980s taught me.
Eat smaller portions
One of the most noticeable things about eating from the decade when The Police were still topping the charts is how much less an average plateful was. Although Conley's Hip and Thigh diet stipulates unlimited vegetables, including potatoes, with any of her main meals, overall portion sizes are much, much smaller: both Conley and the F-Plan, for example, allow only 25g of something like Bran Flakes or porridge for breakfast, and a fish pie recipe for four uses only 700g of cod. The average dinner plate, meanwhile, was typically around 10in in diameter in the 1980s – noticeably smaller than the average plate size today, which is between 11-12in. I don't try to stick to the F-Plan's 1,500 calories a day – it leaves my energy levels too low to concentrate on work or wrangle my children – but leaving aside the calorie restrictions, eating smaller portions is something I will definitely take with me from my sojourn into the 1980s.
Cut down on fat (although not the good kind)
Switching to a 'healthy eating' diet of the 1980s makes me realise just how much fat I generally incorporate into my diet: Greek yogurt with seeds for breakfast; olive oil in my salad dressing at lunch; butter on my toast in the afternoon; vegetables stir-fried in more oil or butter on my baked potatoes at dinner. By contrast, on my 1980s diet I'm having skimmed milk on my cereal at breakfast, eating low-fat cottage cheese at lunch and stir frying my mince for a chilli con carne using just a little bit of water at dinner time. By the end of my 1980s stint although I've lost my taste for pastries, cakes, ice cream and pies, I'm also craving yogurt, avocado on toast and peanut butter. 'The focus on having no fat in the diet isn't so good,' says nutritionist Dr Federica Amati, author of Every Body Should Know This: The Science of Eating for a Lifetime of Health. 'We now know that healthy fats are essential – things like olive oil, nuts and seeds are really necessary for good health.'
'These days we know that having some unsaturated fats and a little bit of oil is not bad for you,' admits Conley. 'You don't need to worry if you're eating Greek yogurt or salmon or an avocado – these are healthy foods.' Conley also admits some responsibility for the proliferation of 'low-fat' convenience foods that exploded in the 1980s and generally now have sugar added in place of the fat – not great for overall health. A 2015 paper published in the online journal Open Heart found that the fat dietary recommendations 'lacked any solid trial evidence'.
Focus on fibre
'If you follow a high-fibre diet you will find that you feel more satisfied on fewer calories. And more of the calories that go into your mouth will, to put it bluntly, go straight through and down the lavatory,' wrote Audrey Eyton in the introduction to her The Complete F-Plan Diet. Eyton drew on emerging medical research that suggested that a Western diet rich in refined carbohydrates was causing all sorts of health problems and that by contrast, those in developing countries who ate foods high in dietary fibre avoided things like bowel and heart disease and diabetes. It should not just be 'health food cranks' who bought wholemeal brown bread, Eyton insisted, but all of us: in fact, we should all be eating between 25g and 50g of fibre a day to fill up, stay healthy and lose weight.
It's true that Eyton's 'Fibre Filler' breakfast – a blend of Bran Flakes, bran, All Bran, almonds, dried prunes, apricots and sultanas – is remarkably filling given my small portion sizes, although her breakfast advice is basically to eat commercially available, processed cereals supplemented with bran, which I'm not sure is the optimal choice for health. All the 1980s health gurus also seem to have a remarkable reliance on Ryvita, and only Ryvita, as an acceptable vehicle for cottage cheese or tuna at lunchtime (I got used to it, although without anything on top it is dry in the extreme). Nevertheless 'the focus on fibre and on filling up on fibre to help maintain a healthy weight is really good and something that has been lost', says Dr Amati – who points out that the recommended daily dietary fibre intake for adults in the UK is 30g, and that most of us don't get nearly as much as that. I'd probably be better off eating porridge for breakfast, however, or sticking with yogurt and adding seeds and fruit for fibre – 'relying on fibre-enriched packaged foods [like breakfast cereals] is not as good as eating lentils and pulses and seeds and nuts'.
Move more
One of the things I enjoy most about my 1980s experiment is the exercise, which is basically regular, gentle aerobics and calisthenics. 'Are you ready for the workout?' becomes my mental daily Fonda mantra. 'Very few people were qualified [to teach aerobics] at that stage, so you basically moved to music,' says Conley (who qualified as an aerobics instructor in 1991). The first time I do Jane Fonda's workout on my sitting room floor via AppleTV, about 15 minutes into it I start to understand why Fonda and her pals look so good. The woman is a machine: she can do multiple sit-ups while still looking into the camera and chatting quite happily away; the same with leg raises, jumping jacks, high kicks and more abdominal exercises – and she has the breath to do encouraging shouts and whoops along the way (everyone in Fonda's workout video is highly enthusiastic, letting out cries of excitement every few minutes). The class is fast-paced and energetic, but not difficult to keep up with – a gentle burn as opposed to the usual heart-racing HIIT (high-intensity interval training) classes I'm used to. I feel pleasantly stretched at the end of it, and the next day I can definitely feel the ache in my hips.
It's the same with Conley's daily exercise programme in the Inch Loss Plan, which I alternate with Fonda's workouts: the exercises are all gentle, incorporating things like stretching, sideways jogging, an 'arm and bust uplift', a 'waist whittler' and an 'outer thigh streamliner', but I ache the next day and definitely notice a toning over time, as well as improved posture. Above all, the exercises are easy to incorporate into my daily life and don't require hours of sweating at the gym. I'm not sure I'll give up my strength training sessions or weekly 'erging' on the rowing machine in the gym, but I definitely plan to continue incorporating the daily exercises into my routine.
Don't snack
Although the F-Plan diet book includes a 'Snack-Eaters F-Plan', which allows for five small meals a day, generally the advice from the 1980s diet queens is to stick to breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a decent amount of time between meals to aid digestion. Used to grabbing a latte mid-morning, or a handful of nuts or a piece of toast in the afternoon, it feels odd at first to have these long gaps, but after a short while I really start to appreciate them – not only do I find my focus is clearer but it means I'm hungrier for my next meal and enjoy it more. Not grazing on chocolate on the sofa in the evening, meanwhile, means I sleep better and wake up with more energy. Definitely something I'm going to stick with.
Conclusion
A confession: I don't manage to stick rigidly to a 1980s regimen for the entire month. That said, I'm pleasantly surprised to have lost 5lb by the end of it, and to generally be sleeping better and feeling less stressed. The relentless focus on calorie counting that all the 1980s diets advocate feels outdated and frankly unsustainable long term: as Dr Amati points out, 'restrictive dieting actually increases the risk of low mood and depression – you need to have adequate portions'. Neither will I continue to cut out all fat from my diet, and have already reintroduced yogurt, regular cheese on top of cottage cheese (which I actually love), nuts, avocados and olive oil – although I've noticed I'm less bothered about butter and have practically lost all appetite for biscuits and cakes by following the 1980s regimen. I'm going to keep on leaving proper gaps between meals however, as well as eat more fibre – I've even started to enjoy Ryvita. As for the aerobics, I'm a proper convert. Yes Jane, I am ready for the workout.
