In the late 19th Century there was a strange trend among affluent Americans to gain weight. The reasoning went that only a well-off person could afford to eat to excess, and that an extended waistline was a sign of a healthy person who lived in comfort and didn’t mind flaunting it, in a way that complemented their fine clothes, jewelry and other signs of wealth. The era’s pseudoscience also equated a large girth with cheerful countenance, good humor and complacency, much desired among a certain set.

Starting with the New York Fat Man’s Club of 1869, the rich and heavy began to organize into formal social groups. These groups often demanded a minimum weight of 200 lbs. to become a member, along with a membership fee. The men (and they were overwhelmingly men, though a handful of Fat Women’s Clubs did exist in big cities) gathered in cities and towns to celebrate their shared girth with sporting events, talk-a-thons and massive banquets of food. These groups would often host charity events, which included athletic feats like leapfrog contests and weight-lifting, along with eating contests and public weigh-ins (which caused many a scandal as the participants regularly cheated), with spectators encouraged to bet on the winners. They were fine representatives of what novelist E.L. Doctorow calls “a great farting nation.”

Perhaps the exemplar of the lifestyle was James Buchanan Brady, known to contemporaries as “Diamond Jim.” Brady was a wealthy New York railroad magnate and financier who gained notoriety outside financial circles for his supposedly massive meals. One famous account claims that Brady indulged in a truly monstrous regimen of food: a dinner at Rector’s restaurant “two or three dozens oysters, six crabs, and two bowls of green turtle soup. Then in sumptuous procession came six or seven lobsters, two canvasback ducks, a double portion of terrapin, sirloin steak, vegetables, and for dessert a platter of French pastries.” It’s said that Brady would even include two pounds of chocolate candy to finish off the meal. 

Historians believe these stories were exaggerated in the telling, repeated by trivia books and credulous websites. Brady however did battle chronic stomach illness, and was forced to cutback to a comparatively spartan lifestyle in his later years. Either way, the fat trend faded in the 1920s as the health defects of such a lifestyle became obvious, and the overweight industrialist became a sign of social decadence rather than good-natured fun. Today, it’s often the opposite, with poorer Americans suffering from obesity due to poor food resources while the wealthy and middle class find fitness and skinny-tude more desirable.