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This year, like every year, 1 in 4.76 people will resolve to lose weight. To cut calories, eschew sugary snacks, and memorize the FDA food pyramid. Or they might just try one of a hundred fad diets.

The notion that our diet affects our health has been around for millennia. In 400 BCE, Hippocrates was recommending a ketogenic, or Atkins-like, diet as a treatment for epilepsy. But the thrust of today’s dieting—the attempt to lose weight—comes from a problem relatively new to humans: having too much to eat. And the persistence of the problem—only 1 in 2.27 adults who make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight will keep it throughout the year—is matched by the persistence of diet trends.

Here are some landmark years in the history of dieting and weight loss:

c. 1066—William the Conqueror grows so fat after the Battle of Hastings that he undertakes an all-liquid diet, lying in bed and consuming nothing but alcohol. The results are unrecorded, though it is known that clergymen had difficulty wedging him into his funeral sepulcher after his death in 1087.

1796—Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, a German physician, coins the term “macrobiotic.” According to Hufeland in his The Art of Prolonging Life, one of the first books to address dieting, modern humans are increasingly taken by “immoderation” and “idleness.” A year later, the philosopher Immanuel Kant would respond to this in a discussion of the power of human will to overcome or prevent health problems. His example: an old man's ability to regulate his increased need for fluids, in order to stop the unpleasant urge to urinate at night.

1824—French chemist Nicolas Clément first defines the “calorie,” a unit of energy. A calorie refers to the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Today's use of the word (e.g. “food calorie,” “2,000 calories a day,” etc.) refers to the kilocalorie, or capital-C Calorie, the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. The metric unit of energy—used today by every nation except Liberia, Burma, and the United States—is the joule, equal to 4.184 calories.

1829—Sylvester Graham invents “Graham bread,” the predecessor of the Graham cracker. Vegetarianism, he argued, and additive-free foods like Graham bread, would cure alcoholism and suppress sexual urges. Advocating abstinence whenever possible, he was a firm and vocal believer that masturbation, or “self-abuse,” ultimately led to insanity. Graham also recommended frequent bathing, which habit has for the most part become a part of American culture. The odds an adult showers at least once a day are 1 in 1.59, or 63%.

1863—William Banting, an English undertaker, writes his highly influential Letter on Corpulence. In it, he describes “reducing" by 50 lbs. on a diet of meat, dry wine, and a little fruit: “The items from which I was advised to abstain as much as possible were:—Bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer, and potatoes.” His regimen can be considered the first modern predecessor to the Atkins Diet.

1897—John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, Will, begin producing whole grain breakfast cereals, of which Corn Flakes® is now the most famous. Kellogg maintained the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a spa-like institute in Michigan dedicated to the promotion of healthy living and abstinence. He was a firm believer in calisthenics and a low-meat, nearly vegetarian diet, and also promoted a number of outré health fads: nut-based meals, yogurt enemas, sunbaths, and rigorous abstinence from sexual activity and other “destructive evils,” chiefly masturbation. Like Sylvester Graham, Kellogg had much to say on the subject—he believed that, through “onanism,” an otherwise healthy person “literally dies by his own hand.” Kellogg went so far as to recommend circumcision (for boys), carbolic acid applied to the clitoris (for girls), and other, even more extreme measures in his vocal efforts to prevent the “solitary vice.”

Early 1900's—Horace Fletcher argues that food should be thoroughly chewed to maintain good health. His recommendation: chew each bite 45 times, which became known as “Fletcherizing.” His most famous adage was that “Nature will castigate those who don't masticate.” Fletcher also recommended analyzing one’s stool, which, he argued, indicated one's level of health—a healthy person's “digestive ash” will be “inoffensive,” with the opposite being true of the sickly. His traveling lectures on the subject made him a millionaire, and gained him famous followers like John D. Rockefeller and Henry James.

1917—The American Dietetic Association is founded by Lenna Cooper, Lulu Graves, and others. The ADA was created as an organization for conserving food and improving public wellbeing during World War I. Today, “dietitian” is the legally protected term for a food/nutrition expert with extensive accredited education and experience. By contrast, “nutritionist” is not a legally protected term, and indicates no legal credentials—anyone may call themselves a nutritionist, regardless of experience-level.

1918—Lulu Hunt Peters, a physician in Los Angeles, popularizes Calorie-counting as a dieting method with her book, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories. Illustrated with stick figures by Peters' nephew, Diet quantifies daily food consumption in the now-familiar Calories-per-day scheme. So for, say, the “sedate” man or woman, Peters recommends consuming around 2,200 Calories per day. To lose weight, she writes, one should eat 500 to 1,000 fewer Calories-worth of food; to gain, 500 to 1,000 more (her other Calorie categories—e.g., the “working” man, for whom Peters recommends 3,500 to 4,000 Cal/day—reveal as much about the changing nature of “work” and culture as about the history of health science). Page after page is filled with serving-to-Calorie-content tables, calisthenic diagrams, low-Calorie recipes, and diet advice, as in her famous proclamation: “Hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 Calories of bread, 350 Calories of pie.” Sixty-five years later, the Jenny Craig® nutritional counseling service opens, offering Calorie-related advice very similar to Peters'.

On through the 20th century, the number of diets and dieting fads grew dramatically. Even an incomplete list can be overwhelming. Recent, notable years in dieting include:

1941—Stanley Burroughs invents the “lemonade diet,” still practiced by some today as the Master Cleanse® diet. Its allowable foods, all liquid, can include lemonade or lemon water, maple syrup, salt water, and others. In his 1976 book, Master Cleanser, Burroughs promotes his diet as a detoxification regimen, curing “every kind of disease.” In 1984, Burroughs was tried by the state of California for “unlawfully selling drugs, compounds, or devices for alleviation or cure of cancer…felony practicing medicine without a license…and second degree felony murder in the treatment and death of Lee Swatsenbarg,” a 23-year-old terminal leukemia patient to whom Burroughs had sold his diet—plus colored-light exposure and massage—as a cure for cancer. To date, no peer-reviewed medical evidence suggests that the diet removes toxins. And notably, the body already has an efficient toxin-filtering system: the liver and kidneys.

1972—Robert Atkins writes Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution, in which he recommends a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet as a method of weight loss. According to the book, the diet consists of four phases: one of almost total carbohydrate deprivation—with a small amount (20 net grams) of vegetables/fruit to stave off constipation and scurvy—and the remaining three successively adding a bit of carbohydrates back into the diet. Atkins' diet differs little from William Banting's regimen, or Hippocrates’ for that matter. For anyone other than epileptics, the advantages of ketosis (the state in which the body burns stored fat rather than glucose) are debatable. In 2005, two years after Atkins died from slipping on ice, Atkins Nutritionals filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

1979—Cardiologist Herman Tarnower first publishes his Scarsdale Medical Diet, a high-protein, low-calorie regimen similar to Atkins. The diet’s strict schedule—including, notably, an unswerving breakfast of one grapefruit and dry “protein bread”—restricts a dieter’s Calorie intake to 700 per day. Tarnower’s diet gained considerable attention in 1980 after his girlfriend, Jean Harris, shot and killed him in a quarrel.

2003—Cardiologist Arthur Agatston creates his South Beach Diet®. With it, carbohydrates and fats are sorted into “good” and “bad” categories based on their glycemic index. Essentially a lowered-carbohydrate, elevated-protein regimen, the diet resembles a less extreme Atkins Diet. Like all diets throughout millennia, the health benefits are up for debate.

That’s the way with history—it repeats. Millions still resolve to lose weight, and millions still fold. The odds an adult is overweight are still 1 in 2.74. And diets are all variations on a few old themes—like the Atkins Diet, direct descendent of Hippocrates’ 2,500-year-old treatment for epilepsy. The treatment still exists today; it is famously depicted in the 1997 Meryl Streep movie …First Do No Harm, about a family struggling to treat their epileptic son—played by an actor named, oddly enough, Adkins.