Diets | Three Eggs and a Bottle of Wine | 1
Legacy
Original Legacy Productions
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What did Vogue actually recommend women eat in 1977 — and why did it make one food writer cry in the
bathroom? How did the Greeks turn a six-pack into a moral argument? And, has the human obsession with
controlling what we eat ever really been about health at all?
Peter and Afua trace the long, strange history of dieting — from ancient Greek athletics and Roman
feast-and-purge excess, to medieval starvation saints who turned self-denial into a radical act of female agency.
0:00 Vogue’s 1977 Wine and Egg Diet — and what happened when someone actually tried it
6:30 The diet industry’s dirty secret: it was never about nutrition
9:00 Peter on fasting, cranky emails, and what not eating teaches you about your relationship with food
14:30 Ancient Greece: when abs were a moral statement, not just an aesthetic one
19:30 The manosphere’s Spartan fantasy — and what the Greeks would actually make of it
23:00 Rome: the inventors of binge and purge culture
24:30 When Christianity enters the chat — and fasting becomes holy
26:00 Catherine of Siena: the medieval starvation saint who used hunger as protest
30:00 Anorexia mirabilis — holy anorexia, and why Peter is wary of projecting modern diagnoses onto the past
32:00 Why medieval peasants weren’t dieting — they were just trying to stay alive
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions
Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Afwa Hirsch. I'm Peter Franco |
| 0:14.0 | Pern. And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped |
| 0:19.1 | our world and asks whether they have the |
| 0:21.3 | reputations that they truly deserve. |
| 0:30.7 | This is the legacy of diets, episode one, three eggs and a bottle of wine. |
| 0:40.8 | Okay. Episode 1, three eggs and a bottle of wine. Okay, Peter, I'm not saying you look like you need this. |
| 0:45.4 | This is what Vogue was recommending in 1977. |
| 0:51.6 | It's called the wine and egg diet, And it's basically self-explanatory, because this is |
| 0:59.9 | what you do on this advice for three days straight. Okay. Breakfast, one hard-boiled egg, one |
| 1:09.5 | glass of white wine, dry, preferably shabbly, a black coffee. |
| 1:13.7 | I could do that. |
| 1:14.4 | Lunch, two eggs, ideally hard-boiled but poached if necessary. |
| 1:19.5 | Two glasses of white-wide, preferably shabbly, black coffee. |
| 1:24.1 | I could do that too. |
| 1:25.8 | Dinner. |
| 1:27.2 | A five-ounce steak grilled with black pepper and lemon |
| 1:30.6 | juice. Where's the butter, guys? Reminder of white wine, one bottle total allowed per day. Black coffee. |
| 1:41.2 | So if you exist on this diet of eggs and white wine and black coffee for three |
| 1:48.9 | days straight, you will, Vogue told us in 1977, lose five pounds and feel, well, I don't |
| 1:57.9 | know how you would feel because I've never tried this, but it sounds absolutely |
| 2:02.8 | disgusting to me. And there was a wine expert. Wait, wait, wait. Let me just tell you what Diane |
| 2:08.0 | McMartin, who tried this recently. She's a, she's a food and wine writer, and she did this |
... |
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