William Taft's Favorite Breakfast Food Was More Suited For Dinner

You probably know President William Howard Taft for one thing and one thing only, but there's actually a good deal of interesting trivia about the 27th president. He was the first (and thus far, only) former president to be made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which was apparently his dream job all along. He was one of the most prominent members of the Taft family, a conservative political dynasty from Ohio. His first lady, Nellie Taft, was the first person to plant one of Washington, D.C.'s now-ubiquitous cherry blossom trees. But if you know anything about Taft, you probably know him as "the guy who got stuck in the White House bathtub." That story is nothing but a myth, but it is true that Taft lived large. How large? Well, his favorite breakfast food was steak.

Thanks to memoirs by White House housekeeper Elizabeth Jaffray, we have some insight about this fairly obscure president. At his heaviest, Taft came in at around 340 pounds and he had an appetite to match. Jaffray noted his love of steak, which he asked for almost every morning served with toast (perhaps buttered in this easy yet controversial way) and copious amounts of coffee. She mentioned the large shopping trips she undertook to get ingredients for the White House — barrels full of potatoes and enormous butter tubs. And while not all of these groceries were for Taft (he hosted many state dinners, after all), there's no doubt he ate plenty.

In 1911, Jaffray noted in her diary that President Taft went on a diet, a prospect which didn't exactly thrill him: "Things are in a sad state of affairs when a man can't even call his gizzard his own." (He was, admittedly, real for that.) But with the help of a dietician named Dr. Nathanial Yorke-Davies, Taft did manage to cut back – to a certain extent. He still had steak for breakfast, but it was 6 ounces rather than 12 and he was instructed to eat soups, salads, and plenty of vegetables (hopefully not these vegetables, which nutritionists tell us aren't as healthy as we thought.)

For a time, the diet worked — Taft ended up losing 60 pounds and those who knew him said he looked much healthier. (Yorke-Davies' diet, in fact, is rather similar to today's low-carb diets.) But as is so often the case, he grew restless with the diet, and ended up gaining some of the weight back. There is, however, one part of Taft's fitness regimen that had a lasting impact. When he was Chief Justice, Taft took to walking as a means of exercise, and the route from his house to the Capitol and back would take him across a bridge near Rock Creek. In 1931, a year after his death, the bridge was named Taft Bridge.