Empress Elisabeth of Austria - Physical Regimen

Physical Regimen

At 172 cm (5 feet 8 inches), Elisabeth was unusually tall (she was taller than her husband); even after four pregnancies she maintained her weight at approximately 50 kg (110 pounds) for the rest of her life. She achieved this through fasting and exercise. Elisabeth was strongly attached to her parents, especially to her mother, and was still a child in search of an identity of her own when an adult role with unusual obligations and restrictions was imposed upon her. She had no control in her new life and was unable to identify herself as both the spouse of the emperor and a young mother. As a result, she attempted to recreate her childhood with its lack of obligations. The only quality for which she felt herself appreciated, and over which she had control, was her physical appearance, so she started cultivating this as the primary source of her self-esteem. Obsessively achievement-oriented and almost compulsively perfectionistic in her attitudes, she became a slave to her own beauty and image.

In deep mourning after her daughter Sophie's death, Elisabeth refused to eat for days; a behavior that would reappear in later periods of melancholy and depression. Whereas she previously had supper with the family, she now began to avoid this; and if she did eat with them, she ate quickly and very little. Whenever her weight threatened to exceed fifty kilos, a "fasting cure" or "hunger cure" would follow, which involved almost complete fasting. Meat itself often filled her with disgust, so she either had the juice of half-raw beefsteaks squeezed into a thin soup, or else adhered to a diet of milk and eggs.

Elisabeth emphasised her extreme slenderness through the practice of "tight-lacing". During the peak period of 1859–60, which coincided with Franz-Joseph's political and military defeats in Italy, her sexual withdrawal from her husband after three pregnancies in rapid succession, and her losing battle with her mother-in-law for dominance in rearing her children, she reduced her waist to 16 inches in circumference. Corsets of the time were split-busk types, fastening up the front with hooks and eyes, but Elisabeth had more rigid, solid-front ones made in Paris out of leather, "like those of Parisian courtesans", probably to hold up under the stress of such strenuous lacing, "a proceeding which sometimes took quite an hour". The fact that "she only wore them for a few weeks" may indicate that even leather proved inadequate for her needs. Elisabeth's defiant flaunting of this exaggerated dimension angered her mother-in-law, who expected her to be pregnant continuously.

Although on her return to Vienna in August 1862, a lady-in-waiting reported that “she eats properly, sleeps well, and does not tight-lace anymore”, her clothing from this time until her death still measured only 18 1/2 – 19 1/2 inches around the waist, which prompted the Prince of Hesse to describe her as “almost inhumanly slender.” She developed a horror of fat women and transmitted this attitude to her youngest daughter, who was terrified when, as a little girl, she first met Queen Victoria.

In her youth Elisabeth followed the fashions of the age, which for many years were cage-crinolined hoop skirts, but when fashion began to change, she was at the forefront of abandoning the hoop skirt for a tighter and leaner silhouette. She disliked both expensive accoutrements and the protocol that dictated constant changes of clothing, preferring simple, monochromatic riding habit-like attire. She never wore petticoats or any other "underlinen", as they added bulk, and was often literally sewn into her clothes, to bypass waistbands, creases, and wrinkles and to further emphasize the "wasp waist" that became her hallmark.

The empress developed extremely rigorous and disciplined exercise habits. Every castle she lived in was equipped with a gymnasium, the Knights' Hall of the Hofburg was converted into one, mats and balance beams were installed in her bedchamber so that she could practice on them each morning, and the imperial villa at Ischl was fitted with gigantic mirrors so that she could correct every movement and position. She took up fencing in her 50s with equal discipline. A fervent horsewoman, she rode every day for hours on end, becoming probably the world's best, as well as best-known, female equestrian at the time. When due to gout, she could no longer endure long hours in the saddle, she substituted walking, subjecting her attendants to interminable marches and hiking tours in all weather.

In the last years of her life, Elisabeth became even more restless and obsessive, weighing herself up to three times a day. She regularly took steam baths to prevent weight gain; by 1894 she had wasted away to near emaciation, reaching her lowest point of 95.7 lbs (43.5 kg). There were some aberrations in Elisabeth's diet that appear to be signs of binge eating, On one occasion in 1878 the Empress astonished her travelling companions when she unexpectedly visited a restaurant incognito, where she drank champagne, ate a broiled chicken, an Italian salad, and finished with a "considerable quantity of cake". She may have satisfied her urge to binge in secret on other occasions; in 1881 she purchased an English country house and had a spiral staircase built from her living room into the kitchen, so that she could reach it in private.