Lean in 15 becomes bestselling diet book since records began

Joe Wicks has leapfrogged himself to claim the number one spot in the book chart for a third week running—this time with his debut Lean in 15 (Bluebird), which shifted 17,252 copies for £136,868, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. It defeated Lean in 15: The Sustain Plan by just 122 copies to banish it to second place.

This is The Body Coach’s 14th week in the top spot and 10th (non-consecutive) with Lean in 15 alone. Only two non-fiction titles have spent longer in the top spot, with Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals racking up 17 non-consecutive weeks in 2010 and Delia Smith’s How to Cook: Book 1 clinching 12 in 1998. Wicks’ debut has already beaten the latter in volume, jumping to second place in the bestselling cookery books of all time chart, below 30-Minute Meals.

Wicks has long conquered the Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery sub-category, but last week saw Lean in 15 finally beat the biggest-selling title of that other diet book section, Fitness & Diet. Having officially outsold Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat (Michael Joseph), the Instagram trainer’s debut is now the bestselling diet book since records began. And it’s also seventh among the biggest non-fiction books ever.

However, Wicks was forced to relinquish his muscular grip on all top three chart places. Chef Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet (Bloomsbury) surged into third place, with an endorphin-inducing 14,673 copies sold, and the first Hardback Non-Fiction number one for Bloomsbury since Paul Hollywood’s Bread in June 2013. In contrast, Kerridge’s diet is very much against bread, but it did help him lose 11 stone in three years. The main theme surrounding diet books in this post-Wicksian era is a more recipe-based approach, encroaching on the Food & Drink category rather than the Lifestyle one.

In total, 11 diet books charted in the Top 50 last week, with only paperback fiction out-ranking it, with 24 titles. Alongside Tom Kerridge, another new entry was Dr Xand van Tullenken with Channel 4 tie-in How to Lose Weight Well (Quadrille). Only one non-diet cookery title charted: Rick Stein’s Long Weekends (BBC). Notably, no wellness bloggers were present in what could be viewed as another nail in the coffin of the clean eating trend.

Jessie Burton’s The Muse (Picador) held the Mass Market Fiction number one for a third week running, but the gap between it and second-placed Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep (The Borough Press) has narrowed dramatically, to just 676 copies. Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize winning The Sellout (Oneworld) held the Original Fiction number one for a second week, amid a rush of all those January debut hardbacks into the top 20, vying to be the next Girl on the Train.

In Children’s, it was business-as-usual with a Walliams-Rowling-Donaldson lockdown on the top 20. But Lisa Thompson’s debut The Goldfish Boy (Scholastic), Waterstones’ Children’s Book of the Month, clinched 20th place of the overall Children’s chart, shifting 1,913 copies.