These days, the British Horseracing Authority's chief medical officer, Dr Jerry Hill, has prioritised making the weight in a safe and healthy way that actually enhances a jockey's performance rather than impairing it.
His approach is holistic; through education, nutrition, fitness and mental well-being.
Racing is getting there gradually but there are still two groups; those doing it right and those who starve, sweat or flip (stick their finger down their throat to make themselves sick), which, unlike Phentermine, cannot be tested for.
Of course, the obvious solution would be to put the minimum weights up again, but that would be naive.
In 1925, the minimum weight was 6st, and 5st for apprentice races. It has risen in increments until, in 2013, the minimum weight became 8st.
But, on the Flat, many top jockeys operate at 8st 7lb-plus and, whatever the weights, there will still be jockeys operating below their limits.
In my day, making the weight in some desperate - lazy - manner was almost a rite of passage, and hoodwinking the clerk of the scales for a pound or two was a pastime much like poaching a pheasant for the pot under the nose of the gamekeeper.
Ryan Moore's father, Gary, always struggled with his weight as a jump jockey. On the way to Fontwell once, he persuaded his father to drop him in Arundel and he ran the rest of the way, about 5½ miles.
Another time, after taking a "pee pill", he was getting a lift in a fellow jockey's Porsche but they were so late for their rides at Stratford that they were unable to stop.
The car lacked a watertight container and after putting his head out of the sunroof and trying to do it out of the window - a manoeuvre his colleague eventually dissuaded him from - he found a cigar container and did it in shifts.
My first experience of chemical weight loss was when I needed to lose 4lb for a ride at Ludlow the following day.
My sister suggested Ex-Lax and offered the pertinent advice that "one square won't even make you fart".
I ate the packet, camped in the bathroom all night, rode with a weight cloth full of lead the next day and still cannot eat dark chocolate.
But my favourite weight-loss programme was that employed by fellow jockey Martin Bosley.
While everyone else sat down to Sunday roast, he would be served with a Kinder egg by his mother.
The 23-year-old would get a mild sugar rush from the chocolate and amuse himself for the rest of lunch playing with the toy.
This worked well until two friends decided to play a practical joke, surgically removing the toy before rewrapping it and putting it back on his plate.
Wasting can make you a bit irritable, so, when he discovered nothing but fresh air inside his egg, all hell let loose.
Marcus Armytage in 1990 won the Grand National as an amateur. The former jockey is now a journalist.
-Daily Telegraph UK
