Eyton [née Gray], Audrey (1936–2019), journalist and animal welfare campaigner, was born on 11 January 1936 at Springfield Maternity Home in Blackburn, Lancashire, the younger daughter of Melville Gray (1905–1948), a travelling salesman for a polish manufacturer, and his wife, Evelyn, née Ling (1908–1989). She passed the eleven-plus exam and entered Blackburn Girls’ High School with a free place, leaving at the age of sixteen despite achieving high marks in her O-level examinations. She was ambitious, keen to work for a newspaper, and aiming at a career in Fleet Street. To this end she joined the Accrington Observer as a junior reporter, later working at the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, and moved to London after three years to work for Woman magazine as an agony aunt. Promoted to beauty editor, a job she did not enjoy, she became interested in diets and slimming, having noticed that most of the letters she had received as an agony aunt had been concerned with worries over weight. Meanwhile, on 17 June 1957, in Darwen, Lancashire, she married Thomas Richard (Tom) Eyton (b. 1934), a sub-editor at the Daily Telegraph, son of Thomas Eyton, fitter, and his wife, Ethel, née Collier, both from Manchester.

In 1969 Audrey Eyton left Woman to start the monthly magazine Slimming and Family Nutrition with her husband, working from their home in Caterham, Surrey. The first magazine devoted entirely to slimming was an immediate success, with a circulation of 140,000 after three issues, and by 1970 they could afford to employ staff. They went on to establish a health farm, Ragdale Hall, in Leicestershire, and founded a chain of slimming clubs, which grew to 400 clubs. Although they divorced in 1976 (and he married again the following year), she and her husband continued to run the business together until selling it for £4 million in 1980. She remained as editorial consultant to Slimming Magazine. With some of the proceeds of the sale she bought a large old house with 30 acres of parkland in Denton, near Canterbury, keeping her mews house in London.

In 1982 Audrey Eyton published The F-Plan Diet, which sold 4 million copies worldwide and was the first British diet book to become a best-seller in the United States. It was influenced by the work of the epidemiologist Denis Burkitt, whose best-selling book Don’t Forget Fibre in Your Diet (1975), based on his comparison of diseases in Uganda with diseases in the West, put forward the theory that the high incidence of colon cancer in Western countries was caused by the lack of dietary fibre. In The F-Plan Diet Eyton argued that weight loss could be achieved with a diet of under 1500 calories a day combined with an increased intake of foods high in fibre, including wholemeal bread, bran cereals, and pulses. She explained that because food high in fibre took longer to digest, it made one feel full and therefore less hungry, and so a diet based on them was more effective than other low-calorie diets. She also claimed that by switching from fatty food to high-fibre food one not only lost weight but also became healthier.

The F-Plan Calorie and Fibre Chart (1982) elaborated on Eyton’s theory. She became a celebrity when she was invited onto BBC1’s Breakfast Time in 1983 to present a weekly ‘Slim and Shine’ slot, demonstrating low-calorie, high-fibre menus, and also a weekly question and answer programme giving dietary advice and hearing ‘confessions’. In 2006 she published The F2 Diet and The F2 Cookbook, concentrating more on the health benefits of the F-Plan diet and less on the slimming aspect. In these books she stressed the importance of eating foods that stimulate the growth of ‘good bacteria’ in the gut.

Audrey Eyton had two sons, the elder of whom, Richard, died after only ten days. The younger son, Matthew (b. 1967), with whom she lived and to whom she was devoted, shared her growing interest in animal welfare. In 1991 she published The Kind Food Guide which exposed the cruelty of factory farming and urged the avoidance of buying and eating factory-farmed food, and seeking out suppliers of free-range eggs, dairy, and meat products. She listed which supermarkets to buy from, and which to avoid.

Sadly, in the same year, 1991, Matthew committed suicide. In his suicide note he asked his mother to ‘go on working for the animals’ and this gave her a purpose for living after the shock of his death. In his memory she established the Matthew Eyton Animal Welfare Trust, which supported charities and organizations dedicated to ending the suffering of farm animals. Although the F-Plan diet allowed small amounts of meat and dairy products, she supported veganism and gave generously to Viva!, an organization founded in 1994 to campaign on vegan issues. A member and trustee of Compassion in World Farming, which campaigned to end intensive factory farming and to ensure that all farm animals had a decent life and a humane death, she took part in demonstrations, including protests in Dover against the export of live animals to be slaughtered in Europe. Convinced that pigs were as intelligent as dogs, in 1996 she bought a piglet, named it Babe, and had it trained by a dog trainer. She and her friend, the actress Joanna Lumley, then took it to the House of Commons, to protest against intensive pig farming and to raise awareness of animals as ‘sentient beings’. Babe joined several other rescued pigs to be cared for on land she owned. She also financed two very successful educational films about the lives of farm animals for the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour, Stimulus Response (1994) for secondary school pupils, and Let’s Ask the Animals (1997) for primary schools.

After Matthew Eyton’s death Audrey Eyton moved into an elegant house in Blackfriars, on the River Stour in the centre of Canterbury, and became a regular member of the congregation at Canterbury Cathedral. Involved in a number of local committees and public bodies, including the Marlowe Theatre, the Canterbury Festival, and the King’s School, she had many friends in and around the city, who remembered her as a delightful friend and host, determined and energetic, with strong opinions, attractive, and always well-dressed. She died on 30 June 2019 at her home, 7 Blackfriars Street, Canterbury.