Diet and Health With Key to the Calories
By Lulu Hunt Peters
If there is anything comparable to the joy of taking in your clothes, I have not experienced it. And when you find your corset coming closer and closer together (I advise a front lace so this can be watched), the day you realize that you will have to stitch in a tuck or get a new one! But don’t be in a hurry to make your clothes smaller now. If they are loose, they will show the world that you are reducing.
A fat person in a tight suit, unless it is perfectly new, should be interned. I have said that food, and food only, causes fat. That gives you the cue to what you must do to eliminate it. No anti-fat medicines unless under the supervision of your scientific, educated physician. They are dangerous; most contain thyroid extract, arsenic, or mercury. Even the vendors of these harmful compounds in their advertisements are now saying to “stop harmful drugging,” but urge you to adopt their particular delightful product, and, “without dieting or exercises, you will positively reduce,” and so forth.
No drastic purges, no violent exercises, especially at first, and not too frequent nor prolonged Turkish baths. Epsom salt baths have little effect. If salts are used habitually internally, they are harmful. These are unscientific and unsuccessful, and the things they bring on are worse than the fat. Now, if food is the only source of body substance, you see that you must study that question, and that is what I will give you—some lessons on foods and their values.
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Lulu Hunt Peters
Lulu Hunt Peters (1873–1930) was an American medical doctor and writer who wrote a featured newspaper column entitled Diet and Health, which she followed up with a best-selling book, Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories.
Biography.
She was the first to widely popularize counting calories as a weight loss method. It was also the first weight-loss book to become a bestseller. Having grown up a hefty child and once weighed 220 lbs, she was highly conscious of the weight of the problem presented to her. Peters’s book Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories, explicitly targeted to American women, became extremely popular, selling 2 million copies. People found it witty and entertaining. The book was the first dieting book to become a bestseller, and it remained in the top ten non-fiction bestselling books from 1922 to 1926, topping the list for two years running, in 1924 and 1925. In the book, she explained the concept of the calorie as a scientific unit of measurement of the energy potentially available from food. The idea of the calorie was so new that her book even provides instruction on the word’s pronunciation. She explains the importance of balancing food intake and energy use and suggests exercises supported with simple cartoons. She explains in her book that “hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie”.
She shows women how to calculate their ideal weight with a formula. Her book included estimates of food portions containing 100 calories based on research in various technical publications unavailable to the general reader. She also indicates how many calories someone should eat per pound of ideal body weight to keep the perfect weight that her system suggests (similar to body mass index). She paid less attention to the issue of what sorts of foods a person should eat. Under her system, a person of Peters’s height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained a strict diet of 1,200 calories daily. However, she warned against eating candy because she thought women who ate a little candy would binge.
Lulu Hunt Peters
