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Dr Lulu Hunt Peters (1873–1930) | 1920s guidelines
Lulu Hunt Peters was born in Maine, but made her home in California, where she got her M.D. in 1909. Even as a child her weight was a problem and she was always being told that she would outgrow her fatness, but as a grownup she reached 15 stone 10lb (100kg). At her heaviest she felt that she should refund the "comfortable salary received as superintendent of a hospital; for I know I was only sixty five per cent efficient, for efficiency decreases in direct proportion as excess weight increases."Calorie the new salvation
The title of the book was modelled on another bestseller, Mary Baker Eddy's 'Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures', but for the Episcopalian Peters the calorie was the new route to salvation. She told her readers, "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 declared: "How anyone can want to be anything but thin is beyond my intelligence… if there is anything comparable to the joy of taking in your clothes I have not experienced it."
The morality of weight
For Peters, dieting demanded control and vigilance. It was also a lifelong commitment and a virtue, which she ranked alongside being kind, being tender, reading, studying and loving. For Peters weight control was the new morality and being overweight was a sign of moral weakness. Writing during wartime, she metaphorically linked the crime of hoarding food in war to the way many Americans were hoarding food "in their own anatomy." She declared: "Food Will Win the War. WATCH OUR WEIGHT!" She was highly patriotic proposing the formation of "Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser Classes" where members would weigh themselves on an official scale. Those who had not lost weight were fined with the proceeds going to the Red Cross.
Peters' writing is relentlessly upbeat and chatty, full of jokey asides and littered with references to characters with pseudonyms such as Ima Gobbler and Mrs Knott Little, all of whom she claims "are friends of mine", adding "perhaps you had better substitute were for are". Satisfied readers are supplied with forms on which to write testimonials in support of her diet.
During the 1920s she became the best known and best loved female physician in America through her syndicated newspaper columns, with titles like 'A disgrace to be fat', in which she emphasized that three out of four adult Americans were disgracefully overweight. Following the success of 'Diet and Health' she went on to publish the first calorie-counting book explicitly for children – 'Diet for Children (and Adults)' and the 'Kalorie Kids'. She explained that having been an overweight child herself she knew "that there is genuine mental suffering in being an obese child."
