Diet & Health: with Key to the Calories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780982719602)

Lulu Hunt Peters was born in Maine in 1873, eventually making her home in Southern California, where she received her medical degree from the University of California in 1909. 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 220 lbs. Dr. Peters eventually managed to lose 70 of those pounds using the system she described in her book: self control and calorie counting. To Dr. Peters understanding calories was the new route to salvation. She told her readers," hereafter you are going to eat calories of food." When Lulu Hunt Peters condensed the state of the art of slenderizing in her best-selling book Diet and Health, calories were such a new concept that Dr. Peters had to explain to readers how to pronounce the word itself. Her book included a list of food portions that contained 100 calories, because she felt it was simpler to just learn how much of a food contained how many calories. She declared: "How anyone can want to be anything but thin is beyond my intelligence...... if there is anything comparable to the joy taking in your clothes I have not experienced it." For Peters, dieting demanded control and vigilance. It was also a lifelong commitment. Peters' writing is witty, upbeat and chatty She whimsically had her 9 year old nephew Dawson Hunt Perkins do the illustrations in the book. Dr. Peters was the first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital. She spent two years in the Balkans working for the Red Cross as the Great War was winding down and following the end of the war. As a woman with a chronic weight problem herself, she was naturally interested in diet. She put together a balanced diet with a mixture of common sense and good humor. During the 1920s she became the best known and best loved female physician in America through her syndicated newspaper columns. First published in 1918, more than 2 million copies of Diet & Health with Key to the Calories were sold and it was the number 4 bestselling nonfiction book in 1923, according to Publisher's Weekly. Dr. Peters died in 1930, but her book outlived her, going into its 55th edition in 1939.