Diet and Health; With Key to the Calories

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About this book

Calories are the organizing idea in Lulu Hunt Peters's lively 1918 handbook on food and body weight. Writing as a physician, Peters addresses both people who want to lose weight and those who want to gain it. She explains her approach through jokes, personal recollections and question-and-answer exchanges with figures called Mrs. Tiny Weyaton and Mrs. Ima Gobbler. The contents range from calorie definitions and vegetarian eating to exercise, testimonials and maintaining weight.

Peters closely links eating habits with personal discipline. Her opening even connects stored body fat with wartime food conservation, while a later chapter discusses movement as part of general health. Readers interested in the history of nutrition will find a forceful, conversational example of early twentieth-century diet writing, with its period assumptions about bodies and behavior plainly on display.