The Calorie Queen

The woman who introduced the concept of calorie counting to the world.

Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters’s 1918 classic, “Diet and Health; With Key to the Calorie” introduced the concept of counting calories to the world. The book sold over a staggering 2 million copies. It stayed on non-fiction best-seller lists for more than four years across North America, elevating the book into a culture-changing status.

Dr. Peters graduated in medicine from west coast Berkeley among the first women across the country as a doctor of medicine, and within 10 years — thanks to her revolutionary ideas — she became the most well-known female physician in America during the 1920s.

She was a fairly large lady (weighing just over 100Kg) when she decided to do ‘something about it. She dieted, her weight dropped and she felt compelled to share the good news of her success with the world. That ‘something’ was in part to advise women (and it was women she mainly wrote for) to lose weight by eating less and eat more consciously.

Previously, traditional health influencers were mostly patriarchal religious preachers who strongly emphasized organic, raw diets.

These often self-righteous leaders and their followers followed an extremely strict and restrictive diet in order to achieve spiritual purity and a higher state of consciousness, through high vibe nutrition. It was based on the very simple concept:

A healthy body equals a healthy mind which eventually leads closer to God.

However, Dr. Peters’s dieting book provided a new perspective that resonated with many women’s concerns and desires. She gave new meaning to food which fascinated women all over the country. She wrote ”Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 Calories of bread, 350 Calories of pie,”

By putting a number to food, she basically mathematized nutrition and provided a scientific method for women to take charge of their own bodies. This caused a major paradigm shift in culture and society in the early 20th century, because for the first time ever she linked dieting with beauty and appearance.

With the help of calories, many women felt empowered to take charge of their own bodies and this cultural seismic shift can be regarded as among the major victories for first-wave feminism.

According to her, fat bodies reflect poor eating habits, and slim bodies reflect self-control. She was a firm believer that dieting and slimness required discipline, work, and denial. But the payoff was huge.
High energy, increased self-confidence, more attention, and an opportunity to climb up on the social ladder by marrying a high-status man. She believed that nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.

Thinness formed a visible difference between the working and aristocratic classes, inspiring the affluent and aspirational middle-class women to diet. The new thin body signified wealth and leisure, also a means of signaling social status.

Being thin was a way for privileged women to project refinement and moral superiority that was defined by possessing willpower.

By emphasizing the importance of discipline in weight control, women mimicked attributes associated with maleness, by the embodiment of the ideology of “the mind mastering the body” and an increased level of confidence.

As Hollywood replaced the French and Italian production companies as the most popular filmmakers in the world after the First World War, this new and conscious weight control methodology created a massive hype in the city. Many aspiring young girls wanting to be famous actresses, now had a tool to consciously influence the bodies.

Also many of Hollywood’s leading actresses sometimes only had about 10 days to get into their figure. Film directors often castigated women for overeating — citing the importance of changing habits to enact change in bodily composition. Increasingly actors, and mostly actresses found that contacts could only be signed or renewed with the addition of “weight clauses” that stipulated termination upon going over a certain weight.

The irony is that Dr. Peters's big idea that “don’t eat food, eat calories” may not have been the true cause for the success of her diet.

Her recommended meal plans listed in her book, in fact, are very low-carb. Mostly organic foods, plenty of salad, fruit, meat, and fish.

An occasional piece of toast but there is no pasta, pizza, cake, biscuits, or rice, no fruit juices, no smoothies.

Apart from the occasional snacks like a pie, Dr. Peters actually created a pretty low-carb’ diet program for the world. This is not to say that calories are totally irrelevant — but the qualities of the foods consumed appear to be far more important than simply their quantity and in the last few years, mainstream websites raised questions about the necessity of calories at all.

Fundamentally, calories are a shallow, empty metric, it does not tell you anything about the freshness and richness of the food.

If you’re concerned about overall health and permanent weight mastery your foods need to do more than just cherish your tastebuds and achieve the approval of the calorie police.
The food has to satiate your muscles which crave protein, your digestive system which needs constant fiber to optimal gut health, and your tissues and bones, which work optimally when they’re getting vitamins and minerals from food.

Some may say a calorie is a calorie.

But food is so much more than just a calorie.