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Lulu Hunt Peters pioneered counting calories a century ago

When Lulu Hunt Peters brought Americans a new method for weighing their dinner options, she launched a century of diet fads that left us hungry for a better way to keep our bodies strong and healthy

Tango Images / AlamyThe irony was that while women were giving up the torments of corsets and hobbles, they substituted a form of internal torture to control their bodies: what became known as “reducing.” To that end, they were aided by another innovation: the bathroom scale, which appeared on the American market in 1913. In 1919, she joined a Red Cross medical delegation to the Balkans and stayed there for almost two years, earning decorations from the Serbian and Albanian governments for her child welfare and public health work amid the devastated postwar civilian population. One research analysis in the journal Public Health Nutrition describes attempts to achieve and maintain a calorie deficit as “practically and biologically implausible.” New weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic appear to interrupt that cascade, by manipulating hormones in the gut and the brain to decrease appetite.

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