Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters's Diet and Health with Key to the Calories was a runaway best-seller during the figure-conscious 1920s. The book provided calorie-counting menus, advice on exercise and health in general, dialogues involving such characters as Mrs. Irna Gobbler and Mrs. Knott Little, line drawings purportedly by the author's young nephew, and Dr. Peters's personal confessions: "It is not in vain that all my lift I have had to fight the too, too solid. Why, I can remember when I was a child I was always being consoled by being told that I would outgrow it, and that when I matured I would have some shape. Never can I tell pathetically 'when I was married I weighed only one hundred eighteen, and look at me now.' No, I was a delicate slip of one hundred sixty-five when I was taken."

Source: Lulu...