Can Television Destroy Diet Culture?

This year marks the 100th anniversary of diet culture as we know it. Compared to the span of human activity and the arc of civilization, the propagation of the idea that fatness should be shamed is a relative blip on the historical calendar. Yes, diets have been around for millennia. Saint Augustine of Hippo dieted. Lord Byron dieted. But diet culture itself—the widespread dissemination of the idea that bodies (specifically female ones) have a civic duty and moral imperative to reduce themselves, with tips for doing so—has its origins in 1918.

That year, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, a UC Berkeley–trained physician, published In the book, Peters explained the concept of the calorie for the first time. She decried fatness as unpatriotic, declaring that it was “a crime” to hoard food, “a valuable commodity,” by storing vast quantities of it on one’s person in the form of excess weight. She drew comical doodles of blob-shaped people next to stick figures, and cartoon coffins awaiting the obese. She offered regimented diet plans. And she encouraged dieters to fine themselves if they failed to lose weight sold 2 million copies over the next two decades. Diet culture was born.