In today’s world, we can sometimes feel surrounded by images of very thin models, and magazine and internet articles full of diet tips to help us lose weight. It is easy to forget that society did not always view weight loss as the final goal that it often is today.
Although I can’t deny that many of my vintage magazines also contain ads for weight loss products and tips, I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen an article such as the one featured here in any modern magazine.
That’s right, “Diet for the Thin Woman” – in other words, a diet for the woman who feels that she needs to add some pounds to her figure. This fascinating article was found in the November 1915 issue of McCall’s magazine. In the featured picture at the very top of this post, the caption is a bit cut off but it reads “Bread-and-butter and milk make a good bedtime lunch.” The article begins by assuring the thin woman:
Do you, perhaps, as the scales mark one hundred and one, or one hundred and three, or one hundred and eight, make a somewhat similar remark, the burden of which is always that “there is absolutely no use in trying?” If you do, you’re all wrong, for anybody, whatever her heritage or ancestry, can acquire just as many pounds of flesh as she desires, and curves instead of angles, if she only wants to hard enough.
But lest you believe that this would be the best diet ever, basically consisting of eating as many sweet, fattening foods as often as you’d like, the fact is that this diet too comes with a set of rules. And not all of them sound very enjoyable. I’ve taken the basic rules of the “diet for the thin woman” as found in this article and compiled them in a list here:
1) Chew every mouthful of food until it is liquid before swallowing it – the stomach will then have no trouble in digesting it
2) Drink eight to ten glasses of water daily
3) Take enough exercise to stimulate healthy activity on the part of every organ of your body.
4) Starchy foods, fats, and sweets build fat.
5) For dinner, do not have too many kinds of food at one meal.
6) Do not eat between meals
7) Have a glass of milk and a slice of bread and butter at bedtime
8) Take a tablespoonful of olive oil after each meal (it is a simple way of taking fats into the system)
“Trying the potato route to extra pounds”
And finally, at the end of the article comes a special diet for the woman who wants a quick road to gaining weight. She is warned, however, that she will have to avoid the enjoyments of the table. To me this diet sounds like it is in much the same vein as the lemon detox diet of today where someone drinks only lemon juice with cayenne pepper for a period of days to lose a large amount of weight.
“The milk diet – which means milk only, with no solid food, for one month or two – will add from one to three pounds in weight weekly, clear the complexion, improve the health, and develop the figure.”
I truly cannot even think too long about how it would feel to consume nothing but milk for up to two months at a stretch! But I do find it interesting that even though a woman may be aiming for different physical results, in the end there were also women in 1915 still willing to suffer through a rigid diet in order to better conform to the day’s standards of beauty.
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