Lose 20 pounds of fat in just four weeks in 1935


Let's time-travel back to 1935, and lose twenty pounds of fat in just four weeks. According to this article, a St. Louis, Missouri lady wrote, "I'm only 28 years old and weighed 170 pounds until taking one box of your Krushchen Salts just four weeks ago. I now weigh 150 pounds. I also have more energy and furthermore I've never had a hungry moment.

Of course this is all nonsense. The only way that you're going to lose that much weight that quickly is to chop off your head, and you would actually need two heads! But this kind of thing is still popular, and while there have been attempts to limit how much people get swindled, it's still a big business, especially on the internet.

But the more I think about this, the more I'm inclined to be a bit jealous of people who could be so hopeful. I call them "unreasonably optimistic", and they tend to be the opposite of people who just don't believe anything.  In my lifetime I've found that it's good to find yourself somewhere in the middle, where you believe that you can lose twenty pounds, but that you can't do it in four weeks. I'd like to describe myself as "reasonably optimistic".

From what I've been able to determine about this product, it was just made of salt. You mixed it with hot water first thing in the morning, and I'm guessing that if it didn't ruin your appetite, it at least gave you the feeling that you were doing something towards your fitness and weight loss goals. Going to expensive "mineral springs" places was very popular at the time, where wealthy people would soak in mineral water, and drink it, too. Yuck!

I especially like how convincing the line is "if not joyfully satisfied after the first bottle - money back". I wonder how many people did that? Probably not many, as they probably imagined, just like nowadays, that they did something wrong. Maybe it's meant to be taken during a full moon? Or standing on one leg?

Thank you for the encouragement! If you want to see daily pics of my adventures on my recumbent trike in suburban Phoenix (just for fun, of course!) you can follow me on Buy me a coffee, and you can buy me a coffee if you'd like to:

  Buy Me A Coffee

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more