By Movie Actress Ingeborg Loff (1950s)
(originally published in The Body Beautiful, an American magazine, and copied in the book, Live Food Juices, by H.E. Kirschner, M.D., Copyright 1957)
You've seen me on magazine covers and in pictures. But I want you know at twenty-five no one living would have wanted my picture.
My figure was dumpy, my complexion like the bottom of a dried river. I had little watery eyes and no eye-lashes. My hair was a matted mass of colorless twine. My few acquaintances called me dull, stupid, and even a natural born idiot. The only thing that really interested me was sleeping. No man ever asked twice to take me out. I had been to a splendid school. My father and mother were wonderful people, but I had all the appearances of a scrub-woman of fifty when I was only twenty-five. I couldn't secure work of a mental order. In terrible discouragement I applied for a housekeeping position. It was with a Scandinavian doctor in New York City.
After I had worked for him a week he asked me if he could experiment with me promising that nothing would hurt me, that I was a chemical plant like everything else in Nature, and that if I would let him make me over, he would see that I was helped to the top in better ways.
It required a week of experimental work on his part before I realized that I was beginning to think and look differently. It seemed strange. He fed me special meals six times a day. I had no white bread or starch of any kind. He made me drink small drinks of [fresh] vegetable juices several times daily. Once a week I was shown before a group of doctors who were studying bio-chemistry with the doctor. They all took notes on my change in hair, color of eyes, depth of chest, greater slenderness of ankles, and they pinched my skin to note how it changed each week. I was getting a marvelous complexion. My hair was glowing, and was turning lighter with golden tints in it. I wanted to run and shout for the sheer joy of living. My finger nails, my eyebrows and lashes were growing better and developing a gloss. The fat lumps about my hips had disappeared. I lost twenty-five pounds and yet I had been eating oftener. I became fired with ambition. My mind and heart went out to new studies, new people, and I know I had never really lived before I had been analyzed by this doctor.