Many of the people who got caught up in the health “craze” of the late twentieth century—people who exercised, watched what they ate, abstained from smoking and heavy drinking—have nevertheless died. Lucille Roberts, owner of the chain of women’s gyms that introduced me to the fitness culture, died incongruously from lung cancer at the age of fifty-nine, even though she was a “self-described exercise nut” who, the New York Times reported, “wouldn’t touch a French fry, much less smoke a cigarette.”1 Jerry Rubin, who devoted his later years to trying every supposedly health-promoting diet fad,
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