American exercise instructor (1914–2011)
He opened America's first modern health club in 1936, when weight training was still suspect, then spent seven decades selling the country on a simple proposition: that moving your body and eating real food might be more powerful than any medicine.
Francois Henri LaLanne was, by his own account, a sugarholic junk food junkie with behavioral problems until age 15, when a lecture by health food pioneer Paul Bragg flipped the switch. At 21, in 1936, he opened the nation's first modern health club in Oakland — a prototype that would become dozens of gyms licensed to Bally. From 1951 to 1985 he hosted The Jack LaLanne Show, the first and longest-running nationally syndicated fitness program, coaching housewives and eventually the elderly and disabled through exercises no one else thought to teach them. He invented the pulley and leg extension…
Sourced, dated quotes from Jack LaLanne
I was the worst, most sickly kid of all – 30 pounds underweight. The girls used to beat me up. Actually I was a mean kid, early on because I had no self-esteem.
That's what I wanted! I wanted to be an athlete, I wanted the girls to like me, and I wanted to be able to get good grades in school, and this man said I could do all that.
I was a whole new human being, he said of this transformation. I liked people, they liked me. It was like an exorcism, kicking the devil outta me!
When I first started out, I was considered a crackpot, [he said].
People thought I was a charlatan and a nut, [he remembered].
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