Celebrity news, gossip, photos

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Jack LaLanne, a one-time sugar-holic who became a broadcasting shape guru preaching exercise and flourishing diet to a generation of American housewives, died on Sunday at geezerhood 96, his daughter said.

LaLanne, who became U.S. broadcasting fixture in his close-fitting garment starting in 1959 and came to be regarded as the father of the recent shape movement, succumbed to pneumonia mass a short illness at his home in Morro Bay, along the California's bicentric coast.

"He was surrounded by his family and passed very peacefully and in no distress ... and with the sport mettlesome on Sunday, so everything was normal," Yvonne LaLanne, 66, told Reuters.

She said her father had remained active until a some months ago, including the recording of a past public TV special.

Well into his 90s, LaLanne exercised for digit hours a day. A typical workout would be 90 minutes of weightlifting and 30 minutes of swimming, dynamical his routine every 30 days.

He preached the gospel of exercise, nakedness vegetables and clean experience daylong after his grouping had traded in their bicycles for nursing home beds.

"I can't die," LaLanne would say. "It would ruin my image."

LaLanne was born Francois Henri LaLanne on Sept 26, 1914, in San Francisco, the son of French immigrants. He said he grew into a "sugar-holic" who suffered intense headaches, feeling swings and depression.

In desperation when he was 14, LaLanne's care took him to hear upbeat lecturer Apostle Bragg, who urged followers to exercise and take raw foods.

The teen LaLanne swore soured albescent flour, most fruitful and dulcify and began eating more fruits and vegetables. By geezerhood 15, he had shapely a backyard gym of climbing ropes, chin-up bars, sit-up machines and weights.

Soon, LaLanne, who was only 5 feet, 6 inches tall, was playing high school football. He added weight-lifting to recover from a sport injury and was hooked.

LaLanne opened the nation's prototypal recent upbeat club in Oakland, California, in 1936. It had a gym, humour forbid and upbeat food store. Soon there were 100 gyms nationwide.

Without bothering with patents, LaLanne designed his possess exercise equipment, which he had shapely by a blacksmith. In 1951, he started using broadcasting to get the prototypal generation of couch potatoes to try jumping jacks, push-ups and sit-ups.

"The Jack LaLanne Show," which went national in 1959, showed housewives how to work discover and take right, decent a staple of U.S. daytime broadcasting during a 34-year run.

He also was known for a series of promotional shape stunts. At geezerhood 45, in 1959, he did 1,000 push-ups and 1,000 chin-ups in 86 minutes. In 1984 a 70-year-old LaLanne had himself shackled and handcuffed and towed 70 boats 1.5 miles in Long Beach Harbor.

LaLanne said in 2007 his pore was ever to support grouping the artefact Apostle general had helped him, adding, "Billy choreographer is for the hereafter, I'm for the here and now!"

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Bill Trott and Chris Wilson)