The Fun of Getting Thin | Page 3

no use or worse than useless. It can be done, of course; and lumps of muscle can be stuck on almost any part of the body--but what's the use to the person who has to make a living? Then, too, I am speaking now of methods that can be used by men and women who are no longer young. A young man can and will do stunts in physical culture that an older man cannot do, either satisfactorily or comfortably.
So far as the medicinal or drug method of fat reduction is concerned, any fat man or woman who takes drugs to reduce flesh, or to help, deserves all that he or she will get--and that will be plenty. There's no need of saying anything further on that subject. Then there remains the dietary method--the old familiar friend, diet. Starting with William Banting--maybe it didn't start with William, but before him--but, starting with Bill for present purposes, there have been more systems of diet invented and promulgated than there have been systems of religion--and that means about one in every hundred has evolved a system.
You can get them of all sorts and all sure to do the work, ranging from an exclusive diet of beefsteak and spinach to desiccated hay and creamed alfalfa. There are monodiets, duodiets, vegetable diets, fruit diets, nut diets--all kinds of diets--each guaranteed to take off flesh if you have too much or to put it on if you have too little. Basically, however, the antiflesh diets are about the same. You are told to cut out everything you want to eat and exist on triply toasted bread and the white meat of a chicken, or string beans and sawdust, or any other combination the sharps say will not produce fat, but will sustain life in a lingering form. They surround these diet talks and presentments with a lot of frills about proteins and calories and all that sort of guff, and make it as difficult as possible. Now, mark you, I am not saying diet--scientific diet--is not a good thing, a magnificent step forward in the progress of this world; but I am saying that the average fat-reducing diet is impossible to any but a man or woman of the ultimate will-power, and is a hardship that need not be endured. I have tried these diets, and I know! They may help reduce flesh, but they are not easy to follow and they do not contain things that any person wants to eat or is accustomed to eat, or will eat, to the exclusion of things that person does want to eat and will eat. It can be done. One of these diets can be followed if the will-power is there, and the flesh will come off; but the method does not conduce to the best results--the physical force is reduced, and there is a much easier way.
I have one of these diet lists before me now from the highest-priced flesh-reducing specialist in the world, who claims to have taken mountains of flesh off mountainous men. In the beginning, for example, it says: "You will understand, of course, that sugar is entirely debarred. Also, that fats, milk, cheese, cream, eggs, and so on, are cut off for the time being. Also that bread and farinaceous foods are all cut off. In place of bread or toast you must use gluten biscuits." For breakfast, in this dietary, one or two gluten biscuits are allowed and a cup of unsweetened coffee. Also, six ounces of lean grilled steak, chops or chicken, and any white fish--or the whites of two eggs.
This is about the layout for luncheon and dinner. It is all about as exciting and appetizing as that. The proposition is, of course, that you are not taking food which will make fat and you must, therefore, inevitably lose flesh. So far so good; but the difficulty is not in the system, but in the hardship of carrying it out. You can't have anything to eat that you want to eat. You torture yourself for a space and lose some flesh; then when you do go back to your normal method of eating the flesh comes galloping back--and there you are! It is the same with exercise. You can take off fat by exercise; but, once you begin, you are doomed to everlasting exercise, for the minute you stop back comes the fat--and more of it than you had before you began to reduce.
It is a tough game, anyway you play it, if you are disposed to be fat. No man living, who isn't a freak, can persist always in one diet. Nor can any man who has anything else on his mind be always exercising--especially after he has reached forty years of age, when there are so