The Fun of Getting Thin - Samuel G. Blythe (great books to read .txt) 📗

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 many better things to do and time is valuable, and the real idea of how to live has just begun to percolate. Also, until one is forty, if reasonably healthy, flesh is a joke, and not so much of a burden as it becomes later. I haven't a thing in the world against any or all of these methods. I have tried most of them and know most of them are bogus; but I am not trying to dissuade any person from taking off fat in any way that suits any individual fancy or the fancy of any reducer into whose hands the victim may have fallen. If you have a good method go to it—and more power to you!

My idea is this: I am setting down here a record of my own experiences, and that is all. Every person who does not like what I have to say is cheerfully advised to lump it. Any person who is as fat as I was and who wants to get thinner is at liberty to follow my method. If circumstances are similar results will be similar. If not there will be no results. I am not advising or urging or putting forth any propaganda. Here is what happened. It may suit you or it may not. Either way I am indifferent. In the words of the coon song: "I've got mine!"

I hope I make myself clear. I have no mission or message or any flubdub of that kind. I am not one of those boys who urge you to do this for your own good. I have read a ton of literature put out by persons who found something that agreed with them and immediately started out to reform the world along that line. Your reformer, anyhow, is a person who wants all the rest of the world to do as he wants the rest of the world to do, not as the rest of the world wants to do. And the reason reformers get past so numerously is because our society is so constituted that we spend every one of our brief years doing what other people want us to do and tell us to do, and never do anything we ourselves want to do. Once I got seventeen pounds of books telling that the only way to cure everything was to fast. I knew a man who tried that. The results were grand. He fasted a long time and cured himself of what ailed him. Only, unfortunately, just before the last vestige of disease was removed the fasting killed him. I contend that man might just as well have died of what ailed him originally as to cure that disease and die of the cure. It seems to me it is as broad as it is long.

However, have at this fat-reduction process of mine! You must bear with a few personal reminiscences. I was a big, husky brute of a boy—thick-chested, broad-shouldered, country-bred and with an appetite that knew no bounds. After I got going at my business, when I was twenty-five or so, I was pinned down to a desk for about ten years. I worked hard in a most exacting place. I was so healthy it hurt. I had just as much appetite for food as I had ever had; but I didn't get a chance to bat around as I had been accustomed to do and burn up that food. The result was inevitable. I began to get fat. I had a big chest—forty-six inches—and the fat filled in underneath. That big chest, combined with my broad shoulders, concealed the size of my paunch, and I didn't realize I was accumulating that paunch until it was soldered, riveted, lashed, glued, nailed and otherwise fastened to me.

When I got my growth I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds and was a pretty formidable physical proposition. When I woke up to the fact that I was getting fat I found I weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. That extra thirty-five pounds was mostly fat—excess baggage. Still, it didn't bother me any. I had the strength to tote it round and had the shoulders and the chest to conceal it. I didn't show any bay window, as most fat men do. As they used to say: "You're big all over. You carry it all right."

All this time I was eating three or four times a day and eating everything that came my way. Also, I drank some—not excessively, but some whisky and some beer, and occasionally some wine and cocktails—about the average amount of drinking the average man does. I thought I was getting too fat, and I wrestled with a bicycle all one summer, taking long rides and plugging round a good deal. I did some centuries, but continued eating like a horse—naturally because of the outdoor exercise—and drank a good deal of beer. As will be seen, all the fat I had was legitimate enough. I put it on myself. There was no hereditary nonsense about it. I was responsible for every ounce of it. The net result of that summer's bicycle campaign was a gain of five pounds in weight. I was harder—but I was fatter, too.

When I was thirty-five I began to experiment. I then weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. I went to the canned-exercise, the physical-torture professor, the diet, the salts, and all the rest of it, taking off a few pounds but putting it all back again—and more—as soon as I stopped.

These attempts numbered about two a year. Between times I ate as I wanted to and drank as I pleased. Things ran along until the first of January, 1911. I knew I was getting fatter, for my tailor told me so and my belts and old clothes all proved it. Still, I didn't bother much. I thought I was lingering round about two hundred and thirty-five—too much, of course; but I got away with it pretty well, except in hot weather and when I went up in the high mountains, and I was reasonably content. I was fat, all right. My waist was only two inches smaller than my chest and that meant my waist was forty-four inches in girth. As a matter of fact, being scant five feet ten and a half, I was bigger than a house; but I deluded myself with that stuff about my broad shoulders and my deep chest, and thought it didn't show. It did show, of course. I was a fat man—a big fat man—carrying forty pounds or more of excess weight.

I had dieted and quit; exercised and quit; gone on the waterwagon and fallen off; had fussed round a good deal, spending a lot of money in the attempt, and I was getting fatter all the time. I hated to admit that fact. I tried to fool myself into the conviction that I wasn't getting any larger—and all the time I knew I was. I even went so far as to stop getting on the scales; and when anybody—as almost everybody did—said, "Why, you're getting bigger, ain't you?" I always replied: "No, I think not. I stick along about two hundred and thirty-five pounds."

A year ago last summer I went up into the mountains, where I usually go for my fun. I had noticed a shortness of breath and a wheeziness in previous summers, and had felt my heart pounding pretty hard; but that summer I noticed these things acutely. I couldn't get any air to breathe. My heart pounded like a pneumatic riveter. Any little exercise tired me; and when in the lowlands in hot weather I was the perspiring marvel and the most uncomfortable as well as the sloppiest person you ever saw. It was fierce!

I was doing a good deal of walking in those days—had to burn up the fuel I was taking into my body. Also, I noticed it was mighty hard to keep awake after dinner unless I got out into the air and kept moving. I felt well enough and the doctors said I was organically all right. I kept informed on those points—but I was fat! Also, though I lied to myself, I knew I was getting fatter.

CHAPTER III FACING THE TISSUE

On New Year's Day, 1911, I weighed myself. I don't know why, for I hadn't been on a scale for two or three years. I set the weight at two hundred and thirty-five and it bounded up like a rubber ball; so I shoved it along to two hundred and forty and it still stayed up in the air. When I got a balance I found I weighed two hundred and forty-seven pounds. I was amazed! Also, I was scared; for it instantly occurred to me that if I had gone up to two hundred and forty-seven in two or three years from two hundred and thirty-five I should keep on going up if my manner of living didn't change—and that presently I should weigh three hundred!

That two hundred and forty-seven pounds was a facer. I was forced to admit to myself that I was fat, disgustingly fat—too fat; and that I should get fatter! So I sat down and looked the situation in the eye. I recounted all my former efforts to get thin and discarded them one by one. I knew myself, and knew the ordinary diet proposition and the ordinary exercise proposition were not for me. I knew I was wheezy and that my heart was getting choked with fat; that there were great folds of it on me, and that it was up to me to get rid of it or quit and wait for the inevitable end. If it kept on I knew I should blow up some fine day. Besides, I was uric-acidy, rheumatic and stertorous and clumsy.