Diet and Health - Lulu Hunt Peters (great books to read .txt) 📗
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Low calorie days can be repeated once a week if necessary in order to keep the stomach in good order. Fruit juice, one-quarter glass, or fresh fruit, can be substituted for the skim milk, and you may prefer it.
You could keep on this for some time, or fast for some time, and probably be much benefited. I fasted five days once, or rather fruit-juiced five days. I lost about ten pounds, I think, and my heart, which had begun to carry on, was relieved.
It was during that period of which I have spoken, and of which I am ashamed; for I had my M.D. degree then and should have known better. But you know we have good authority that it is easier to teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of twenty to follow our own teaching.
Third OrderNow you will have to reckon on the amount of food or number of calories you need per day. Review the rule I have given. You find for your age and normal weight that you will need, let us say for example, 2200 calories. You have probably been consuming twice that amount and either storing it away as fat or as disease. (It is surprising how small an excess will gradually add up pounds of fat. For instance, three pats of butter or three medium chocolate creams a day, if over the maintenance limit, would add approximately 27 pounds a year to your weight!)
Now you are to reduce your maintenance diet—the 2200 calories we are taking for example—to 1200 calories—quite a comfortable lot, you will find.
You will be surprised how much 1200 calories will be if the food is judiciously selected.
You may be hungry at first, but you will soon become accustomed to the change. I find that dry lemon or orange peel, or those little aromatic breath sweeteners, just a tiny bit, seem to stop the hunger pangs; or you may have a cup of fat-free bouillon or half an apple, or other low calorie food. (Count the calories here.)
One thousand calories less food per day equals four ounces of fat lost daily—approximately 8 pounds per month. If you do not want to lose so fast, do not cut down so much.
Fourth OrderYou may eat just what you like—candy, pie, cake, fat meat, butter, cream—but—count your calories! You can't have many nor large helpings, you see; but isn't it comforting to know that you can eat these things? Maybe some meal you would rather have a 350-calorie piece of luscious pie, with a delicious 150-calorie tablespoonful of whipped cream on it, than all the succulent vegetables Luther Burbank could grow in California.
My idea of heaven is a place with me and mine on a cloud of whipped cream.
Now that you know you can have the things you like, proceed to make your menus containing very little of them.
Fifth OrderThis is going to be your chief business and pursuit in life for the next few months, this reducing of your weight. However, keep up your Red Cross and all other activities, fast and furiously, so that you won't be thinking about yourself.
Don't reduce more than two or three pounds a week; two or less is better. If you are too cannibalistic, your heart, kidneys and nervous system are liable to suffer—you yourself are supplying too much fat in your dietary, and there are other scientific reasons against reducing too rapidly.
However, you may find that the first week or so you may reduce five or seven pounds; but don't worry about this, for that is a slushy, watery fat that goes easily.
If a claim like a cold should attack you, and after spraying nose and throat frequently with an antiseptic, and then denying the claim vigorously, it persists in running a severe course, better go back to maintenance diet for a few days.
Don't "taste"! You will find the second taste much harder to resist than the first. If you have allowed in your daily program something between meals (a good plan), take it, but not otherwise.
Try not to overeat at any time, and thus undo the work that perhaps has taken you two or three days to accomplish. It will be all right occasionally, possibly one day a week, to eat up to your maintenance diet, but don't, I beg of you, go over it so that you will gain.
You will be tempted quite frequently, and you will have to choose whether you will enjoy yourself hugely in the twenty minutes or so that you will be consuming the excess calories, or whether you will dislike yourself cordially for the two or three days you lose by your lack of will power.
I am afraid I am going to tell a story. I feel as though I were, and I don't want to. It is one I heard years ago at a teachers' convention at Riverside, when I was a tender, unsuspecting young school teacher, so it is perfectly good, albeit senile—and it illustrates my point so well—so well—well, you have to put yourself in the place of the little chaps, Billie and Johnnie, of the kindergarten.
It seems it was customary to bring a lunch, and Little-new-boy had come without one. Teacher asked Billie would he share? No, sturdily; not he. But little Johnnie, he would. Some time later, Johnnie, with a frantic waving of his hand, and with just pride in his generosity, informed the class that he had shared his lunch with Little-new-boy and he felt good is his little heart.
Billie stood his ground and stoutly declared that he ate his and he felt good in his little belly.
9 Autobiographical
I did not give our thin friends a sample menu for fear it would upset them; but nothing can upset your digestion, I know. However, I will not give you a sample menu, either, but will tell you what I eat when I go on a reduction regime, which for me is 1200 Calories.
You will notice, most of my calories I have at dinner in the evening. You may not like this, but would rather have yours spread over the entire day; and you can suit your fancy, for it makes no difference as long as your total number per day stays within your reduction limit.
Don't think you have to follow my menu. You might gain on it! Study the Key and select your own.
Many will lose by going on the no-breakfast plan, or the no-lunch plan. If they do reduce, it is because they have lowered their daily consumption of food, and not because of the no-breakfast or no-lunch plan per se.
Fat seems to melt faster when the chief meal is in the middle of the day, and with only 200 or 300 calories of fruit for the evening meal. In this way you slim while you sleep.
MY BREAKFASTYou may prefer many more calories for breakfast, or none at all. This may not look good to you, but it means an awful lot in my young life, after my exercise and bath, to sit down to my little breakfast and read the papers.
Recently I have found that two cups of moderately hot water with the juice of a lemon answers just as well as the toast and watery coffee, and is probably better. You might like some fruit.
MY LUNCHEONIf you are patriotic and constipated, substitute one bran muffin. You can see that this is in reality a further extension of my sumptuous breakfast. If I get tired of this, I add a salad of
I am very fond of this Roquefort cheese dressing; 1-1/8in. cube of cheese in a little vinegar, no oil, keeps it within the hundred calories.
You might prefer a baked apple or two tomatoes, or a dish of prunes, or 3 oz. of cottage cheese. The chief thing is to take what you like, not what I like. Count your calories.
MY DINNERSUMMARY
That leaves me 50 more calories to total 1200, to take before retiring if I am hungry. You should leave this 50 calories to take before retiring, because if you are hungry you will find it very difficult to go to sleep.
A small cup of hot skimmed milk tends to be a sedative. Hunger, like cold feet, is hard to go to sleep on.
If there is one thing more important than another, it is thorough mastication.
This applies to the thin as well as to the fat, and to the child as well as to the adult. Take a moderate mouthful and rassel with it until it is automatically swallowed. Chew until it is all gone before you put any more in your mouth. There is no better way of jollying yourself into thinking that you have had all you want than this Fletcherizing habit, and it takes the same time to consume one-half the amount of food you have been in the habit of eating.
I will allow you all the water you want, in reason; in fact, I advise it while you are reducing, both at the meals and between meals. The only precaution is that at the meals it should not be drunk while food is in the mouth, for this would tend to lessen thorough mastication.
Now, Madam and Madam's husband, when are you going to begin this important business of reducing? After the holidays? Tomorrow? No! Right now. The sooner you get started, the better. The chief thing to do, and the hardest, is to get started and to get the habit. After the first three days you will not dread it; in fact; you will feel so much better that you will not be willing to go back to your old habits of overeating.
Now let's review a bit what you are to do.
First: Pledge yourself to yourself, and to someone else,
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