8

At Last! How to Reduce

The title of this chapter indicates to whom it is addressed. All others please refrain from reading, for it is strictly private and confidential, and is intended only for those who need it.

You thin and you normal had better save it, though, for you may qualify later. You are keeping right on reading now! I'm surprised. I wanted to tell my fat friends that the first thing they have to do is to get control of their will power, and now I can't do it.

Somehow, will power with a layer of fat on it gets feeble. Don't laugh, you too thin! It gets worse than feeble, if there is no fat at all and the nervous system is starved, it—well, I won't say what it does, for I don't want to worry you.

Now That Order Is Restored I Will Resume

Will power, being feeble to a greater or less degree, must be bolstered and aided a bit, to begin with, so—

First Order

Watch Your Weight!

Nature Always Counts

Tell loudly and frequently to all your friends that you realize that it is unpatriotic to be fat while many thousands are starving, that you are going to reduce to normal, and will be there in the allotted time. If you belong to a club, round up the overweights and form a section. Call it the "Watch Your Weight—Anti-Kaiser Class." Tax the members sufficiently to buy a good, accurate pair of scales. Meet once a week to weigh. Wear approximately the same weight clothes, and weigh at the same time in relation to eating. Do this whether or not you belong to a club. Once or twice a week is often enough to weigh. Scales vary, so try to use the same ones.

Don't be discouraged if some day after you have dieted well you seem to have gained. Nature sometimes seems fiendish that way. The excess weight is probably due to a retention of water, and will not be permanent. However, don't depend upon this too often! Usually, if you have gained when you think you ought not to, it is because Nature has been counting calories and you haven't.

Have the members listed on a weight chart conspicuously placed near the scales, and record accurately the weight weekly.

WATCH YOUR WEIGHT ANTI-KAISER CLASS

Members' Names Normal Weight Weight on

Date Date Date Date Date Date

No Funds for the Red Cross

Those not reducing at least one pound per week to be fined soundly and the proceeds given to the Red Cross. That won't be a good way to raise funds for the chapter, though, for there will be no fines after the first week or so, when the members find what their maintenance diet should be and are consuming less than that.

I will explain this maintenance diet business. You shameless thin ones, call back your more polite comrades—this is important for all of you. (I shall also tell you more fully about this in the last chapter.)

Maintenance Diet

The maintenance diet is one which maintains you at your present weight, i.e., you are not gaining or losing. You may be over or under normal, but are staying there. The intake equals the outgo.

When you eat less than your maintenance diet, you are going to supply the deficiency with your own fat.

So commit yourself on your honor that you are going to reduce or perish—no joke; you can't tell how near you are to it if you are much overweight. There are two general stages of fatty heart. In the first stage the heart is surrounded by a blanket of fat, and it also penetrates between the muscles. Later, if it goes on too long, the heart muscle itself degenerates to fat, then—

Good-night!

Shakespeare warns you to make thy body less, hence thy grace more; leave gormandizing, and know that the grave doth gape for thee thrice wider than for other men.

Second Order

Shrink Your Stomach

Your stomach, long used to an excess of food for your needs—it may not be a large amount—but still, I repeat, being used to an excess of food for your needs, your stomach must be disciplined. It is undoubtedly distended, as it should not be.

Shrink Your Stomach

A good way to show it that you are master is to fast for at least one day—drink nothing but pure water, hot or cold, as you prefer. It will protest vociferously and will tell all its friends, the different organs of your body, how you are persecuting it, and they will join the league against you and decide they will oust you from your position, and you will feel like—but don't mind it; it will soon know that you mean business, and, much chastened and considerably contracted, will take the next day a very small amount of food very gratefully.

Shrink Your Stomach

If you do not want to be so severe with it you can allow it five glasses of hot or cold skim milk or buttermilk, one every three hours, say, at 10,1,4,7, and 10 o'clock. One glass is 80 calories, five equal 400 calories, which is not so much.

Or Mashed

The baked potato and glass of skim milk diet, three times a day one day a week, which has its devotees, depends upon its low caloric content for its results. There is no magic in it, no yeast business which reduces. This is most wholesome, however, for potatoes contain a large amount of the potassium salts, which tend to counteract the effects of uric acid, and thus are good for the gouty type.

Mono-Diets

The beefsteak, the milk, and the fruit diets are also good. One can gain as well as lose on the milk diet, all depending on number of calories consumed, and it is an excellent method for both. The beefsteak diet is beneficial for a short time, but too much protein over a long period has been shown to be harmful. An exclusive fruit diet is excellent for reduction.

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.

But You Do Not Have To

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.

Sob Stuff

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 Order

You Are Down to Business

And Maybe Diabetes

Now 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.

After All, Hunger Is Much More Agreeable Than Apoplexy

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 Order

You Register Joy

You 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.

You Registered Too High

Now that you know you can have the things you like, proceed to make your menus containing very little of them.

Fifth Order

This 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.

More Warnings

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.

Not Even While Cooking

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 Ought Not to Do This

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.

A Little Anatomical Story

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.