E-text prepared by Al Haines
How To Be Happy and Reduce the Waist Line
by
Author of "Cutting It Out"
Chicago
Forbes & Company
1912
I. Fat
II. The So-Called Cures
III. Facing the Tissue
A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes—one on herself andthe other on her husband. Half the comedy in the world is predicatedon the paunch. At that, the human race is divided into but twoclasses—fat people who are trying to get thin and thin people who aretrying to get fat.
Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out thelast two letters of the indictment. Fat is fat. It isn't any morefatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it's adarned sight more uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin orunreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the longend of it. I never was thin, so I don't know. However, I have beenfat—notice that "have been"? And if there is any phase of humanenjoyment, any part of life, any occupation, avocation, divertisement,pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it in any regard,I failed to discover it in the twenty years during which I looked likethe rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a baleof hay.
When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line ofhuman endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent,directly or indirectly, in the assay. The personal equation is theruling equation. Women want to be thinner because they will lookbetter—and so do men. Likewise, women want to be plumper because theywill look better—and so do men. This holds up to forty years. Afterthat it doesn't make much difference whether either men or women lookany better than they have been looking, so far as the great end and aimof all life is concerned. Consequently fat men and fat women afterforty want to be thinner for reasons of health and comfort, or quit andresign themselves to their further years of obesity.
Now I am over forty. Hence my experiments in reduction may be taken atthis time as grounded on a desire for comfort—not that I did not makemany campaigns against my fat before I was forty. I fought it now andthen, but always retreated before I won a victory. This time, insteadof skirmishing valiantly for a space and then being ignominiously andfatly routed by the powerful forces of food and drink, I hung stolidlyto the line of my original attack, harassed the enemy by a constant anddeadly fire—and one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.
It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losingflesh—unless, of course, the decrease in weight is due to illness. Nohealthy person, predisposed to fat, ever lost any flesh. If thatperson gets rid of any weight, or girth, or fat, it isn't lost—it isfought off, beaten off. The victim struggles with it, goes to the matwith it, and does not debonairly drop it. He eliminates it with sterneffort and much travail of the spirit. It is a job of work, a gruelingcombat to the finish, a task that appalls and usually repels.
The theory of taking off fat is the simplest theory in the world. Itis announced, in four words: Stop eating and drin