In this short, amusing book, subtitled "How to Be Thin and Reduce The Waist Line," Samuel G. Blythe explains how he was able to lose, and keep off, 50 pounds, without resorting to fad diets or giving up the foods he loved. Over a hundred years later, his common-sense advice about food, drink and exercise still makes sense today.NOTE: It should be noted that there is language within this book that was commonplace during the time this book was written that is often considered offensive today.
By : Samuel G. Blythe (1868 - 1947)
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A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes—one on herself and the other on her husband. Half the comedy in the world is predicated on the paunch. At that, the human race is divided into but two classes—fat people who are trying to get thin and thin people who are trying to get fat.
Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out the last two letters of the indictment. Fat is fat. It isn't any more fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it's a darned sight more uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin or unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the long end of it. I never was thin, so I don't know. However, I have been fat—notice that "have been"? And if there is any phase of human enjoyment, 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 like the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a bale of hay.
When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent, directly or indirectly, in the assay. The personal equation is the ruling equation. Women want to be thinner because they will look better—and so do men. Likewise, women want to be plumper because they will look better—and so do men. This holds up to forty years. After that it doesn't make much difference whether either men or women look any better than they have been looking, so far as the great end and aim of all life is concerned. Consequently fat men and fat women after forty want to be thinner for reasons of health and comfort, or quit and resign themselves to their further years of obesity.
Now I am over forty. Hence my experiments in reduction may be taken at this time as grounded on a desire for comfort—not that I did not make many campaigns against my fat before I was forty. I fought it now and then, but always retreated before I won a victory. This time, instead of skirmishing valiantly for a space and then being ignominiously and fatly routed by the powerful forces of food and drink, I hung stolidly to the line of my original attack, harassed the enemy by a constant and deadly fire—and one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.
It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losing flesh—unless, of course, the decrease in weight is due to illness. No healthy person, predisposed to fat, ever lost any flesh. If that person gets rid of any weight, or girth, or fat, it isn't lost—it is fought off, beaten off. The victim struggles with it, goes to the mat with it, and does not debonairly drop it. He eliminates it with stern effort and much travail of the spirit. It is a job of work, a grueling combat to the finish, a task that appalls and usually repels.
The theory of taking off fat is the simplest theory in the world. It is announced, in four words: Stop eating and drinking. The practice of fat reduction is the most difficult thing in the world. Its difficulties are comprehended in two words: You cannot. The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak. The success of the undertaking lies in the triumph of the will over the appetite. There's a lovely line of cant for you! Triumph of the will over the appetite. It sounds like the preaching of a professional food faddist, who tells the people they eat too much and then slips away and wolfs down four pounds of beefsteak at a sitting. However, I suppose it is necessary to say this once in a dissertation like this—and it is said.
In writing about this successful experiment of mine in reducing weight I have no theories to advance except one, and no instructions to give. I don't know whether my method would take an ounce off any other person in the world, and I don't care. I only know it took more than fifty pounds off me. I am not advancing any argument, medicinal or otherwise, for my plan. I never talked to a doctor about it, and never shall. If there are fat men and fat women who are fat for the same reasons I was fat I suppose they can get thin the way I got thin. If they are fat for other reasons I suppose they cannot. I don't know about either proposition.
I have great respect for doctors—so much respect, in fact, that I keep diligently away from them. I know the preliminaries of their game and can take a dose of medicine myself as skillfully as they can administer it. Also, I know when I have a fever, and have a working knowledge of how my heart should beat and my other bodily functions be performed. I have frequently found that a prescription, unintelligibly written but looking very wise, is highly efficacious when folded carefully and put in the pocketbook instead of being deposited with a druggist. I suppose that comes from a sort of hereditary faith in amulets. No doubt the method would be even more efficacious if the prescription were tied on a string and hung around the neck. I shall try that some time when my wife lugs in a doctor on me.
Still, doctors are interesting as a class. After you get beyond the let-me-feel-your-pulse-and-see-your-tongue preliminaries they are versatile and ingenious. Almost always, after you tell them what is the matter with you, they will know—not every time, but frequently. Also, they will take any sort of a chance with you in the interest of science. However, they generally send out for a specialist when they are ill themselves. When you come to think of it that is but natural. Almost any man, whether professional or not, will take a chance with somebody else that he wouldn't quite go through with on himself. Besides, doctors treat comparative strangers for the most part, and the interests of science are to be conserved.
Almost any doctor can tell you how to get thin. To be sure, no doctor will tell you to do the same things any other doctor prescribes, but it all simmers down to the same thing: Cut out the starchy foods and sweets, and take exercise. Also: Don't drink alcohol. The variations that can be played on this simple theme by a skillful doctor are endless. When a real specialist in fat reduction gets hold of you—a real, earnest reducer—he can contrive a diet that would make a living skeleton thin—and likewise put him in his little grave. I have had diets handed to me that would starve a humming-bird, and diets that would put flesh on a bronze statue; and all to the same end—reduction. Science has been monkeying with nourishment for the past ten or fifteen years to the exclusion of many other branches of research; and about all that has happened to the nourishment is the large elimination of nutriment from it.
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