Samuel G. Blythe - The Fun of Getting Thin: How to Be Happy and Reduce the Waist Line

A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokesone 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 twoclassesfat 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 beenfatnotice 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 lookbetterand so do men. Likewise, women want to be plumper because theywill look betterand 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 comfortnot 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 fireand one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.

It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losingfleshunless, 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 lostit 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 drinking. The practice offat reduction is the most difficult thing in the world. Itsdifficulties are comprehended in two words: You cannot. The flesh iswilling, but the spirit is weak. The success of the undertaking liesin the triumph of the will over the appetite. There's a lovely line ofcant for you! Triumph of the will over the appetite. It sounds likethe preaching of a professional food faddist, who tells the people theyeat too much and then slips away and wolfs down four pounds ofbeefsteak at a sitting. However, I suppose it is necessary to say thisonce in a dissertation like thisand it is said.

In writing about this successful experiment of mine in reducing weightI 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 personin the world, and I don't care. I only know it took more than fiftypounds off me. I am not advancing any argument, medicinal orotherwise, for my plan. I never talked to a doctor about it, and nevershall. If there are fat men and fat women who are fat for the samereasons I was fat I suppose they can get thin the way I got thin. Ifthey are fat for other reasons I suppose they cannot. I don't knowabout either proposition.

I have great respect for doctorsso much respect, in fact, that I keepdiligently away from them. I know the preliminaries of their game andcan take a dose of medicine myself as skillfully as they can administerit. Also, I know when I have a fever, and have a working knowledge ofhow my heart should beat and my other bodily functions be performed. Ihave frequently found that a prescription, unintelligibly written butlooking very wise, is highly efficacious when folded carefully and putin the pocketbook instead of being deposited with a druggist. Isuppose that comes from a sort of hereditary faith in amulets. Nodoubt the method would be even more efficacious if the prescriptionwere tied on a string and hung around the neck. I shall try that sometime when my wife lugs in a doctor on me.

Still, doctors are interesting as a class. After you get beyond thelet-me-feel-your-pulse-and-see-your-tongue preliminaries they areversatile and ingenious. Almost always, after you tell them what isthe matter with you, they will knownot every time, but frequently.Also, they will take any sort of a chance with you in the interest ofscience. However, they generally send out for a specialist when theyare ill themselves. When you come to think of it that is but natural.Almost any man, whether professional or not, will take a chance withsomebody else that he wouldn't quite go through with on himself.Besides, doctors treat comparative strangers for the most part, and theinterests of science are to be conserved.

Almost any doctor can tell you how to get thin. To be sure, no doctorwill tell you to do the same things any other doctor prescribes, but itall simmers down to the same thing: Cut out the starchy foods andsweets, and take exercise. Also: Don't drink alcohol. The variationsthat can be played on this simple theme by a skillful doctor areendless. When a real specialist in fat reduction gets hold of youareal, earnest reducerhe can contrive a diet that would make a livingskeleton thinand likewise put him in his little grave. I have haddiets handed to me that would starve a humming-bird, and diets thatwould put flesh on a bronze statue; and all to the same endreduction.Science has been monkeying with nourishment for the past ten or fifteenyears to the exclusion of many other branches of research; and aboutall that has happened to the nourishment is the large elimination ofnutriment from it.

Broadly speaking, the methods of fat reduction most in vogue aredivided into four classesmechanical, physical, medicinal and dietary.The first two are not worth considering by a man who has anything elseto do. I do not doubt that a man who could devote his whole time tothe work could, by means of some of the appliances offeredfrom theapparatus in a gymnasium to rubber shirts, get off fatnor do I doubtthe efficacy of exercise and its accompaniments in the way of sweatingand baths and all that; but when a person has a living to make thesemethods are useless, not through any demerit of their own but becausethe man who is fat hasn't the time or opportunity and, more than all,soon fails in the inclination to use them.