Excerpt from the book
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. |
