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, divertissement,
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. |
