At Last! How to Reduce

First Order

Watch Your Weight!

Nature Always Counts

Tell loudly and frequently to all your friends that you realize that it is unpatriotic to be fat while many thousands are starving, that you are going to reduce to normal, and will be there in the allotted time. If you belong to a club, round up the overweights and form a section. Call it the "Watch Your Weight—Anti-Kaiser Class." Tax the members sufficiently to buy a good, accurate pair of scales. Meet once a week to weigh. Wear approximately the same weight clothes, and weigh at the same time in relation to eating. Do this whether or not you belong to a club. Once or twice a week is often enough to weigh. Scales vary, so try to use the same ones.

Don't be discouraged if some day after you have dieted well you seem to have gained. Nature sometimes seems fiendish that way. The excess weight is probably due to a retention of water, and will not be permanent. However, don't depend upon this too often! Usually, if you have gained when you think you ought not to, it is because Nature has been counting calories and you haven't.
Have the members listed on a weight chart conspicuously placed near the scales, and record accurately the weight weekly.

WATCH YOUR WEIGHT ANTI-KAISER CLASS
Members' Names	Normal Weight	Weight on
		Date	Date	Date	Date	Date	Date

No Funds for the Red Cross

Those not reducing at least one pound per week to be fined soundly and the proceeds given to the Red Cross. That won't be a good way to raise funds for the chapter, though, for there will be no fines after the first week or so, when the members find what their maintenance diet should be and are consuming less than that.
I will explain this maintenance diet business. You shameless thin ones, call back your more polite comrades—this is important for all of you. (I shall also tell you more fully about this in the last chapter.)

Maintenance Diet

The maintenance diet is one which maintains you at your present weight, i.e., you are not gaining or losing. You may be over or under normal, but are staying there. The intake equals the outgo.
When you eat less than your maintenance diet, you are going to supply the deficiency with your own fat.
So commit yourself on your honor that you are going to reduce or perish—no joke; you can't tell how near you are to it if you are much overweight. There are two general stages of fatty heart. In the first stage the heart is surrounded by a blanket of fat, and it also penetrates between the muscles. Later, if it goes on too long, the heart muscle itself degenerates to fat, then—

Good-night!

 

Shakespeare warns you to make thy body less, hence thy grace more; leave gormandizing, and know that the grave doth gape for thee thrice wider than for other men.

Second Order

Shrink Your Stomach

Your stomach, long used to an excess of food for your needs—it may not be a large amount—but still, I repeat, being used to an excess of food for your needs, your stomach must be disciplined. It is undoubtedly distended, as it should not be.

Shrink Your Stomach

A good way to show it that you are master is to fast for at least one day—drink nothing but pure water, hot or cold, as you prefer. It will protest vociferously and will tell all its friends, the different organs of your body, how you are persecuting it, and they will join the league against you and decide they will oust you from your position, and you will feel like—but don't mind it; it will soon know that you mean business, and, much chastened and considerably contracted, will take the next day a very small amount of food very gratefully.

Shrink Your Stomach

If you do not want to be so severe with it you can allow it five glasses of hot or cold skim milk or buttermilk, one every three hours, say, at 10,1,4,7, and 10 o'clock. One glass is 80 calories, five equal 400 calories, which is not so much.

Or Mashed

The baked potato and glass of skim milk diet, three times a day one day a week, which has its devotees, depends upon its low caloric content for its results. There is no magic in it, no yeast business which reduces. This is most wholesome, however, for potatoes contain a large amount of the potassium salts, which tend to counteract the effects of uric acid, and thus are good for the gouty type.

Mono-Diets

The beefsteak, the milk, and the fruit diets are also good. One can gain as well as lose on the milk diet, all depending on number of calories consumed, and it is an excellent method for both. The beefsteak diet is beneficial for a short time, but too much protein over a long period has been shown to be harmful. An exclusive fruit diet is excellent for reduction.
Low calorie days can be repeated once a week if necessary in order to keep the stomach in good order. Fruit juice, one-quarter glass, or fresh fruit, can be substituted for the skim milk, and you may prefer it.

But You Do Not Have To

 

You could keep on this for some time, or fast for some time, and probably be much benefited. I fasted five days once, or rather fruit-juiced five days. I lost about ten pounds, I think, and my heart, which had begun to carry on, was relieved.

Sob Stuff

It was during that period of which I have spoken, and of which I am ashamed; for I had my M.D. degree then and should have known better. But you know we have good authority that it is easier to teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of twenty to follow our own teaching.

Third Order

You Are Down to Business

And Maybe Diabetes

Now you will have to reckon on the amount of food or number of calories you need per day. Review the rule I have given. You find for your age and normal weight that you will need, let us say for example, 2200 calories. You have probably been consuming twice that amount and either storing it away as fat or as disease. (It is surprising how small an excess will gradually add up pounds of fat. For instance, three pats of butter or three medium chocolate creams a day, if over the maintenance limit, would add approximately 27 pounds a year to your weight!)
Now you are to reduce your maintenance diet—the 2200 calories we are taking for example—to 1200 calories—quite a comfortable lot, you will find.
You will be surprised how much 1200 calories will be if the food is judiciously selected.

After All, Hunger Is Much More Agreeable Than Apoplexy

You may be hungry at first, but you will soon become accustomed to the change. I find that dry lemon or orange peel, or those little aromatic breath sweeteners, just a tiny bit, seem to stop the hunger pangs; or you may have a cup of fat-free bouillon or half an apple, or other low calorie food. (Count the calories here.)
One thousand calories less food per day equals four ounces of fat lost daily—approximately 8 pounds per month. If you do not want to lose so fast, do not cut down so much.

Fourth Order

You Register Joy

You may eat just what you like—candy, pie, cake, fat meat, butter, cream—but—count your calories! You can't have many nor large helpings, you see; but isn't it comforting to know that you can eat these things? Maybe some meal you would rather have a 350-calorie piece of luscious pie, with a delicious 150-calorie tablespoonful of whipped cream on it, than all the succulent vegetables Luther Burbank could grow in California.
My idea of heaven is a place with me and mine on a cloud of whipped cream.

You Registered Too High

Now that you know you can have the things you like, proceed to make your menus containing very little of them.