The Fun of Getting Thin | Page 6

that I should get fatter! So I sat down and
looked the situation in the eye. I recounted all my former efforts to get thin and discarded
them one by one. I knew myself, and knew the ordinary diet proposition and the ordinary
exercise proposition were not for me. I knew I was wheezy and that my heart was getting
choked with fat; that there were great folds of it on me, and that it was up to me to get rid
of it or quit and wait for the inevitable end. If it kept on I knew I should blow up some
fine day. Besides, I was uric-acidy, rheumatic and stertorous and clumsy. I had about fifty
or sixty pounds of poisonous junk wrapped round me, and I knew I should suffer for it in
the end, though I didn't feel it much and carried it with a fair assumption of lightness.
I was not an amateur at the game. I had been through the mill. I spent several days in
going over the whole matter. It was reasonably simple, too, and needn't have taken so
much of my time; but I was protecting myself, you see, gold-bricking myself--trying to
find a way out that would not deprive me of things I liked to do, of pleasures I wanted to
enjoy. It was pure selfishness that dominated me and made me do so much figuring on a
proposition I knew was contained in a sentence; but I did fight to hang on to the old way

of living.
After each session of false logic and selfish hypothesis I invariably came back to the
same proposition, which is the only proposition--and that was: What makes fat? Food and
drink. How can you reduce fat? By reducing the amount of food and drink--that is all
there is or was to it. The only way to get rid of the effects of overeating and overdrinking
is to stop overeating and overdrinking.
I went over my food habit. I was accustomed to eating a big hired-man's breakfast--fruit,
coffee, eggs, waffles, hot bread, sausage, anything that came along; and I heaved in a lot
of it--not a little--a lot! I didn't eat so much at luncheon, but I ate plenty; and at night I
simply cleaned up the table. I wasn't so strong on sweets and pastry, because I usually
drank a few highballs during the day, and highballs and cocktails and sweets do not go
well together--that is, the man who takes alcohol into his system usually does not care for
sweets. Beer was one of my long suits too--Pilsner beer. I did like that!
I looked this food habit squarely in the face. I impaled the drink habit with my glittering
eye. I knew I was eating about sixty per cent more than I needed or could use, and that I
was drinking a hundred per cent more. I knew that nothing makes fat but food and drink.
I knew excess of food will make any animal fat and I saw I had been eating freely of the
most fattening kinds of food. I knew beer and liquor were made of grain, and that grain is
used to fatten steers and cows and pigs. I refused to adopt a diet like any of those
unpalatable ones I had experimented with, but the remedy was as plain as the cause. It
was simple enough if I had the nerve to go through with it.
Inasmuch as an excess of food and drink make an excess of fat, it follows that the
reduction in the amount of food will stop that fat-forming and give the body a chance to
burn up the excess fat already formed. That was my conclusion. Mind you, I reached that
conclusion before I made any of my arguments; but I didn't want to admit it as reasonable
or logical, for I hated to give up the pleasures of the table and the sociability that came
with the sort of drinking I did. I was trying to find a way out that would be easy and
comfortable. And all the time I was getting fatter! The scales told me that.
This backing and filling and argument with myself lasted all through January and part of
February. It took me six weeks to get myself into the frame of mind where I admitted the
truth of my conclusion. I was no hero. I didn't want to do it. I loved it all too well. I was
as rank a coward in the beginning as you ever saw! It appalled me to think of restricting
myself in any way, for I liked the pleasures that I knew I must forego. However, when I
got up to two hundred and fifty pounds I sat