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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78225 ***
+
+
+
+
+                                NO FOOD
+                             WITH MY MEALS
+
+                                   O
+
+
+
+
+                                BOOKS BY
+
+                              FANNIE HURST
+
+                                   O
+
+                         JUST AROUND THE CORNER
+                        EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG
+                            GASLIGHT SONATAS
+                               HUMORESQUE
+                               STAR DUST
+                           THE VERTICAL CITY
+                                 LUMMOX
+                              APPASSIONATA
+                               MANNEQUIN
+                              SONG OF LIFE
+                          A PRESIDENT IS BORN
+                               PROCESSION
+                              FIVE AND TEN
+                              BACK STREET
+                           IMITATION OF LIFE
+                             ANITRA’S DANCE
+
+
+
+
+                                NO FOOD
+                                WITH MY
+                                 MEALS
+
+                                  _by_
+
+                              Fannie Hurst
+
+                             [Illustration]
+
+                                  1935
+
+                           HARPER & BROTHERS
+                               PUBLISHERS
+                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+                         NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS
+
+                   _Copyright, 1935, by Fannie Hurst_
+
+               _Printed in the United States of America_
+
+_All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic,
+   motion- or talking-picture purposes without written authorization
+  from the holder of these rights. Nor may the text or part thereof be
+ reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing. For
+ information address: Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd Street, New York,
+                                 N. Y._
+
+                             FIRST EDITION
+
+                                  A-K
+
+
+
+
+                                NO FOOD
+                             WITH MY MEALS
+
+                                   O
+
+
+Sometimes, regarding my slimmed human envelope, which at best seems
+designed more for service than beauty, I do ponder.
+
+Not so much upon its frailty, which has been achieved at the cost of no
+food with my meals, but upon the frailty of the spiritual inhabitant of
+that envelope.
+
+Regarding that spiritual inhabitant at the restless business of trying
+to learn to live in her house of clay, faint ironic laughter, the kind
+apt to be induced by a breakfast of lemon juice and hot water, rumbles
+along the inner me.
+
+Some women are born frail. Some have frailty thrust upon them. Still
+others achieve it, and at what price glory!
+
+_Trivia_, you say?
+
+Not at all.
+
+What is _trivia_, and what is not?
+
+If, by virtue of its relativity to my concerns, the dahlia in my
+garden, the color of my tweeds, the nick in my dining-room table, or
+the market price of strawberries become important, then they _are_
+important. Everything or nothing matters.
+
+When even half of one hundred and twenty-three million human beings on
+a North American continent begins to care passionately about adhering
+in standards of beauty to formulae concocted somewhere between anywhere
+and Hollywood, then that state of mind becomes important. Sufficiently
+so to create neurosis, psychosis, and acidosis.
+
+No state of mind or body flecked with evidence of phobia can remain
+trivial, no matter how trivial the minds and bodies themselves.
+
+It was about four years ago that the slimming phobia of my sex and era
+first began to fleck me with its rabies-like foam.
+
+Up to that period, although overweight by a not inconsiderable
+poundage, I had not given complete rein to the latent unease which
+sporadically smote me at my abundance.
+
+In fact, overweight from my advent as an eleven-pound baby, there was a
+brief period around adolescence when my opulence seemed something of an
+asset.
+
+“Guess how much she weighs,” I can hear my grandfather proudly
+challenging, as he stood me on the sitting-room table and named a good
+eight or ten pounds over and above the most conservative estimate.
+
+Ladies called me apple-cheeked, and gentlemen pinched them. I strutted,
+but even back there, there was unease in that strut.
+
+But generally speaking, up to the time of my acute surrender to my
+sex’s phobia for slimming, the matter of anatomical distinction or
+peculiarity was scarcely within the pale of discussion. You were
+fat or slim, narrow or wide, dark or blond, according to a divine
+appropriation over which you had little control. To be sure, there was
+usually a “Fatty” in the schoolroom or on the block, but generally
+speaking, one did not dwell upon the flesh, or lack of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beauty, had it not been parceled out in your direction, was something
+that could be brewed within the spirit in a manner to offset the
+external lack. This you were taught at the parental knee. Although
+it was not very satisfactory, you let it go at that. Except, why
+were hearts of gold and curls of gold so rarely supposed to strike
+simultaneously. How odd of God....
+
+Now take this matter of being a plump little girl. You were
+apple-cheeked and got pinched for their cuteness, but then, you had to
+go and be a fat little girl, too. Why couldn’t one be a slender little
+girl--and apple-cheeked!
+
+If you were unduly slim, you were simultaneously apt not to be
+apple-cheeked. There God went again, being odd. Slim, your portion was
+usually the bitter one of cod-liver oil and shoulder braces, whereas
+in plump reverse, you were called the picture of health and encouraged
+in your natural predilection for the creamed potatoes and marshmallow
+fillings which were usually anathema to the slim cod-liver oilers.
+
+There was to come an adult time however, in the life of this narrator,
+when as the hum of a swarm of locusts over the peace of her mind, the
+dietary chant of the dieting women began to separate itself into a
+specific and ominous roar all its own.
+
+Gradually, and oh, so insidiously, the spectacle of you, going your
+somewhat robust routine of three normal, if perhaps unscientific meals
+a day, in a state of taken-for-granted health that made it no theme for
+discussion; gradually you became to yourself a not edifying spectacle.
+
+There was too much of something with you. Yourself.
+
+Awareness, faint as the footsteps of a fly along the back of a neck,
+began to creep upon you so lightly at first that it was scarcely more
+than a tickling across your consciousness.
+
+It began from who knows what remote scratchings of unease, in a
+changing attitude toward such cardinal institutions as breakfast.
+
+There had recently arrived a newcomer in our Middle West midst, a Mrs.
+de Lisle from New York, a slim, pretty little lady much criticized
+by the impeccable housewives on the pretty residential street of our
+pretty city, for lax housekeeping, and who was openly known to have her
+breakfast (roll and coffee) in bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now you take what has since become this more or less national
+institution of roll and coffee in the morning. It has its points
+æsthetically and doubtless gastronomically. But along about ten-thirty
+in the affairs of a busy morning those points, during the first period
+of the transition from more substantial matinal fare, begin to reside
+chiefly in the aching void at the pit of the stomach.
+
+Breakfast tradition dies hard, particularly if that tradition happens
+to have been born and bred in the Middle West.
+
+We lived not on a farm mind you, in these years of my late teens when
+too much of the corporeal me first began to seem too much with me, but
+in a large Middle West metropolis of urban habits of a most complicated
+nature. We ate our corn on cob from silver end-pieces, traveled east
+in a manner your Easterner seldom traveled west, and were among the
+first of the American communities to be stricken with such respective
+epidemics as burnt wood, honitan, ping-pong, Kinloch telephones,
+horseless carriages and hobble skirts.
+
+At seven-thirty o’clock during the first eighteen years of my life
+spent there, a family of three, consisting of my father, the president
+of a fair sized shoe factory, but who nevertheless, punctiliously
+slid back his roll-top desk at eight o’clock; an alert and brainy
+housekeeper, my mother, and a slightly overweight youngster, myself,
+sat down to a breakfast worthy of the name. Literally we broke fast.
+Oatmeal in a covered dish was served out with plentiful additions of
+butter, sugar and yellowish cream. A platter of bacon and eggs, the
+eggs not necessarily portioned out along the conventional lines of two
+per person. My father was not adverse to a third, the frailer members
+of the family usually contenting themselves with two. Toast or hot
+biscuits or both arrived in a wicker basket, all tucked in under a
+red-and-white napkin with a fringed edge. There was usually hominy or
+grits or stacks of griddle cakes with apple jelly or molasses. Coffee
+and plenty of it in a beautiful old “Meissen” china pot with a gilt
+snout, and, more often than not, crumb coffee cake, still hot, and
+thickly sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.
+
+You ate, aided and abetted, it is true, by maternal duress of the most
+insistent nature, to have more of this, and another helping of that, on
+the respective suppositions that a business man was facing a long and
+exacting day, a growing child her school, and a housekeeper her arduous
+routine.
+
+You ate! And thereby were to become susceptible for life to a tickling
+of the nostrils at the smell of frying bacon rushing up from the
+servant’s quarters as you, in your bedroom, sip black unsweetened
+coffee or gulp orange juice.
+
+I was reared to like breakfast. I still like breakfast. Heaven my
+witness, I have not eaten a breakfast in twelve years.
+
+Because it was about twelve years ago that the first whirrings of the
+dietary chant of the dieting women began to assail my ears. In fact,
+glancing back, it becomes apparent that about the time rolls-and-coffee
+became synonymous for the old noun breakfast, was launched the dietary
+era of my life.
+
+It was all insidious, it was all as the humming of locusts, it was all
+as the fluty wings of the voice of my sex.
+
+What had hitherto been only the vague unease at the poor, or rather the
+ample, showing put up by my externalities of figure; an unease which
+had been sweetly soothed by parents, now began to assert itself more
+positively.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Suddenly, or so it seemed to a languidly awakened awareness, the
+biology of my entire sisterhood seemed to have undergone an evolution.
+Female silhouettes began to take on the concavity of the letter
+C. Curves, only as they collapsed inward upon the anatomy, were
+apparently fit to be visible to the naked eye of the beholder. The
+bust measurements of the potential and actual mothers of the race
+dropped to the proportions of their young sons and brothers. The old,
+well-nourished ideal of the Venus de Milo became a lummox. Something
+actually rodential began to characterize the upper lips of the women of
+the slimming era as they gnawed at the raw carrot and the herbaceous
+green.
+
+Out of the stuff of enameled rolling-pins for kneading too, too solid
+lady-flesh, rubber reducing girdles, bathroom scales to match any color
+scheme, reduction salts in the pastel shades, electric-light cabinets,
+rowing-machines, _et al._, new industries were born. Restaurateurs
+became Melba toast, spinach, and saccharine conscious. Spas began to
+find obesity, real and imagined, more profitable than liver complaint,
+gall stones, and gout rolled in one. Came the dawn of a dark hour when
+public opinion demanded that a grand-opera diva must be able to look
+down and see her own toes.
+
+Such diet-derivative expressions as incompatibility, mental cruelty,
+fanaticism, irritability, cussedness, began more and more to creep into
+the phraseology of the divorce courts.
+
+Overnight, as it were, that quick barometer, the show girl, achieved
+the biological phenomenon of shedding her hips, and measurements
+fluctuated more violently than a falling stock market. Figures began to
+slump and tip the scales at far below the Venus de Milo par. The way to
+compute your approach to the norm of the current ideal of beauty was
+to divide Lillian Russell’s adult weight by two, her measurements by
+three, and her vitality by four.
+
+A favorite hypothesis has it that, in the main, women dress and
+adorn themselves primarily for the appraising eye of women. It is
+then also fair to assume that women reduce for women. Until his eye
+and arm became trained to the lesser lines of his womanhood, the
+male-in-the-streets’ reaction was scarcely nothing at all.
+
+You’re all right as you are. What you want to reduce for? What’s the
+idea? You look good to me. Never did like skinny women. Cut out the
+dieting.
+
+The very new crop of adult young men, a generation born and reared in
+the slimming era, probably cerebrates about it not at all, except that
+by now our new male adults are trained to like their fair sex, should
+they stop to think at all, slab-like, flat-chested, hipless, and with
+skin tones of emacia carefully smeared over with sunburn, real or
+artificial.
+
+Next, starting from proportions which at first had seemed no more
+ominous than that cloud no larger than a man’s hand, the home-wrecking,
+nerve-wracking noun of the age burst explosively upon the scene.
+_Calories!_ And the counting of the women within the shadow of a
+guillotine became as naught, compared with the counting of the dieting
+women.
+
+      Five medium slices pickled beet      25 calories
+      One cup black unsweetened coffee      0 calories
+      One medium-sweet pickle              25 calories
+      Two tablespoons lemon juice          10 calories
+      Average helping lettuce, no oil       0 calories
+      One plum                             30 calories
+      One-half one small peach             30 calories
+      Five strawberries                    25 calories
+      One stalk celery                      3 calories
+      One slice cucumber                    1 calorie
+      Four ounces consommé, no fat         15 calories
+
+It was along about then, free, white, and over twenty-one, that the
+rabies-like foam of the slimming phobia of my era began to fleck me.
+
+In fact, it is possible to lay finger upon the very occasion of my
+surrender to the caloric age.
+
+Suddenly, and at one fell swoop, as they would have put it back in the
+days when Venus de Milo was not considered a stylish stout, all the
+inchoate unease of my overweight lifetime burst forth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A slim and lovely woman invited me to lunch with her at one of the
+town’s smart hostelries. As we walked through crowded dining-rooms,
+heads turned to the rhythm of her svelte grace. With the prerogative of
+the guest, I ordered first, off a menu the size of a tabloid newspaper.
+About my usual. A creamed celery soup (specialty of this particular
+hotel). A grilled chop rolled around a kidney. Green salad with an
+oil dressing. A sweet and coffee. Mine hostess, whose neck, so slim,
+was like a swan’s, ordered plain spinach (en branch please--not even
+buttered) and a demi-tasse.
+
+“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m dieting. Came back from White
+Sulphur last week one hundred and nine pounds, which is just exactly
+nine more pounds than this five-feet-nine is going to drag around. I’m
+foul with overweight.”
+
+Reader, as they would say back in the days when Lillian Russell
+attached her corset strings to the bed post and took three deep
+breaths, I died that day. Of shame. Suddenly it seemed to me, sitting
+there in the abundant coverage of thrice nine pounds overweight,
+that of grossness I must perish before the very eyes of the waiter
+so solicitously placing my four hundred calories of cream of celery
+before me. The hand with which I toyed at the tablespoon designed to
+convey them to my stiffened lips became as a pale and flaccid ham.
+The dead hammish hand of a lady who had suddenly died of the shame of
+her overweight. From every corner of that opulent dining-room, there
+appeared the delusion of the slim hands of slim ladies mocking at one
+of their sex who permitted indenture space for dimples on the backs of
+her hands, whose neck seemed shorter than it need have, who was fair,
+fat, and alas! size forty.
+
+And all the while, the waiter never even suspected that the lady toying
+with her cream-of-celery soup was dead. Of shame. And neither did her
+rodential hostess, nibbling at her spinach with her quivering little
+upper lip.
+
+So out of this moment of this dream of slenderness honing herself
+still further on a diet of a concoction that looked like a small
+portion of boiled green tissue paper, was born resolution.
+
+Mine no longer to reason why, mine but to do and diet.
+
+To be sure, over a period of years dating back to days when a college
+senior who detested basket ball had played it vociferously, and had
+swapped her cream pie at dormitory for abominated jello, there had been
+varied and expensive attempts at reduction.
+
+Subsequently, one unsuccessful experiment followed another. I had
+eighteen-dayed, counted calories, lamb-chopped-and-pineappled, sat in
+an elegant electric cabinet, and been treated exactly like a fowl in
+a Dutch oven; taken punishment from a famed Hollywood masseuse, that
+put me in the red, the black and blue; immersed my too, too solid
+self in baths of paraffine and mud; walked around reservoirs in sweat
+shirts; and without making appreciable inroads, had indulged in every
+out-and-indoor sport dear to funny-paper compilers.
+
+But this day of the spectacle of the dream of slenderness honing
+herself down on boiled green tissue-paper, something toward which the
+not inconsiderable bulk of me had doubtless sub- or unconsciously been
+traveling since the basket-ball-jello days, was suddenly bang up in
+front of me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Life, except on the basis of a lesser me, was no longer endurable.
+The fulsome sensation of being me, of having the vendeuse in the
+shop smear me, as I approached, with her appraising eye: “Blouse?
+Er--yes--er--size forty?” had reached its limit.
+
+Invalid, suddenly intolerable, were the years of the benignity of
+friends: “But you are really not too stout, my dear. You’re just
+plump. Nonsense! You wouldn’t be you, thin. Don’t you go dieting and
+ruin your health. Why, my sister-in-law got herself down to a bag of
+bones and died of getting herself there, that’s what happened to my
+sister-in-law. Yes, of course _I_ diet, but I wouldn’t if my weight was
+as becoming to me as yours is.”
+
+Apple sauce! I found myself hissing to myself in the days when that
+elegant compound noun was eloquent. Apple sauce! (without sugar in it).
+
+Suddenly the too, too solid flesh and I were in the death grapple.
+
+Latently, beneath my poor numbed powers of logic where this faddistic
+subject of diet was concerned, there stirred insurrection.
+
+Beneath the superficial layers of puerile and sometimes pernicious
+panaceas, eighteen-day ones, rolling-machine ones, sweat-shirt and
+hair-shirt ones, must somewhere lurk a fundamental truth.
+
+Casting aside, except as subsidiaries, the dumbbells, the
+static bicycle in its sweat-cabinet, the vibratory machine, the
+rowing-machine, the electric horse, I set up a fundamental truth for
+myself.
+
+Food makes fat.
+
+Exercise may aid and abet its con- or destruction, baths, massage,
+health waters and what not, be its handmaidens, but fundamentally,
+chemically, irrefutably, it is certain foods which make fat! And so
+it came about that the lesser me that corresponds to the one you
+see in reduction advertisements etched in dotted lines beside the
+before-taking silhouette, rose to the supreme heights of decision.
+Casting away the cluttering paraphernalia of the blue-enameled
+rolling-pins, the indoor bicycle, the five-foot Diet-book shelf, I
+decided to set out afresh upon the single supposition that in the
+normally functioning human being, _food makes fat_.
+
+I sought out the most all-around wise man of my acquaintance. He, in
+turn, directed me to a man especially wise in the highly specialized
+field of dietetics.
+
+There was little in this physician’s laboratory-like office to suggest
+what I had come to regard as part of the sumptuous adjuncts of slimming.
+
+The address was not good.
+
+I arrived there finally, to be received by a tall, rangy man with no
+manner at all, who promptly proceeded to take from me what had never
+been taken before, my metabolism.
+
+Metabolism is something that you surrender with a clothespin on your
+nose and what seems to be the cork end-piece of a bicycle handle bar
+inserted into your mouth.
+
+This walling up of the two major points of egress of what is known
+to the laity as your breathing, results in an inner panic which is
+recorded by an automatic pen attached to the apparatus which records
+the goings-on of your trapped breath.
+
+You do not give your metabolism standing up. You lie prone, first
+thinking you are going to die, then hoping it.
+
+The results of this sudden internal commotion, as recorded by the
+metabolism-machine, established my metabolistic processes as normal.
+This fact, in turn, established the further fact that there were no
+glandular alibis or pathological peculiarities to exonerate this case
+of overweight.
+
+To put it bluntly, food in wrong selection, proportion, and combination
+was the root of the evil.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now if the motif of my words seems to have chiefly to do with food and
+editorial we, please bear in mind that these words have chiefly to do
+with food and editorial we. The sum, substance and portent which give
+whatever justification I may be able to eke out of the penning of these
+pages of adjectives and split infinitives, being food and editorial we.
+
+This, however, is neither the time nor the place to go into the details
+of this new post-metabolism regime, except to emphasize that after
+years of dangerous and rudderless experimentation, I had at last found
+a man who seemed to understand the science of food as it applied to my
+human envelope.
+
+The lesser me (who now purchases her blouses in the misses’
+department) has not got it left in her to display the behaviorism of
+your true hero. “It was nothing at all. I saw my duty and I did it.”
+It _was_ something, let me tell you that. It was lean and rocky going,
+full of thorn. Rocky going and slow and uphill and torturous and to a
+dreadful sing-song rhythm that more and more frequently got into my
+way: What-of-it-what-of-it----
+
+Neither is the transformation from my hitherto normal attitude toward
+food as a pleasant means of subsistence, pretty telling.
+
+There were hours, there were days, during the long lean siege of
+the post-metabolism era, when part of a newly developed form of
+self-torture was to rise from the pickings of my table and retire to
+a solitude I sought chiefly in order to visualize, while the tortured
+saliva ran, the meal it might have been. Instead of the soulless and
+fatless broth, consisting of the water off boiled greens, creamed soup
+to cling warmingly to cold ribs; instead of the cube of boiled beef
+(three ounces, cooked), a filet of sole, lying tenderly beneath a
+velvety sauce and sprinkled through with capers, like the black tips of
+little ermines; hot rolls slit on the side and then pressed down again
+on a cube of sweet butter to fit into the aching void of no bread. A
+sweet, preferably souffléd, or even a lowly, a sugared and cinnamoned
+baked apple under cream, to take the place of eight gulps of water.
+
+There was to come a time, fallen so low had I, when to stand with my
+nose plastered against the plate-glass windows of lunch-room emporiums,
+where flapjacks, later to be smothered under melting butter and golden
+syrup were being juggled, became one of my favorite outdoor sports.
+
+Time has healed those aching voids. Alas! one of the cruel anachronisms
+of this whole cruelly anachronistic business is that deep within the
+lesser me nests regret that my palate, doubtless also leaner, has lost
+much of its fine gusty capacity to yearn.
+
+Today a dish of flapjacks beneath a golden blanket of maple syrup;
+a Roquefort dressing flowing off the smooth red flank of a stuffed
+tomato, a soufflé, a marron glacé, a crêpe suzette, a marzipan, leave
+me cold and without zest. Before them now I stand bowed with a regret
+that I have lost my capacity to regret them.
+
+But there is no denying the fact that there was that period when my
+secret absorption upon the subject of food (food denied me) became
+shamefully dominant. Not the fierce legitimate hunger pangs of one
+starving for lack of the ability to obtain food, but the flabby, rather
+shameful spectacle of one in the midst of the plentiful prerogatives of
+three meals a day, self-denied them.
+
+Frightening, mental traits began to creep upon me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Living chiefly upon myself, stoked on the low fuel values of lean
+meats and five-per-cent vegetables boiled in water, going through my
+pallid days always conscious of a catherine wheel of desire spinning
+somewhere within the center of my denied and shrinking anatomy, I began
+to take on a quite horrible and private pleasure in watching other
+people eat, or preferably, overeat.
+
+Myself relentless in passing up a toothsome dish, often as not
+especially prepared by a gracious hostess, I showed neither mercy nor
+consideration. But let that same hostess sit down at my own board and I
+became sly and spider-like, luring my victim into my gastronomic den of
+rich foods.
+
+Eat and overeat, something devilish within me seemed to shout. Eat, in
+order that I may all the more exultantly deny and work myself up into
+the ecstasies of martyrdom. How the saints must have learned to love
+their sweet agonies!
+
+Nor were these macabre mental processes to remain unsuspected. Chilly
+laughter began to greet the dreadful might of my hospitality. Glances
+flashed between my guests as sawing away at a thin slice of especially
+prepared lean beef, fried in mineral oil, I importuned, nay commanded,
+my futilely resisting guests to more of this and that richly devised
+concoction; pressed upon them the au gratin potato, the sherry-flavored
+tart, while I tinkled ice water against denied but omnivorous teeth,
+dallied with my chaste unused dessert spoon and rammed persuasion and
+second helpings of pistachio Melba down my friends.
+
+“Dammit,” cried one of my obese guests one night, goaded (and tempted)
+beyond endurance, “I won’t overstuff myself with another helping of
+this delicious bouillabaisse in order to enhance your lean inner spirit
+of self-righteousness! Dammit, I tell you, no! Well, just a little
+more--just a damn little more.”
+
+Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies “padded,” my
+friend, alas! spoke too truly. Hungry, whetted with a desire for foods
+that hitherto had never interested nor particularly tempted me, I
+schemed for the obesity of my lean friends and the greater obesity of
+my obese ones. Schemed, Reader! The sense of rising from my board,
+feebly stoked on lean meats broiled in mineral oil, five-per-cent
+vegetables (the ones that grow on the wrong side of the gastronomic
+railroad tracks; parsnips, cabbage, spinach, beets, greens, leeks,
+dandelions) brought me the strange sadistic martyr-like delights herein
+elsewhere described. I began to lose my friends.
+
+Neither, alas! did it stop here. As week by week, under a
+scientifically ordered regime which I partially defeated by overdoing
+my doctor’s dietary orders, the coverage began to diminish too rapidly
+to please him, and the strange psychology of a lady in the throes of a
+too rigid diet continued its baffling manifestations.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About the time that my slimming success began to be apparent to the
+appraising eyes of the sisterhood, my entrance into a room was the
+occasion for a gust of Oh’s and Ah’s, How-did-you-do-it? Why, I
+wouldn’t have known you! My dear, you’re marvelous! The heady wine of
+my success (on an empty stomach) began to induce giddiness.
+
+Hollow-eyed and a bit necky, I began to indulge in the private
+procedure of posing before my mirror, pinning in my loose waistband and
+twisting about a slightly loose-fleshed neck for the Jean Harlow angle
+or the Hepburn line of jaw. The first faint knob pushing out through my
+neck was something on which to hang high hope.
+
+It was during this period that, after having goaded her with food,
+I would remark maliciously to a friend: “Look over there at that
+spectacle! It is enough to cause a scientist to faint! A stout woman
+eating a potato!”
+
+Oh, I was the subject for inclusion in the rows of introspective ladies
+waiting in the outer rooms of smart Park Avenue psychoanalysts, I can
+tell you!
+
+It enraged me to see my friends eat, or, for that matter, drink,
+although a taste for alcohol or spirituous liquors had never made them
+part of my problem. It enraged me to see them eat; I could not bear not
+to see them overstuff.
+
+I now pitied obesity in others, and did all in my power to either
+induce or encourage it.
+
+Smoldering rage began within me if my entrance into a group of friends
+failed to elicit pæans of surprised admiration. In the twelvemonth of
+fanatical defiance of my doctor’s admonitions for temperance, I became
+a narrow-looking, bony individual with a disproportionately large head,
+wide, uninhabited-looking shoulders, old-looking hands, and a cold kind
+of chic.
+
+There was not a laugh in a carload of me.
+
+I had been through a grim, hungry, cold, and lonely fight, and always
+to that insistent tom-tom of rhythm, relentless as a drum-beat:
+What-of-it-what-of-it-what-of-it.
+
+I had won my spurs and they stuck out all over me.
+
+People with two chins and plenty of laughter above and below them said,
+without rue, that I had character. Friends, to my face at least, said I
+had “looks,” although toward the end even some of them began to admit
+that they had liked me better “before.”
+
+I had lost pounds and my sense of humor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The miracle of it, cheating my doctor as I did, was that I had not lost
+my health. Perhaps the funniness of me came rushing over me just in
+time to avert that. Perhaps the spectacle on all sides of women almost
+deliberately throwing the incomparable asset of their health away upon
+the absurd altar of slimming, for no other reason than the desire to
+be slim, helped, Reader, to snatch me from the jaws of a dieting lady
+novelist’s more or less untimely death.
+
+Not that I have come far enough along the line of mental readjustment
+to relinquish my diet. Slimming is a battle that is never won. But at
+least I am on to myself. I can laugh it off. And the spectacle of me to
+myself in the mirror is really nothing to leave home about, nor, so far
+as I can see, has there been the impulse on anyone’s part to indulge
+in that drastic measure in my behalf. I have not observed that those
+nearest and dearest, or that friends in general, like me any the more
+or less. If anything, you may deduce, less.
+
+Now this is not to convey that all diets for æsthetic ends are
+pernicious and that all slimming is vicious.
+
+On the contrary, excess baggage of flesh is not only unwieldy and
+unbeautiful, but it is more usually a health liability than an asset
+(see life-insurance-risk charts).
+
+As a matter of fact, undereating may generally be counted as a cardinal
+virtue. A wise and disturbing man it was who first passed out the
+golden advice to always leave the dinner table a little unsatisfied.
+Particularly since nature has seen fit to pester the human race with
+various appetites which are so far and away beyond requirements, are
+food and drink restraints to be regarded on the benign side.
+
+Moderation is one of the nicer practices.
+
+It is upon the widespread perils of the abuses of moderation in
+reduction diets that I would dwell.
+
+My average daily allotment of food allowed by a careful dietitian might
+not have always been to my liking, but it was ample to accomplish the
+slimming desire and at the same time maintain and nourish.
+
+Here is an average day’s menu; a menu which I advise no one to emulate
+without first consulting a physician. It is simple to understand its
+component parts. Proteins and minerals are emphasized; carbohydrates,
+fats, minimized:
+
+
+                              _Breakfast_
+
+                          1/2 small grapefruit
+                        2 eggs (boiled poached)
+                     1 tablespoon milk for coffee.
+
+
+                                _Lunch_
+
+               1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.)
+   5 per cent vegetables (the wrong-side-of-the-railroad-track ones).
+
+
+                                _Dinner_
+
+                             Same as lunch.
+
+Six to eight glasses of water per day.
+
+Do not take additional foods unless otherwise specified.
+
+“Not so bad,” you observe, “more than I usually consume during an
+average day.”
+
+Perhaps more food, but not more nourishment. But the point is that on
+this prescribed diet, with certain highly conservative expeditions
+after appreciable reduction had taken place, over into carbohydrates
+and fats, results would almost undoubtedly have been achieved. In time!
+But as the poundage begins shyly to retreat, the frantic psychology,
+characteristic of the thousands of the slimming women, present company
+included, sets in.
+
+Ours not to reason why. Ours but to diet and sometimes die.
+
+Despite physician’s admonitions to the contrary, fascinated by the
+gradual retreat of a hitherto more or less immutable, excess poundage;
+egged on by the appraising women; goaded by the diminishing story of
+the bathroom scales--the fascination for speed began to cause this eye
+to glitter.
+
+More pounds per week. Faster. Quicker. Slimmer!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The daily menu, about which I not infrequently lied to my doctor, began
+to read something like this:
+
+
+                              _Breakfast_
+
+                        Black unsweetened coffee
+                           1/2 small orange.
+
+
+                             _Eleven A. M._
+
+                       Black unsweetened coffee.
+
+
+                                _Lunch_
+
+                           1 head lettuce or
+              1/2 head cabbage-slaw, mineral-oil dressing.
+
+
+                             _Three P. M._
+
+                       Black unsweetened coffee.
+
+
+                                _Dinner_
+
+               1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.)
+                         5 per cent vegetables.
+
+Lean pallid days had arrived along about now; days when I went about
+with the strained face of a plucked fowl, brittle-looking skin sagging
+for want of some place to go.
+
+No conversation survived my entrance into a room. The men might
+struggle a bit to carry forward with a bit of technocracy, Muscle
+Shoals or World Series, but the following two or three minutes carried
+a guarantee that one subject alone would predominate.
+
+How did you do it? Tell me what you eat. Are you taking medicine?
+Awfully dangerous, you know. Now tell me what you had for breakfast. Do
+you mix your starches and proteins? Awfully bad for you! Now isn’t that
+curious, somebody told me you were living on some sort of a reduction
+tea made by an East Indian and had not touched solid food for two
+months. But my dear, you mustn’t let yourself get haggard. Not that you
+are!
+
+Oh no, not that I was.
+
+Sometimes dragging myself to bed, triumphant, faint, cold, tired,
+uncertain whether to laugh or cry, with not quite the energy to do
+either, I dared not glance at the white rattletrap my mirror would have
+revealed to me.
+
+Instead I crept to rest, gladly, exhaustedly, and, to keep from
+laughing or crying or both, fell to contemplating the slight ridge my
+body made beneath the coverings, or trying to crowd back across my
+darkness not, “fancies freed, transient and exploring,” but fancies of
+a froth of café parfait foaming down the flank of a long slim goblet or
+of a slice of four-layer cream cake in which to sink teeth was denied,
+in order to remove taste and memory of liver fried in mineral oil and
+lettuce with its cutting dash of lemon juice.
+
+I must have been as easy to live with, during that period before I lost
+both appetite and desire for the foods that used to haunt me, as a lady
+in a padded cell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strangely, the vigor for work did not desert. It was an escape, to
+sit down at a desk and throw off the gnawing awareness of the human
+envelope. One can almost concoct the fantastic doctrine that the brain
+is a favorite child of the human body and before any other part is fed,
+is given the cream (or in this case skimmed milk) of the intake.
+
+However, just what mental processes might have resulted from that same
+period, corn fed, must remain forever, to those who palpitatingly would
+know, in the limbo of the hypothetical.
+
+Like almost everything else in moderation, slimming has its points. Its
+excellent points. Outside moderation, and ’tis of thee I sing, it takes
+on the proportion of menace to that half of the race which is intrusted
+with incubation and delivery of the species.
+
+Biological years move slowly and science does not pretend to offer
+up prematurely compiled data to prove that slenderized women are
+necessarily better or worse breeding-machines.
+
+Besides, my own paternal ninety-eight-pound grandmother, who produced
+six two-hundred-pound sons was remarked, but scarcely remarkable, for
+it.
+
+On the other hand, it requires no barrage of data to logically assume
+and conclude that a race of undernourished, highly nervous women with
+a low resistance to disease and an abhorrence of bust measurements, is
+going to leave its mark upon tomorrow’s child.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Italy, Il Duce openly commands that women be big, ripe, fecund,
+intimating, with no particular authority for it, that these processes
+go together. As a rule he assumes, and rightly, that women who have
+many children stop being slender in the process. And so he extols the
+robust mother who concedes that her beauty lies not in her shape, but
+in her rôle as mother.
+
+I see no reason why it cannot lie in both, unless the beauty standards
+of the female of an era drop so low that the proportions of a fertile
+adult woman must hover around those of a fourteen-year-old boy....
+
+To be sure, for the moment, in America at least, the movement away from
+the boyish figure seems to be on the up and up, although the Mae West
+atavism seems to be little more than a half-hearted fad, and millions
+lie waiting for the chemist or alchemist who can present the human race
+with the miracle of a slimming serum.
+
+Perhaps after that day comes we will be a happier and a healthier race
+and the laugh will be on nature, who for thousands of years had made
+us the butt of her old joke on the fats and the thins, plying some of
+us with her too, too ample coverage, condemning others to an immutable
+destiny of skin and bones.
+
+Of the two evils, the latter, by insurance companies at least, is
+reckoned the least hazardous.
+
+For myself, alas! I cannot even claim that I feel better slim than I
+did, not so slim. I felt vigorous then. I feel almost as vigorous now.
+Overweight in excess is beyond controversy an undesirable and dangerous
+state. If the male more easily escapes its æsthetic menace, he falls
+rigidly within its pathological perils. The female of the species,
+more’s the pity, is its social, biological and æsthetic victim.
+
+But now that the laugh has come back to me, I want to reach out a
+deterring, an ancient-looking hand, to the hordes of slimming women
+as I observe them nibbling at celery stalks over lunch tables,
+swapping their diets across bridge tables, baring their backs to the
+rolling-machine and their breasts to camphor rubs.
+
+And even to those who are dieting for good and authentic reason of one
+sort or another, I want to reach out that same ancient-looking hand to
+impress upon them the danger of the short-cut food fad; of following
+any diet regime outside a physician’s prescribed one; of succumbing to
+the perils of the pineapple and lamb-chop group of fantasies; of the
+terrible risks involved in accepting what is almost certain to be the
+he-says and the she-says dietary word of their not always thoughtful
+dieting sisters; of the falseness of current æsthetic values as they
+fluctuate to the season’s fashion; of the absurdity of a woman weighing
+one hundred and nine pounds undernourishing herself on boiled green
+tissue-paper.
+
+Whether it is to his credit or due to just plain lack of
+self-discipline, the fact remains that with his middle-aged
+susceptibility to embonpoint, the male has not gone to extremes in
+combating his foe. True, too often he self-indulgently tolerates its
+perilous and heavy folds about his heartbeat, and rather than suffer
+the weary battle of reduction, allows himself to take on the convexity
+of a barrel. The spas are crowded with him, he is not beautiful, and
+one doubts if he is as happy as he pretends to look. But at least he
+had not reduced the dietary habits of a nation to roughage, bulk and
+greens. In fact, watching his women totter past him on their fanatical
+way to the altar of the emaciated false goddess of their passion, he is
+apt to look back rather wistfully upon the good old days when Pauline
+Hall was the hour-glass beauty of his dreams.
+
+Observe the shopkeeper catering to this psychological invalidism of
+his women customers. The gown he hangs in his show window is shrewdly
+pinned back at the waist line to one third its natural size, thereby
+capturing with its suggestion of anemia, the eye of the woman who
+visualizes herself commensurate with it.
+
+The measurements of the mannequins upon whom are draped the models of
+the couturières and by way of whom the measurement standards for women
+are devilishly established, are usually those of underdeveloped boys.
+
+The woman of average proportion who enters such a shop in the hope
+of finding a ready-to-wear gown is apt to depart feeling herself
+Gargantuan in a land of Lilliputians.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What thousands of normal healthy women have been driven to starvation,
+illness, even death, in order to more nearly conform to the adolescent
+standards established by the pale little mannequins who stand hours in
+workrooms while the standardizers and glorifiers of their puniness,
+drape their poor little flat chests, wind around the knobs of their
+sparrow-like hips, and wrap their little concave stomachs in fabrics
+designed to accent emacia!
+
+One wonders what place the boyish-breasted flapper of half a decade
+ago, or the scarcely less spare female of today, will ultimately have
+alongside the respective ideals of Ruth among the corn, Mme. de Staël,
+Signorina Mona Lisa, Laura, Venus, Winged Victory, Lillian Russell.
+
+More and more, today’s standards of American Beauty are being set
+up and authorized by the bizarre little so-called civilization known
+as Hollywood, home of the eighteen-day diet, the orange juice, the
+skimmed-milk-and-baked-potato, the liquid bread, the thyrodic bath
+salt, the paraffin sweat, the holy rolling-machine, the pugilistic
+massage, and almost every reduction fad known to this tormented year of
+our Lord.
+
+By way of Hollywood, the young man is thereby automatically trained to
+accept his female of the species slinky, low in vitality, and concave
+in curve. In fact, a plump débutante in the family is more of a problem
+than a mental delinquent.
+
+And meanwhile, the slimmed, the irritable, the hungry woman takes
+on the proportion of one of our minor menaces. She does not add to
+the gaiety of the nation or of the home; she is no healthier, she is
+prettier only according to the frail standards of a papier-maché city
+on the west coast where the human envelope is the stock in trade. She
+is a success chiefly to herself and to her sister of similar standards.
+
+Now I am aware of a certain perverse psychology which you may suspect
+I am beginning to manifest. My definition of white hair is something
+you admire only when it is on another woman.
+
+This is not a plea for the tolerance or toleration of excess weight,
+just so it is on the other fellow. It is a plea for intolerance of
+excess underweight.
+
+I am personally too infected with this slimming phobia to hope for
+complete redemption. I may come back, but probably not all the way. As
+a matter of fact, I would not come all the way. My struggle is to find
+the moral courage to make the partial return. The slimming years have
+been so long. I have won my battle knowing that it is a battle that is
+never truly won and that the helmet and the spurs cannot be laid aside.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It remains practically impossible for me to sit down whole-heartedly
+to a meal among whole-hearted folk. What has long since become the more
+or less rare spectacle of an American woman partaking of potato is
+still sufficient to send chills down this spine. By now, expert in that
+strange branch of lower mathematics, the counting of the calories, I
+can compute on sight the heat and food value of a helping of filet of
+sole (3 × 2-1/2) or of one slice of zwieback (3-1/2 × 1-1/2 × 1/2).
+
+To violate by one calorie is to invite regrets out of all proportion to
+the delights of the transgression. One suck off the sugared sides of
+a candy sour-ball can cause one to scuttle to the scales in fear and
+trembling, or one spoonful off the side of the pyramid of ice-cream on
+your dinner partner’s dessert plate, transform you into a distrait and
+regretful guest.
+
+But at least mine hungry eyes have a certain sharpened clarity which
+enables them to see the funniness and the menace of the spectacle of
+the slimming women.
+
+We are funny. Realizing that, we might long since have learned to
+laugh it off, except, alas! laughter is supposed to be fattening!
+
+It is not a simple matter to get a laugh out of a slimming woman. It is
+the easiest thing she does not do.
+
+My laughs have come back slowly, mere spurts at first, as from a spring
+gone dry but about to yield again.
+
+It means that even while, with me, meal-time still remains largely
+a process of omission and elimination, I am at least on to myself.
+Ladies, really, it is to laugh.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Today, four unrelenting years after the episode of the boiled tissue
+paper, I now enter a shop to have a vendeuse glide up to me with: “For
+yourself? Misses department across the aisle.”
+
+Well, what of it?
+
+This much of it! If a slimmer, a sadder, and perhaps a wiser me has
+succeeded in helping to convey to the slimmers of today and the
+potential slimmers of tomorrow some of the ridiculousness and some of
+the perils of the slimming age, then the public sacrifice of myself
+upon the altar of mine own absurdities will not have been in vain.
+
+Would I do it all over again?
+
+“Well,” I reply, as I continue to count my calories, “well--er----”
+
+In conclusion, Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies
+munched chocolates in bed, I desire to make public the following
+acknowledgments:
+
+  To a husband who bore with me during a period when a snapping-turtle
+  shared roof with him.
+
+  To my doctor to whom I lied.
+
+  To my many friends upon whom at my supposedly hospitable board, my
+  greenly glittering eye rested in one hatred or another.
+
+  To a cook who learned to defile her art in order to brew me dishes
+  unwanted and unsavory.
+
+  To the books written during this period which abound perhaps unduly
+  in foods coveted by their author.
+
+  To hosts and hostesses who offered me their hospitality only that I
+  might wave aside with supercilious celery stalk their good meat and
+  wassail.
+
+  To my comfortably stout friends upon whom my disdainful eye rested
+  not kindly.
+
+  To my slender friends upon whom my good-as-you-now gaze has
+  assailingly glared.
+
+  To the human race for bearing with me.
+
+  To myself for finally realizing that I am funnier than any character
+  I have ever succeeded in depicting in fiction.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+                          =Transcriber’s Notes=
+
+Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78225 ***
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+      No food with my meals | Project Gutenberg
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78225 ***</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe30">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class= "center xlarge">
+NO FOOD<br>
+WITH MY MEALS
+</p>
+
+<p class= "center xlarge">
+O</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center">
+    BOOKS BY</p>
+<p class= "center xlarge">
+FANNIE HURST</p>
+
+
+<p class= "center xlarge">
+O</p>
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="smcap center">
+JUST AROUND THE CORNER<br>
+EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG<br>
+GASLIGHT SONATAS<br>
+HUMORESQUE<br>
+STAR DUST<br>
+THE VERTICAL CITY<br>
+LUMMOX<br>
+APPASSIONATA<br>
+MANNEQUIN<br>
+SONG OF LIFE<br>
+A PRESIDENT IS BORN<br>
+PROCESSION<br>
+FIVE AND TEN<br>
+BACK STREET<br>
+IMITATION OF LIFE<br>
+ANITRA’S DANCE
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h1>
+    NO FOOD<br>
+    WITH MY<br>
+    MEALS
+  </h1>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center"><i>by</i></p>
+
+<p class= "center xlarge">Fannie Hurst</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe4">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/ititle.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="center">1935</p>
+
+<p class="smcap center">HARPER &amp; BROTHERS<br>
+PUBLISHERS<br>
+NEW YORK AND LONDON</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak">
+    NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Copyright, 1935, by Fannie Hurst</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Printed in the United States of America</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used
+for dramatic, motion- or talking-picture purposes without
+written authorization from the holder of these rights.
+Nor may the text or part thereof be reproduced in any
+manner whatsoever without permission in writing. For
+information address: Harper &amp; Brothers, 49 East 33rd
+Street, New York, N. Y.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">FIRST EDITION</p>
+
+<p class="center">A-K</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2>
+    NO FOOD<br>
+    WITH MY MEALS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class= "center xlarge">
+O</p>
+
+
+<p class="drop-cap">Sometimes,
+regarding my slimmed human envelope,
+which at best seems designed more for service
+than beauty, I do ponder.</p>
+
+<p>Not so much upon its frailty, which has
+been achieved at the cost of no food with
+my meals, but upon the frailty of the spiritual
+inhabitant of that envelope.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding that spiritual inhabitant at the
+restless business of trying to learn to live in
+her house of clay, faint ironic laughter, the
+kind apt to be induced by a breakfast of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span>lemon juice and hot water, rumbles along
+the inner me.</p>
+
+<p>Some women are born frail. Some have
+frailty thrust upon them. Still others achieve
+it, and at what price glory!</p>
+
+<p><i>Trivia</i>, you say?</p>
+
+<p>Not at all.</p>
+
+<p>What is <i>trivia</i>, and what is not?</p>
+
+<p>If, by virtue of its relativity to my concerns,
+the dahlia in my garden, the color of
+my tweeds, the nick in my dining-room
+table, or the market price of strawberries become
+important, then they <i>are</i> important.
+Everything or nothing matters.</p>
+
+<p>When even half of one hundred and
+twenty-three million human beings on a
+North American continent begins to care
+passionately about adhering in standards of
+beauty to formulae concocted somewhere
+between anywhere and Hollywood, then
+that state of mind becomes important.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>Sufficiently so to create neurosis, psychosis, and
+acidosis.</p>
+
+<p>No state of mind or body flecked with
+evidence of phobia can remain trivial, no
+matter how trivial the minds and bodies
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>It was about four years ago that the slimming
+phobia of my sex and era first began to
+fleck me with its rabies-like foam.</p>
+
+<p>Up to that period, although overweight
+by a not inconsiderable poundage, I had not
+given complete rein to the latent unease
+which sporadically smote me at my abundance.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, overweight from my advent as an
+eleven-pound baby, there was a brief period
+around adolescence when my opulence
+seemed something of an asset.</p>
+
+<p>“Guess how much she weighs,” I can hear
+my grandfather proudly challenging, as he
+stood me on the sitting-room table and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>named a good eight or ten pounds over and
+above the most conservative estimate.</p>
+
+<p>Ladies called me apple-cheeked, and
+gentlemen pinched them. I strutted, but
+even back there, there was unease in that
+strut.</p>
+
+<p>But generally speaking, up to the time of
+my acute surrender to my sex’s phobia for
+slimming, the matter of anatomical distinction
+or peculiarity was scarcely within the
+pale of discussion. You were fat or slim, narrow
+or wide, dark or blond, according to a
+divine appropriation over which you had
+little control. To be sure, there was usually
+a “Fatty” in the schoolroom or on the block,
+but generally speaking, one did not dwell
+upon the flesh, or lack of it.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Beauty, had it not been parceled out in
+your direction, was something that could be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>brewed within the spirit in a manner to offset
+the external lack. This you were taught at
+the parental knee. Although it was not very
+satisfactory, you let it go at that. Except, why
+were hearts of gold and curls of gold so rarely
+supposed to strike simultaneously. How odd
+of God....</p>
+
+<p>Now take this matter of being a plump
+little girl. You were apple-cheeked and got
+pinched for their cuteness, but then, you had
+to go and be a fat little girl, too. Why
+couldn’t one be a slender little girl—and
+apple-cheeked!</p>
+
+<p>If you were unduly slim, you were simultaneously
+apt not to be apple-cheeked. There
+God went again, being odd. Slim, your portion
+was usually the bitter one of cod-liver
+oil and shoulder braces, whereas in plump
+reverse, you were called the picture of health
+and encouraged in your natural predilection
+for the creamed potatoes and marshmallow
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>fillings which were usually anathema to the
+slim cod-liver oilers.</p>
+
+<p>There was to come an adult time however,
+in the life of this narrator, when as the hum
+of a swarm of locusts over the peace of her
+mind, the dietary chant of the dieting women
+began to separate itself into a specific and
+ominous roar all its own.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually, and oh, so insidiously, the spectacle
+of you, going your somewhat robust
+routine of three normal, if perhaps unscientific
+meals a day, in a state of taken-for-granted
+health that made it no theme for
+discussion; gradually you became to yourself
+a not edifying spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>There was too much of something with
+you. Yourself.</p>
+
+<p>Awareness, faint as the footsteps of a fly
+along the back of a neck, began to creep upon
+you so lightly at first that it was scarcely more
+than a tickling across your consciousness.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span></p>
+
+<p>It began from who knows what remote
+scratchings of unease, in a changing attitude
+toward such cardinal institutions as
+breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>There had recently arrived a newcomer in
+our Middle West midst, a Mrs. de Lisle from
+New York, a slim, pretty little lady much
+criticized by the impeccable housewives on
+the pretty residential street of our pretty city,
+for lax housekeeping, and who was openly
+known to have her breakfast (roll and coffee)
+in bed.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Now you take what has since become this
+more or less national institution of roll and
+coffee in the morning. It has its points æsthetically
+and doubtless gastronomically. But
+along about ten-thirty in the affairs of a busy
+morning those points, during the first period
+of the transition from more substantial
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>matinal fare, begin to reside chiefly in the aching
+void at the pit of the stomach.</p>
+
+<p>Breakfast tradition dies hard, particularly
+if that tradition happens to have been born
+and bred in the Middle West.</p>
+
+<p>We lived not on a farm mind you, in these
+years of my late teens when too much of the
+corporeal me first began to seem too much
+with me, but in a large Middle West metropolis
+of urban habits of a most complicated
+nature. We ate our corn on cob from
+silver end-pieces, traveled east in a manner
+your Easterner seldom traveled west, and
+were among the first of the American communities
+to be stricken with such respective
+epidemics as burnt wood, honitan, ping-pong,
+Kinloch telephones, horseless carriages
+and hobble skirts.</p>
+
+<p>At seven-thirty o’clock during the first
+eighteen years of my life spent there, a family
+of three, consisting of my father, the president
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>of a fair sized shoe factory, but who
+nevertheless, punctiliously slid back his roll-top
+desk at eight o’clock; an alert and brainy
+housekeeper, my mother, and a slightly overweight
+youngster, myself, sat down to a
+breakfast worthy of the name. Literally we
+broke fast. Oatmeal in a covered dish was
+served out with plentiful additions of butter,
+sugar and yellowish cream. A platter of bacon
+and eggs, the eggs not necessarily portioned
+out along the conventional lines of two per
+person. My father was not adverse to a third,
+the frailer members of the family usually
+contenting themselves with two. Toast or hot
+biscuits or both arrived in a wicker basket, all
+tucked in under a red-and-white napkin with
+a fringed edge. There was usually hominy or
+grits or stacks of griddle cakes with apple
+jelly or molasses. Coffee and plenty of it in a
+beautiful old “Meissen” china pot with a
+gilt snout, and, more often than not, crumb
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>coffee cake, still hot, and thickly sprinkled
+with cinnamon and sugar.</p>
+
+<p>You ate, aided and abetted, it is true, by
+maternal duress of the most insistent nature,
+to have more of this, and another helping of
+that, on the respective suppositions that a
+business man was facing a long and exacting
+day, a growing child her school, and a housekeeper
+her arduous routine.</p>
+
+<p>You ate! And thereby were to become susceptible
+for life to a tickling of the nostrils
+at the smell of frying bacon rushing up from
+the servant’s quarters as you, in your bedroom,
+sip black unsweetened coffee or gulp
+orange juice.</p>
+
+<p>I was reared to like breakfast. I still like
+breakfast. Heaven my witness, I have not
+eaten a breakfast in twelve years.</p>
+
+<p>Because it was about twelve years ago that
+the first whirrings of the dietary chant of the
+dieting women began to assail my ears. In
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>fact, glancing back, it becomes apparent that
+about the time rolls-and-coffee became synonymous
+for the old noun breakfast, was
+launched the dietary era of my life.</p>
+
+<p>It was all insidious, it was all as the humming
+of locusts, it was all as the fluty wings
+of the voice of my sex.</p>
+
+<p>What had hitherto been only the vague
+unease at the poor, or rather the ample, showing
+put up by my externalities of figure; an
+unease which had been sweetly soothed by
+parents, now began to assert itself more positively.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Suddenly, or so it seemed to a languidly
+awakened awareness, the biology of my entire
+sisterhood seemed to have undergone an
+evolution. Female silhouettes began to take
+on the concavity of the letter C. Curves, only
+as they collapsed inward upon the anatomy,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>were apparently fit to be visible to the naked
+eye of the beholder. The bust measurements
+of the potential and actual mothers of the
+race dropped to the proportions of their
+young sons and brothers. The old, well-nourished
+ideal of the Venus de Milo became a
+lummox. Something actually rodential began
+to characterize the upper lips of the
+women of the slimming era as they gnawed
+at the raw carrot and the herbaceous green.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the stuff of enameled rolling-pins
+for kneading too, too solid lady-flesh, rubber
+reducing girdles, bathroom scales to match
+any color scheme, reduction salts in the pastel
+shades, electric-light cabinets, rowing-machines,
+<i>et al.</i>, new industries were born. Restaurateurs
+became Melba toast, spinach, and
+saccharine conscious. Spas began to find
+obesity, real and imagined, more profitable
+than liver complaint, gall stones, and gout
+rolled in one. Came the dawn of a dark hour
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>when public opinion demanded that a grand-opera
+diva must be able to look down and see
+her own toes.</p>
+
+<p>Such diet-derivative expressions as incompatibility,
+mental cruelty, fanaticism, irritability,
+cussedness, began more and more to
+creep into the phraseology of the divorce
+courts.</p>
+
+<p>Overnight, as it were, that quick barometer,
+the show girl, achieved the biological
+phenomenon of shedding her hips, and measurements
+fluctuated more violently than a
+falling stock market. Figures began to slump
+and tip the scales at far below the Venus de
+Milo par. The way to compute your approach
+to the norm of the current ideal of
+beauty was to divide Lillian Russell’s adult
+weight by two, her measurements by three,
+and her vitality by four.</p>
+
+<p>A favorite hypothesis has it that, in the
+main, women dress and adorn themselves
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>primarily for the appraising eye of women.
+It is then also fair to assume that women
+reduce for women. Until his eye and arm became
+trained to the lesser lines of his womanhood,
+the male-in-the-streets’ reaction was
+scarcely nothing at all.</p>
+
+<p>You’re all right as you are. What you want
+to reduce for? What’s the idea? You look
+good to me. Never did like skinny women.
+Cut out the dieting.</p>
+
+<p>The very new crop of adult young men, a
+generation born and reared in the slimming
+era, probably cerebrates about it not at all,
+except that by now our new male adults are
+trained to like their fair sex, should they stop
+to think at all, slab-like, flat-chested, hipless,
+and with skin tones of emacia carefully
+smeared over with sunburn, real or artificial.</p>
+
+<p>Next, starting from proportions which at
+first had seemed no more ominous than that
+cloud no larger than a man’s hand, the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>home-wrecking, nerve-wracking noun of the age
+burst explosively upon the scene. <i>Calories!</i>
+And the counting of the women within the
+shadow of a guillotine became as naught,
+compared with the counting of the dieting
+women.</p>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Five medium slices pickled beet</td>
+<td class="tdr">25 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">One cup black unsweetened coffee</td>
+<td class="tdr">0 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">One medium-sweet pickle</td>
+<td class="tdr">25 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Two tablespoons lemon juice</td>
+<td class="tdr">10 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Average helping lettuce, no oil</td>
+<td class="tdr">0 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">One plum</td>
+<td class="tdr">30 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">One-half one small peach</td>
+<td class="tdr">30 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Five strawberries</td>
+<td class="tdr">25 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">One stalk celery</td>
+<td class="tdr">3 calories</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">One slice cucumber</td>
+<td class="tdr">1 calorie</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">Four ounces consommé, no fat</td>
+<td class="tdr">15 calories</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>It was along about then, free, white, and
+over twenty-one, that the rabies-like foam of
+the slimming phobia of my era began to
+fleck me.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span></p>
+
+<p>In fact, it is possible to lay finger upon the
+very occasion of my surrender to the caloric
+age.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, and at one fell swoop, as they
+would have put it back in the days when
+Venus de Milo was not considered a stylish
+stout, all the inchoate unease of my overweight
+lifetime burst forth.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A slim and lovely woman invited me to
+lunch with her at one of the town’s smart
+hostelries. As we walked through crowded
+dining-rooms, heads turned to the rhythm of
+her svelte grace. With the prerogative of the
+guest, I ordered first, off a menu the size of
+a tabloid newspaper. About my usual. A
+creamed celery soup (specialty of this particular
+hotel). A grilled chop rolled around a
+kidney. Green salad with an oil dressing. A
+sweet and coffee. Mine hostess, whose neck,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>so slim, was like a swan’s, ordered plain spinach
+(en branch please—not even buttered)
+and a demi-tasse.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m dieting.
+Came back from White Sulphur last
+week one hundred and nine pounds, which
+is just exactly nine more pounds than this
+five-feet-nine is going to drag around. I’m
+foul with overweight.”</p>
+
+<p>Reader, as they would say back in the days
+when Lillian Russell attached her corset
+strings to the bed post and took three deep
+breaths, I died that day. Of shame. Suddenly
+it seemed to me, sitting there in the abundant
+coverage of thrice nine pounds overweight,
+that of grossness I must perish before the
+very eyes of the waiter so solicitously placing
+my four hundred calories of cream of celery
+before me. The hand with which I toyed at
+the tablespoon designed to convey them to
+my stiffened lips became as a pale and flaccid
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>ham. The dead hammish hand of a lady who
+had suddenly died of the shame of her overweight.
+From every corner of that opulent
+dining-room, there appeared the delusion
+of the slim hands of slim ladies mocking
+at one of their sex who permitted indenture
+space for dimples on the backs of her hands,
+whose neck seemed shorter than it need
+have, who was fair, fat, and alas! size
+forty.</p>
+
+<p>And all the while, the waiter never even
+suspected that the lady toying with her
+cream-of-celery soup was dead. Of shame.
+And neither did her rodential hostess, nibbling
+at her spinach with her quivering little
+upper lip.</p>
+
+<p>So out of this moment of this dream of
+slenderness honing herself still further on
+a diet of a concoction that looked like a small
+portion of boiled green tissue paper, was
+born resolution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span></p>
+
+<p>Mine no longer to reason why, mine but
+to do and diet.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, over a period of years dating
+back to days when a college senior who detested
+basket ball had played it vociferously,
+and had swapped her cream pie at dormitory
+for abominated jello, there had been varied
+and expensive attempts at reduction.</p>
+
+<p>Subsequently, one unsuccessful experiment
+followed another. I had eighteen-dayed,
+counted calories, lamb-chopped-and-pineappled,
+sat in an elegant electric cabinet, and
+been treated exactly like a fowl in a Dutch
+oven; taken punishment from a famed Hollywood
+masseuse, that put me in the red, the
+black and blue; immersed my too, too solid
+self in baths of paraffine and mud; walked
+around reservoirs in sweat shirts; and without
+making appreciable inroads, had indulged
+in every out-and-indoor sport dear to
+funny-paper compilers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span></p>
+
+<p>But this day of the spectacle of the dream
+of slenderness honing herself down on boiled
+green tissue-paper, something toward which
+the not inconsiderable bulk of me had doubtless
+sub- or unconsciously been traveling
+since the basket-ball-jello days, was suddenly
+bang up in front of me.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Life, except on the basis of a lesser me,
+was no longer endurable. The fulsome sensation
+of being me, of having the vendeuse
+in the shop smear me, as I approached, with
+her appraising eye: “Blouse? Er—yes—er—size
+forty?” had reached its limit.</p>
+
+<p>Invalid, suddenly intolerable, were the
+years of the benignity of friends: “But you
+are really not too stout, my dear. You’re just
+plump. Nonsense! You wouldn’t be you,
+thin. Don’t you go dieting and ruin your
+health. Why, my sister-in-law got herself
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>down to a bag of bones and died of getting
+herself there, that’s what happened to my
+sister-in-law. Yes, of course <i>I</i> diet, but I
+wouldn’t if my weight was as becoming to me
+as yours is.”</p>
+
+<p>Apple sauce! I found myself hissing to
+myself in the days when that elegant compound
+noun was eloquent. Apple sauce!
+(without sugar in it).</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the too, too solid flesh and I were
+in the death grapple.</p>
+
+<p>Latently, beneath my poor numbed powers
+of logic where this faddistic subject of
+diet was concerned, there stirred insurrection.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the superficial layers of puerile
+and sometimes pernicious panaceas, eighteen-day
+ones, rolling-machine ones, sweat-shirt
+and hair-shirt ones, must somewhere lurk a
+fundamental truth.</p>
+
+<p>Casting aside, except as subsidiaries, the
+dumbbells, the static bicycle in its sweat-cabinet,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>the vibratory machine, the rowing-machine,
+the electric horse, I set up a fundamental
+truth for myself.</p>
+
+<p>Food makes fat.</p>
+
+<p>Exercise may aid and abet its con- or destruction,
+baths, massage, health waters and
+what not, be its handmaidens, but fundamentally,
+chemically, irrefutably, it is certain
+foods which make fat! And so it came
+about that the lesser me that corresponds to
+the one you see in reduction advertisements
+etched in dotted lines beside the before-taking
+silhouette, rose to the supreme heights
+of decision. Casting away the cluttering paraphernalia
+of the blue-enameled rolling-pins,
+the indoor bicycle, the five-foot Diet-book
+shelf, I decided to set out afresh upon the
+single supposition that in the normally functioning
+human being, <i>food makes fat</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I sought out the most all-around wise man
+of my acquaintance. He, in turn, directed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>me to a man especially wise in the highly
+specialized field of dietetics.</p>
+
+<p>There was little in this physician’s laboratory-like
+office to suggest what I had come to
+regard as part of the sumptuous adjuncts of
+slimming.</p>
+
+<p>The address was not good.</p>
+
+<p>I arrived there finally, to be received by a
+tall, rangy man with no manner at all,
+who promptly proceeded to take from me
+what had never been taken before, my
+metabolism.</p>
+
+<p>Metabolism is something that you surrender
+with a clothespin on your nose and
+what seems to be the cork end-piece of
+a bicycle handle bar inserted into your
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>This walling up of the two major points
+of egress of what is known to the laity as
+your breathing, results in an inner panic
+which is recorded by an automatic pen
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>attached to the apparatus which records the
+goings-on of your trapped breath.</p>
+
+<p>You do not give your metabolism standing
+up. You lie prone, first thinking you are
+going to die, then hoping it.</p>
+
+<p>The results of this sudden internal commotion,
+as recorded by the metabolism-machine,
+established my metabolistic processes
+as normal. This fact, in turn, established the
+further fact that there were no glandular
+alibis or pathological peculiarities to exonerate
+this case of overweight.</p>
+
+<p>To put it bluntly, food in wrong selection,
+proportion, and combination was the root of
+the evil.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Now if the motif of my words seems to
+have chiefly to do with food and editorial
+we, please bear in mind that these words
+have chiefly to do with food and editorial
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>we. The sum, substance and portent which
+give whatever justification I may be able to
+eke out of the penning of these pages of
+adjectives and split infinitives, being food
+and editorial we.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is neither the time nor the
+place to go into the details of this new post-metabolism
+regime, except to emphasize that
+after years of dangerous and rudderless
+experimentation, I had at last found a
+man who seemed to understand the
+science of food as it applied to my human
+envelope.</p>
+
+<p>The lesser me (who now purchases her
+blouses in the misses’ department) has not
+got it left in her to display the behaviorism
+of your true hero. “It was nothing at all. I
+saw my duty and I did it.” It <i>was</i> something,
+let me tell you that. It was lean and rocky
+going, full of thorn. Rocky going and slow
+and uphill and torturous and to a dreadful
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>sing-song rhythm that more and more frequently
+got into my way: What-of-it-what-of-it——</p>
+
+<p>Neither is the transformation from my
+hitherto normal attitude toward food as a
+pleasant means of subsistence, pretty telling.</p>
+
+<p>There were hours, there were days, during
+the long lean siege of the post-metabolism
+era, when part of a newly developed form of
+self-torture was to rise from the pickings of
+my table and retire to a solitude I sought
+chiefly in order to visualize, while the tortured
+saliva ran, the meal it might have been.
+Instead of the soulless and fatless broth, consisting
+of the water off boiled greens,
+creamed soup to cling warmingly to cold
+ribs; instead of the cube of boiled beef (three
+ounces, cooked), a filet of sole, lying tenderly
+beneath a velvety sauce and sprinkled
+through with capers, like the black tips of
+little ermines; hot rolls slit on the side and
+then pressed down again on a cube of sweet
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>butter to fit into the aching void of no bread.
+A sweet, preferably souffléd, or even a lowly,
+a sugared and cinnamoned baked apple
+under cream, to take the place of eight gulps
+of water.</p>
+
+<p>There was to come a time, fallen so low
+had I, when to stand with my nose plastered
+against the plate-glass windows of lunch-room
+emporiums, where flapjacks, later to
+be smothered under melting butter and
+golden syrup were being juggled, became
+one of my favorite outdoor sports.</p>
+
+<p>Time has healed those aching voids. Alas!
+one of the cruel anachronisms of this whole
+cruelly anachronistic business is that deep
+within the lesser me nests regret that my
+palate, doubtless also leaner, has lost much
+of its fine gusty capacity to yearn.</p>
+
+<p>Today a dish of flapjacks beneath a golden
+blanket of maple syrup; a Roquefort dressing
+flowing off the smooth red flank of a
+stuffed tomato, a soufflé, a marron glacé, a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>crêpe suzette, a marzipan, leave me cold and
+without zest. Before them now I stand bowed
+with a regret that I have lost my capacity
+to regret them.</p>
+
+<p>But there is no denying the fact that there
+was that period when my secret absorption
+upon the subject of food (food denied me)
+became shamefully dominant. Not the fierce
+legitimate hunger pangs of one starving for
+lack of the ability to obtain food, but the
+flabby, rather shameful spectacle of one in
+the midst of the plentiful prerogatives of
+three meals a day, self-denied them.</p>
+
+<p>Frightening, mental traits began to creep
+upon me.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Living chiefly upon myself, stoked on the
+low fuel values of lean meats and five-per-cent
+vegetables boiled in water, going
+through my pallid days always conscious
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>of a catherine wheel of desire spinning somewhere
+within the center of my denied and
+shrinking anatomy, I began to take on a quite
+horrible and private pleasure in watching
+other people eat, or preferably, overeat.</p>
+
+<p>Myself relentless in passing up a toothsome
+dish, often as not especially prepared
+by a gracious hostess, I showed neither mercy
+nor consideration. But let that same hostess
+sit down at my own board and I became sly
+and spider-like, luring my victim into my
+gastronomic den of rich foods.</p>
+
+<p>Eat and overeat, something devilish within
+me seemed to shout. Eat, in order that I may
+all the more exultantly deny and work myself
+up into the ecstasies of martyrdom. How
+the saints must have learned to love their
+sweet agonies!</p>
+
+<p>Nor were these macabre mental processes
+to remain unsuspected. Chilly laughter began
+to greet the dreadful might of my hospitality.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>Glances flashed between my guests as sawing
+away at a thin slice of especially prepared
+lean beef, fried in mineral oil, I
+importuned, nay commanded, my futilely resisting
+guests to more of this and that richly
+devised concoction; pressed upon them the
+au gratin potato, the sherry-flavored tart,
+while I tinkled ice water against denied but
+omnivorous teeth, dallied with my chaste unused
+dessert spoon and rammed persuasion
+and second helpings of pistachio Melba
+down my friends.</p>
+
+<p>“Dammit,” cried one of my obese guests
+one night, goaded (and tempted) beyond
+endurance, “I won’t overstuff myself with
+another helping of this delicious bouillabaisse
+in order to enhance your lean inner
+spirit of self-righteousness! Dammit, I tell
+you, no! Well, just a little more—just a damn
+little more.”</p>
+
+<p>Reader, as they used to say in the days
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>when ladies “padded,” my friend, alas!
+spoke too truly. Hungry, whetted with a desire
+for foods that hitherto had never interested
+nor particularly tempted me, I schemed
+for the obesity of my lean friends and the
+greater obesity of my obese ones. Schemed,
+Reader! The sense of rising from my board,
+feebly stoked on lean meats broiled in mineral
+oil, five-per-cent vegetables (the ones that
+grow on the wrong side of the gastronomic
+railroad tracks; parsnips, cabbage, spinach,
+beets, greens, leeks, dandelions) brought me
+the strange sadistic martyr-like delights
+herein elsewhere described. I began to lose
+my friends.</p>
+
+<p>Neither, alas! did it stop here. As week
+by week, under a scientifically ordered regime
+which I partially defeated by overdoing my
+doctor’s dietary orders, the coverage began to
+diminish too rapidly to please him, and the
+strange psychology of a lady in the throes
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>of a too rigid diet continued its baffling manifestations.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>About the time that my slimming success
+began to be apparent to the appraising
+eyes of the sisterhood, my entrance into a
+room was the occasion for a gust of Oh’s and
+Ah’s, How-did-you-do-it? Why, I wouldn’t
+have known you! My dear, you’re marvelous!
+The heady wine of my success (on
+an empty stomach) began to induce giddiness.</p>
+
+<p>Hollow-eyed and a bit necky, I began to
+indulge in the private procedure of posing
+before my mirror, pinning in my loose waistband
+and twisting about a slightly loose-fleshed
+neck for the Jean Harlow angle or the
+Hepburn line of jaw. The first faint knob
+pushing out through my neck was something
+on which to hang high hope.</p>
+
+<p>It was during this period that, after
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>having goaded her with food, I would remark
+maliciously to a friend: “Look over there at
+that spectacle! It is enough to cause a scientist
+to faint! A stout woman eating a
+potato!”</p>
+
+<p>Oh, I was the subject for inclusion in the
+rows of introspective ladies waiting in the
+outer rooms of smart Park Avenue psychoanalysts,
+I can tell you!</p>
+
+<p>It enraged me to see my friends eat, or,
+for that matter, drink, although a taste for
+alcohol or spirituous liquors had never made
+them part of my problem. It enraged me
+to see them eat; I could not bear not to see
+them overstuff.</p>
+
+<p>I now pitied obesity in others, and did all
+in my power to either induce or encourage
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Smoldering rage began within me if my
+entrance into a group of friends failed to
+elicit pæans of surprised admiration. In the
+twelvemonth of fanatical defiance of my doctor’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>admonitions for temperance, I became
+a narrow-looking, bony individual with a
+disproportionately large head, wide, uninhabited-looking
+shoulders, old-looking hands,
+and a cold kind of chic.</p>
+
+<p>There was not a laugh in a carload of me.</p>
+
+<p>I had been through a grim, hungry, cold,
+and lonely fight, and always to that insistent
+tom-tom of rhythm, relentless as a drum-beat:
+What-of-it-what-of-it-what-of-it.</p>
+
+<p>I had won my spurs and they stuck out
+all over me.</p>
+
+<p>People with two chins and plenty of laughter
+above and below them said, without rue,
+that I had character. Friends, to my face at
+least, said I had “looks,” although toward
+the end even some of them began to admit
+that they had liked me better “before.”</p>
+
+<p>I had lost pounds and my sense of humor.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p>
+
+<p>The miracle of it, cheating my doctor as I
+did, was that I had not lost my health. Perhaps
+the funniness of me came rushing over
+me just in time to avert that. Perhaps the
+spectacle on all sides of women almost deliberately
+throwing the incomparable asset
+of their health away upon the absurd altar
+of slimming, for no other reason than the
+desire to be slim, helped, Reader, to snatch
+me from the jaws of a dieting lady novelist’s
+more or less untimely death.</p>
+
+<p>Not that I have come far enough along
+the line of mental readjustment to relinquish
+my diet. Slimming is a battle that is never
+won. But at least I am on to myself. I can
+laugh it off. And the spectacle of me to myself
+in the mirror is really nothing to leave
+home about, nor, so far as I can see, has
+there been the impulse on anyone’s part to
+indulge in that drastic measure in my behalf.
+I have not observed that those nearest and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>dearest, or that friends in general, like me
+any the more or less. If anything, you may
+deduce, less.</p>
+
+<p>Now this is not to convey that all diets for
+æsthetic ends are pernicious and that all slimming
+is vicious.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, excess baggage of flesh is
+not only unwieldy and unbeautiful, but it
+is more usually a health liability than an asset
+(see life-insurance-risk charts).</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, undereating may generally
+be counted as a cardinal virtue. A wise
+and disturbing man it was who first passed
+out the golden advice to always leave the
+dinner table a little unsatisfied. Particularly
+since nature has seen fit to pester the human
+race with various appetites which are so far
+and away beyond requirements, are food and
+drink restraints to be regarded on the benign
+side.</p>
+
+<p>Moderation is one of the nicer practices.</p>
+
+<p>It is upon the widespread perils of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>abuses of moderation in reduction diets that
+I would dwell.</p>
+
+<p>My average daily allotment of food allowed
+by a careful dietitian might not have
+always been to my liking, but it was ample
+to accomplish the slimming desire and at the
+same time maintain and nourish.</p>
+
+<p>Here is an average day’s menu; a menu
+which I advise no one to emulate without
+first consulting a physician. It is simple to
+understand its component parts. Proteins and
+minerals are emphasized; carbohydrates, fats,
+minimized:</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Breakfast</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">1/2 small grapefruit<br>
+2 eggs (boiled poached)<br>
+1 tablespoon milk for coffee.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Lunch</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.)<br>
+5 per cent vegetables (the wrong-side-of-the-railroad-track ones).</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Dinner</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">Same as lunch.</p>
+
+<p>Six to eight glasses of water per day.</p>
+
+<p>Do not take additional foods unless otherwise
+specified.</p>
+
+<p>“Not so bad,” you observe, “more than I
+usually consume during an average day.”</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps more food, but not more nourishment.
+But the point is that on this prescribed
+diet, with certain highly conservative expeditions
+after appreciable reduction had
+taken place, over into carbohydrates and fats,
+results would almost undoubtedly have been
+achieved. In time! But as the poundage begins
+shyly to retreat, the frantic psychology,
+characteristic of the thousands of the slimming
+women, present company included, sets
+in.</p>
+
+<p>Ours not to reason why. Ours but to diet
+and sometimes die.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span></p>
+
+<p>Despite physician’s admonitions to the
+contrary, fascinated by the gradual retreat of
+a hitherto more or less immutable, excess
+poundage; egged on by the appraising
+women; goaded by the diminishing story
+of the bathroom scales—the fascination for
+speed began to cause this eye to glitter.</p>
+
+<p>More pounds per week. Faster. Quicker.
+Slimmer!</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The daily menu, about which I not infrequently
+lied to my doctor, began to read
+something like this:</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Breakfast</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">Black unsweetened coffee<br>
+1/2 small orange.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Eleven A. M.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">Black unsweetened coffee.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Lunch</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">1 head lettuce or<br>
+1/2 head cabbage-slaw, mineral-oil dressing.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Three P. M.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">Black unsweetened coffee.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>Dinner</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.)<br>
+5 per cent vegetables.</p>
+
+<p>Lean pallid days had arrived along about
+now; days when I went about with the
+strained face of a plucked fowl, brittle-looking
+skin sagging for want of some place to
+go.</p>
+
+<p>No conversation survived my entrance into
+a room. The men might struggle a bit to
+carry forward with a bit of technocracy, Muscle
+Shoals or World Series, but the following
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>two or three minutes carried a guarantee that
+one subject alone would predominate.</p>
+
+<p>How did you do it? Tell me what you eat.
+Are you taking medicine? Awfully dangerous,
+you know. Now tell me what you had
+for breakfast. Do you mix your starches and
+proteins? Awfully bad for you! Now isn’t
+that curious, somebody told me you were
+living on some sort of a reduction tea made
+by an East Indian and had not touched solid
+food for two months. But my dear, you
+mustn’t let yourself get haggard. Not that
+you are!</p>
+
+<p>Oh no, not that I was.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes dragging myself to bed, triumphant,
+faint, cold, tired, uncertain whether
+to laugh or cry, with not quite the energy
+to do either, I dared not glance at the white
+rattletrap my mirror would have revealed to
+me.</p>
+
+<p>Instead I crept to rest, gladly, exhaustedly,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>and, to keep from laughing or crying or both,
+fell to contemplating the slight ridge my
+body made beneath the coverings, or trying
+to crowd back across my darkness not, “fancies
+freed, transient and exploring,” but fancies
+of a froth of café parfait foaming down
+the flank of a long slim goblet or of a slice
+of four-layer cream cake in which to sink
+teeth was denied, in order to remove taste
+and memory of liver fried in mineral oil and
+lettuce with its cutting dash of lemon juice.</p>
+
+<p>I must have been as easy to live with, during
+that period before I lost both appetite
+and desire for the foods that used to haunt
+me, as a lady in a padded cell.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Strangely, the vigor for work did not desert.
+It was an escape, to sit down at a desk
+and throw off the gnawing awareness of the
+human envelope. One can almost concoct
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>the fantastic doctrine that the brain is a
+favorite child of the human body and before
+any other part is fed, is given the cream (or
+in this case skimmed milk) of the intake.</p>
+
+<p>However, just what mental processes might
+have resulted from that same period, corn
+fed, must remain forever, to those who palpitatingly
+would know, in the limbo of the
+hypothetical.</p>
+
+<p>Like almost everything else in moderation,
+slimming has its points. Its excellent points.
+Outside moderation, and ’tis of thee I sing,
+it takes on the proportion of menace to that
+half of the race which is intrusted with incubation
+and delivery of the species.</p>
+
+<p>Biological years move slowly and science
+does not pretend to offer up prematurely
+compiled data to prove that slenderized
+women are necessarily better or worse breeding-machines.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, my own paternal ninety-eight-pound
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>grandmother, who produced six two-hundred-pound
+sons was remarked, but
+scarcely remarkable, for it.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it requires no barrage
+of data to logically assume and conclude that
+a race of undernourished, highly nervous
+women with a low resistance to disease and
+an abhorrence of bust measurements, is going
+to leave its mark upon tomorrow’s child.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In Italy, Il Duce openly commands that
+women be big, ripe, fecund, intimating, with
+no particular authority for it, that these processes
+go together. As a rule he assumes, and
+rightly, that women who have many children
+stop being slender in the process. And
+so he extols the robust mother who concedes
+that her beauty lies not in her shape, but in
+her rôle as mother.</p>
+
+<p>I see no reason why it cannot lie in both,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>unless the beauty standards of the female of
+an era drop so low that the proportions of a
+fertile adult woman must hover around those
+of a fourteen-year-old boy....</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, for the moment, in America
+at least, the movement away from the boyish
+figure seems to be on the up and up, although
+the Mae West atavism seems to be little more
+than a half-hearted fad, and millions lie waiting
+for the chemist or alchemist who can
+present the human race with the miracle of
+a slimming serum.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps after that day comes we will be a
+happier and a healthier race and the laugh
+will be on nature, who for thousands of years
+had made us the butt of her old joke on the
+fats and the thins, plying some of us with
+her too, too ample coverage, condemning
+others to an immutable destiny of skin and
+bones.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two evils, the latter, by insurance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>companies at least, is reckoned the least
+hazardous.</p>
+
+<p>For myself, alas! I cannot even claim that
+I feel better slim than I did, not so slim. I
+felt vigorous then. I feel almost as vigorous
+now. Overweight in excess is beyond controversy
+an undesirable and dangerous state.
+If the male more easily escapes its æsthetic
+menace, he falls rigidly within its pathological
+perils. The female of the species,
+more’s the pity, is its social, biological and
+æsthetic victim.</p>
+
+<p>But now that the laugh has come back to
+me, I want to reach out a deterring, an ancient-looking
+hand, to the hordes of slimming
+women as I observe them nibbling at
+celery stalks over lunch tables, swapping
+their diets across bridge tables, baring their
+backs to the rolling-machine and their breasts
+to camphor rubs.</p>
+
+<p>And even to those who are dieting for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>good and authentic reason of one sort or another,
+I want to reach out that same ancient-looking
+hand to impress upon them the
+danger of the short-cut food fad; of following
+any diet regime outside a physician’s
+prescribed one; of succumbing to the perils
+of the pineapple and lamb-chop group of
+fantasies; of the terrible risks involved in accepting
+what is almost certain to be the he-says
+and the she-says dietary word of their
+not always thoughtful dieting sisters; of the
+falseness of current æsthetic values as they
+fluctuate to the season’s fashion; of the absurdity
+of a woman weighing one hundred
+and nine pounds undernourishing herself on
+boiled green tissue-paper.</p>
+
+<p>Whether it is to his credit or due to just
+plain lack of self-discipline, the fact remains
+that with his middle-aged susceptibility to
+embonpoint, the male has not gone to extremes
+in combating his foe. True, too often
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>he self-indulgently tolerates its perilous and
+heavy folds about his heartbeat, and rather
+than suffer the weary battle of reduction, allows
+himself to take on the convexity of a
+barrel. The spas are crowded with him, he is
+not beautiful, and one doubts if he is as happy
+as he pretends to look. But at least he had not
+reduced the dietary habits of a nation to
+roughage, bulk and greens. In fact, watching
+his women totter past him on their fanatical
+way to the altar of the emaciated false
+goddess of their passion, he is apt to look
+back rather wistfully upon the good old days
+when Pauline Hall was the hour-glass beauty
+of his dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Observe the shopkeeper catering to this
+psychological invalidism of his women customers.
+The gown he hangs in his show window
+is shrewdly pinned back at the waist
+line to one third its natural size, thereby capturing
+with its suggestion of anemia, the eye
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>of the woman who visualizes herself commensurate
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>The measurements of the mannequins
+upon whom are draped the models of the
+couturières and by way of whom the measurement
+standards for women are devilishly established,
+are usually those of underdeveloped
+boys.</p>
+
+<p>The woman of average proportion who
+enters such a shop in the hope of finding a
+ready-to-wear gown is apt to depart feeling
+herself Gargantuan in a land of Lilliputians.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>What thousands of normal healthy women
+have been driven to starvation, illness, even
+death, in order to more nearly conform to
+the adolescent standards established by the
+pale little mannequins who stand hours in
+workrooms while the standardizers and glorifiers
+of their puniness, drape their poor little
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>flat chests, wind around the knobs of their
+sparrow-like hips, and wrap their little concave
+stomachs in fabrics designed to accent
+emacia!</p>
+
+<p>One wonders what place the boyish-breasted
+flapper of half a decade ago, or the
+scarcely less spare female of today, will ultimately
+have alongside the respective ideals
+of Ruth among the corn, Mme. de Staël, Signorina
+Mona Lisa, Laura, Venus, Winged
+Victory, Lillian Russell.</p>
+
+<p>More and more, today’s standards of
+American Beauty are being set up and authorized
+by the bizarre little so-called civilization
+known as Hollywood, home of the
+eighteen-day diet, the orange juice, the
+skimmed-milk-and-baked-potato, the liquid
+bread, the thyrodic bath salt, the paraffin
+sweat, the holy rolling-machine, the pugilistic
+massage, and almost every reduction fad
+known to this tormented year of our Lord.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span></p>
+
+<p>By way of Hollywood, the young man is
+thereby automatically trained to accept his
+female of the species slinky, low in vitality,
+and concave in curve. In fact, a plump
+débutante in the family is more of a problem
+than a mental delinquent.</p>
+
+<p>And meanwhile, the slimmed, the irritable,
+the hungry woman takes on the proportion
+of one of our minor menaces. She does
+not add to the gaiety of the nation or of the
+home; she is no healthier, she is prettier only
+according to the frail standards of a papier-maché
+city on the west coast where the human
+envelope is the stock in trade. She is a
+success chiefly to herself and to her sister of
+similar standards.</p>
+
+<p>Now I am aware of a certain perverse psychology
+which you may suspect I am beginning
+to manifest. My definition of white hair
+is something you admire only when it is on
+another woman.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span></p>
+
+<p>This is not a plea for the tolerance or
+toleration of excess weight, just so it is on
+the other fellow. It is a plea for intolerance
+of excess underweight.</p>
+
+<p>I am personally too infected with this slimming
+phobia to hope for complete redemption.
+I may come back, but probably not all
+the way. As a matter of fact, I would not
+come all the way. My struggle is to find the
+moral courage to make the partial return.
+The slimming years have been so long. I have
+won my battle knowing that it is a battle
+that is never truly won and that the helmet
+and the spurs cannot be laid aside.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It remains practically impossible for me to
+sit down whole-heartedly to a meal among
+whole-hearted folk. What has long since become
+the more or less rare spectacle of an
+American woman partaking of potato is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>still sufficient to send chills down this spine.
+By now, expert in that strange branch of
+lower mathematics, the counting of the calories,
+I can compute on sight the heat and
+food value of a helping of filet of sole
+(3 × 2-1/2) or of one slice of zwieback (3-1/2 ×
+1-1/2 × 1/2).</p>
+
+<p>To violate by one calorie is to invite regrets
+out of all proportion to the delights of
+the transgression. One suck off the sugared
+sides of a candy sour-ball can cause one to
+scuttle to the scales in fear and trembling, or
+one spoonful off the side of the pyramid of
+ice-cream on your dinner partner’s dessert
+plate, transform you into a distrait and regretful
+guest.</p>
+
+<p>But at least mine hungry eyes have a certain
+sharpened clarity which enables them
+to see the funniness and the menace of the
+spectacle of the slimming women.</p>
+
+<p>We are funny. Realizing that, we might
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>long since have learned to laugh it off, except,
+alas! laughter is supposed to be fattening!</p>
+
+<p>It is not a simple matter to get a laugh out
+of a slimming woman. It is the easiest thing
+she does not do.</p>
+
+<p>My laughs have come back slowly, mere
+spurts at first, as from a spring gone dry but
+about to yield again.</p>
+
+<p>It means that even while, with me, meal-time
+still remains largely a process of omission
+and elimination, I am at least on to myself.
+Ladies, really, it is to laugh.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Today, four unrelenting years after the episode
+of the boiled tissue paper, I now enter
+a shop to have a vendeuse glide up to me
+with: “For yourself? Misses department
+across the aisle.”</p>
+
+<p>Well, what of it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span></p>
+
+<p>This much of it! If a slimmer, a sadder,
+and perhaps a wiser me has succeeded in
+helping to convey to the slimmers of today
+and the potential slimmers of tomorrow
+some of the ridiculousness and some of the
+perils of the slimming age, then the public
+sacrifice of myself upon the altar of mine
+own absurdities will not have been in
+vain.</p>
+
+<p>Would I do it all over again?</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” I reply, as I continue to count my
+calories, “well—er——”</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, Reader, as they used to say
+in the days when ladies munched chocolates
+in bed, I desire to make public the following
+acknowledgments:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>To a husband who bore with me during a
+period when a snapping-turtle shared roof
+with him.</p>
+
+<p>To my doctor to whom I lied.</p>
+
+<p>To my many friends upon whom at my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>supposedly hospitable board, my greenly glittering
+eye rested in one hatred or another.</p>
+
+<p>To a cook who learned to defile her art in
+order to brew me dishes unwanted and unsavory.</p>
+
+<p>To the books written during this period
+which abound perhaps unduly in foods coveted
+by their author.</p>
+
+<p>To hosts and hostesses who offered me their
+hospitality only that I might wave aside with
+supercilious celery stalk their good meat and
+wassail.</p>
+
+<p>To my comfortably stout friends upon whom
+my disdainful eye rested not kindly.</p>
+
+<p>To my slender friends upon whom my good-as-you-now
+gaze has assailingly glared.</p>
+
+<p>To the human race for bearing with me.</p>
+
+<p>To myself for finally realizing that I am funnier
+than any character I have ever succeeded
+in depicting in fiction.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="center"><b>Transcriber’s Notes</b></p>
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78225 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #78225
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78225)