o mission or message or any
flubdub of that kind. I am not one of those boys who urge you to do
this for your own good. I have read a ton of literature put out by
persons who found something that agreed with them and immediately
started out to reform the world along that line. Your reformer,
anyhow, is a person who wants all the rest of the world to do as he
wants the rest of the world to do, not as the rest of the world wants
to do. And the reason reformers get past so numerously is because our
society is so constituted that we spend every one of our brief years
doing what other people want us to do and tell us to do, and never do
anything we ourselves want to do. Once I got seventeen pounds of books
telling that the only way to cure everything was to fast. I knew a man
who tried that. The results were grand. He fasted a long time and
cured himself of what ailed him. Only, unfortunately, just before the
last vestige of disease was removed the fasting killed him. I contend
that man might just as well have died of what ailed him originally as
to cure that disease and die of the cure. It seems to me it is as
broad as it is long.

However, have at this fat-reduction process of mine! You must bear
with a few personal reminiscences. I was a big, husky brute of a
boy--thick-chested, broad-shouldered, country-bred and with an appetite
that knew no bounds. After I got going at my business, when I was
twenty-five or so, I was pinned down to a desk for about ten years. I
worked hard in a most exacting place. I was so healthy it hurt. I had
just as much appetite for food as I had ever had; but I didn't get a
chance to bat around as I had been accustomed to do and burn up that
food. The result was inevitable. I began to get fat. I had a big
chest--forty-six inches--and the fat filled in underneath. That big
chest, combined with my broad shoulders, concealed the size of my
paunch, and I didn't realize I was accumulating that paunch until it
was soldered, riveted, lashed, glued, nailed and otherwise fastened to
me.

When I got my growth I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds
and was a pretty formidable physical proposition. When I woke up to
the fact that I was getting fat I found I weighed two hundred and
twenty pounds. That extra thirty-five pounds was mostly fat--excess
baggage. Still, it didn't bother me any. I had the strength to tote
it round and had the shoulders and the chest to conceal