e much difference whether either men or women look
any better than they have been looking, so far as the great end and aim
of all life is concerned. Consequently fat men and fat women after
forty want to be thinner for reasons of health and comfort, or quit and
resign themselves to their further years of obesity.

Now I am over forty. Hence my experiments in reduction may be taken at
this time as grounded on a desire for comfort--not that I did not make
many campaigns against my fat before I was forty. I fought it now and
then, but always retreated before I won a victory. This time, instead
of skirmishing valiantly for a space and then being ignominiously and
fatly routed by the powerful forces of food and drink, I hung stolidly
to the line of my original attack, harassed the enemy by a constant and
deadly fire--and one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.

It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losing
flesh--unless, of course, the decrease in weight is due to illness. No
healthy person, predisposed to fat, ever lost any flesh. If that
person gets rid of any weight, or girth, or fat, it isn't lost--it is
fought off, beaten off. The victim struggles with it, goes to the mat
with it, and does not debonairly drop it. He eliminates it with stern
effort and much travail of the spirit. It is a job of work, a grueling
combat to the finish, a task that appalls and usually repels.

The theory of taking off fat is the simplest theory in the world. It
is announced, in four words: Stop eating and drinking. The practice of
fat reduction is the most difficult thing in the world. Its
difficulties are comprehended in two words: You cannot. The flesh is
willing, but the spirit is weak. The success of the undertaking lies
in the triumph of the will over the appetite. There's a lovely line of
cant for you! Triumph of the will over the appetite. It sounds like
the preaching of a professional food faddist, who tells the people they
eat too much and then slips away and wolfs down four pounds of
beefsteak at a sitting. However, I suppose it is necessary to say this
once in a dissertation like this--and it is said.

In writing about this successful experiment of mine in reducing weight
I have no theories to advance except one, and no instructions to give.
I don't know whether my method would take an ounce off any other person
in the world, and I don't care. I only know it took more than fifty
pounds of