sted.

Gentlemen, you have treated acute sickness in all its forms, and you
have had many cases in which, because of irritable stomachs, neither
food nor medicine could be given. Day after day you have seen the
wasting of the bodies, and you have also seen mental aberration or
stupor lessen day by day as the disease lessened its grasp upon the
brain-centres, and finally when the point of natural hunger was reached,
you never found the lost pounds a matter of physical discomfort or
mental abnormality or weakness; rather you have always found at this
point a mental condition in every way the most highly satisfactory. I
never saw brighter eyes, a happier expression on every line, than
revealed by a woman after a fast of forty-four days, in which acute
disease had reduced the weight forty pounds.

All overweight not due to dropsy or other disease is due to eating more
food than the waste demands. As an abnormal condition overweight has
received a great deal of attention in the way of misguided effort to
both prevention and cure. These efforts are such conspicuous failures
that even the patent medicine man has not found his "anti-fat nostrums"
the happy means to fortune. There have been all kinds of limits built
around bills of fare, but sooner or later Nature revolts and they are
given up.

The reason that certain people take on weight easily and become "stout,"
is because of constitutional tendency, good digestion, and excess of
food. As a general fact, the overweights are "large feeders," and they
not only look well but feel well, for they have much less stomach
trouble than the average mortal, and in cheerful endowment of soul they
rank the highest among all the people.

In spite of my philosophy, I, who am one of the leanest of the kind,
look upon the stoutness of those in the early prime of life with
something of both envy and admiration; they seem so ideally conditioned
to enjoy the best of all things on earth. But it is quite a serious
matter when the muscles and brain have to deal with pounds in excess by
the score, even as if the victim were doomed to wear clothes padded with
so many pounds of shot.

Why some people take on fat easily even with the smallest of meals, why
some of the largest eaters are of the leanest, are matters to talk about
but not to know about. For my purpose it is sufficient that I assert
that overweight can be prevented by an habitual limitation of the daily
food to the daily need; that