That two hundred and forty-seven pounds was a facer. I was forced to
admit to myself that I was fat, disgustingly fat--too fat; and that I
should get fatter! So I sat down and looked the situation in the eye. I
recounted all my former efforts to get thin and discarded them one by
one. I knew myself, and knew the ordinary diet proposition and the
ordinary exercise proposition were not for me. I knew I was wheezy and
that my heart was getting choked with fat; that there were great folds of
it on me, and that it was up to me to get rid of it or quit and wait for
the inevitable end. If it kept on I knew I should blow up some fine day.
Besides, I was uric-acidy, rheumatic and stertorous and clumsy. I had
about fifty or sixty pounds of poisonous junk wrapped round me, and I
knew I should suffer for it in the end, though I didn't feel it much and
carried it with a fair assumption of lightness.

I was not an amateur at the game. I had been through the mill. I spent
several days in going over the whole matter. It was reasonably simple,
too, and needn't have taken so much of my time; but I was protecting
myself, you see, gold-bricking myself--trying to find a way out that
would not deprive me of things I liked to do, of pleasures I wanted to
enjoy. It was pure selfishness that dominated me and made me do so much
figuring on a proposition I knew was contained in a sentence; but I did
fight to hang on to the old way of living.

After each session of false logic and selfish hypothesis I invariably
came back to the same proposition, which is the only proposition--and
that was: What makes fat? Food and drink. How can you reduce fat? By
reducing the amount of food and drink--that is all there is or was to it.
The only way to get rid of the effects of overeating and overdrinking is
to stop overeating and overdrinking.