the system, but in the hardship of carrying it out. You can't have
anything to eat that you want to eat. You torture yourself for a space
and lose some flesh; then when you do go back to your normal method of
eating the flesh comes galloping back--and there you are! It is the
same with exercise. You can take off fat by exercise; but, once you
begin, you are doomed to everlasting exercise, for the minute you stop
back comes the fat--and more of it than you had before you began to
reduce.

It is a tough game, anyway you play it, if you are disposed to be fat.
No man living, who isn't a freak, can persist always in one diet. Nor
can any man who has anything else on his mind be always
exercising--especially after he has reached forty years of age, when
there are so many better things to do and time is valuable, and the
real idea of how to live has just begun to percolate. Also, until one
is forty, if reasonably healthy, flesh is a joke, and not so much of a
burden as it becomes later. I haven't a thing in the world against any
or all of these methods. I have tried most of them and know most of
them are bogus; but I am not trying to dissuade any person from taking
off fat in any way that suits any individual fancy or the fancy of any
reducer into whose hands the victim may have fallen. If you have a
good method go to it--and more power to you!

My idea is this: I am setting down here a record of my own experiences,
and that is all. Every person who does not like what I have to say is
cheerfully advised to lump it. Any person who is as fat as I was and
who wants to get thinner is at liberty to follow my method. If
circumstances are similar results will be similar. If not there will
be no results. I am not advising or urging or putting forth any
propaganda. Here is what happened. It may suit you or it may not.