FAT

A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes—­one on herself and the other on her husband.  Half the comedy in the world is predicated on the paunch.  At that, the human race is divided into but two classes—­fat people who are trying to get thin and thin people who are trying to get fat.

Fat, the doctors say, is fatal.  I move to amend by striking out the last two letters of the indictment.  Fat is fat.  It isn’t any more fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it’s a darned sight more uncomfortable.  So far as being unreasonably thin or unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the long end of it.  I never was thin, so I don’t know.  However, I have been fat—­notice that “have been”?  And if there is any phase of human enjoyment, any part of life, any occupation, avocation, divertisement, pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it in any regard, I failed to discover it in the twenty years during which I looked like the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a bale of hay.

When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent, directly or indirectly, in the assay.  The personal equation is the ruling equation.  Women want to be thinner because they will look better—­and so do men.  Likewise, women want to be plumper because they will look better—­and so do men.  This holds up to forty years.  After that it doesn’t make 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.