telling that the only way to cure everything was to fast.  I knew a man who tried that.  The results were grand.  He fasted a long time and cured himself of what ailed him.  Only, unfortunately, just before the last vestige of disease was removed the fasting killed him.  I contend that man might just as well have died of what ailed him originally as to cure that disease and die of the cure.  It seems to me it is as broad as it is long.

However, have at this fat-reduction process of mine!  You must bear with a few personal reminiscences.  I was a big, husky brute of a boy—­thick-chested, broad-shouldered, country-bred and with an appetite that knew no bounds.  After I got going at my business, when I was twenty-five or so, I was pinned down to a desk for about ten years.  I worked hard in a most exacting place.  I was so healthy it hurt.  I had just as much appetite for food as I had ever had; but I didn’t get a chance to bat around as I had been accustomed to do and burn up that food.  The result was inevitable.  I began to get fat.  I had a big chest—­forty-six inches—­and the fat filled in underneath.  That big chest, combined with my broad shoulders, concealed the size of my paunch, and I didn’t realize I was accumulating that paunch until it was soldered, riveted, lashed, glued, nailed and otherwise fastened to me.

When I got my growth I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds and was a pretty formidable physical proposition.  When I woke up to the fact that I was getting fat I found I weighed two hundred and twenty pounds.  That extra thirty-five pounds was mostly fat—­excess baggage.  Still, it didn’t bother me any.  I had the strength to tote it round and had the shoulders and the chest to conceal it.  I didn’t show any bay window, as most fat men do.  As they used to say:  “You’re big all over.  You carry it all right.”

All this time I was eating three or four times a day and eating everything that came my way.  Also, I drank some—­not excessively, but some whisky and some beer, and occasionally some wine and cocktails—­about the average amount of drinking the average man does.  I thought I was getting too fat, and I wrestled with a bicycle all one summer, taking long rides and plugging round a good deal.  I did some centuries, but continued eating like a horse—­naturally because of the outdoor exercise—­and drank a good deal of beer.  As will be seen, all the fat I had was legitimate enough.  I put it on myself.  There was no hereditary nonsense about it.  I was responsible for every ounce of it.  The net result of that summer’s bicycle campaign was a gain of five pounds in weight.  I was harder—­but I was fatter, too.

When I was thirty-five I began to experiment.  I then weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds.  I went to the canned-exercise, the physical-torture professor, the diet, the salts, and all the rest of it, taking off a few pounds but putting it all back again—­and more—­as soon as I stopped.