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.

I went over my food habit.  I was accustomed to eating a big hired-man’s breakfast—­fruit, coffee, eggs, waffles, hot bread, sausage, anything that came along; and I heaved in a lot of it—­not a little—­a lot!  I didn’t eat so much at luncheon, but I ate plenty; and at night I simply cleaned up the table.  I wasn’t so strong on sweets and pastry, because I usually drank a few highballs during the day, and highballs and cocktails and sweets do not go well together—­that is, the man who takes alcohol into his system usually does not care for sweets.  Beer was one of my long suits too—­Pilsner beer.  I did like that!

I looked this food habit squarely in the face.  I impaled the drink habit with my glittering eye.  I knew I was eating about sixty per cent more than I needed or could use, and that I was drinking a hundred per cent more.  I knew that nothing makes fat but food and drink.  I knew excess of food will make any animal fat and I saw I had been eating freely of the most fattening kinds of food.  I knew beer and liquor were made of grain, and that grain is used to fatten steers and cows and pigs.  I refused to adopt a diet like any of those unpalatable ones I had experimented with, but the remedy was as plain as the cause.  It was simple enough if I had the nerve to go through with it.