It certainly is impossible to gain unless your food is assimilated.

[Sidenote:  Develop Poise]

So the first thing you have to learn is this mental control and to relax.  Remember that word, relax.  After you are better nourished your nervous system will not be on hair-trigger tension, and it will be easier for you.

[Sidenote:  No Pain In Matter; No Matter In Pain Why Worry?]

If you are ill in mind or body, remember that it is natural to be well, and that within your body nature has stored the most wonderful forces which are always tending towards the normal, or health, if not obstructed or hindered.

Nature sometimes needs help to stimulate those forces, or to reinforce them, or to remove obstructions.  This is where the physician comes in.  But you yourself can aid nature the most by realizing that nature is health and it is normal to be well.  By so doing, all of your organs function better and you are restored to normal more rapidly.

[Sidenote:  Sleep]

[Sidenote:  Fresh Air]

Second:  It is very important to have enough sleep.  Dr. Richard Cabot says that probably resistance is lowered as much by lack of sufficient sleep as by any other factor, and that all you can soak into your system in twenty-four hours is not too much.  Don’t forget the fresh air.

You generally suffer from sleeplessness, I believe.  The overweights are always advised not to sleep too much.  They will find while reducing that they won’t want to sleep so much, anyway.  They will like to stay awake—­they feel so much happier.

[Sidenote:  Sometimes]

Now, when you retire and try to sleep but cannot, try this—­it works with me.  You know when you are passing over your mental images become distorted and grotesque.  I artificially induce that state.  If I find myself rehearsing about two hundred times, with appropriate gestures, the keen, witty, logical remarks which I could have made in favor of my pet legislation in the club discussion, but didn’t, then I begin after this fashion: 

Pink elephants with green ribbons on their tails—­red rhinoceri (is that right, or should it be rhinoceroses?)—­smiling peanuts—­Woman’s City Club—­Social Health Insurance—­why didn’t I say—­I wish I had said—­(here get out, you annoyance!)—­pink elephants—­and so forth and so forth.

[Sidenote:  Picture of Pink Elephant Adorned]

[Sidenote:  Woe Is Me]

Now I realize I have ruined myself.  I am my own worst enemy.  I have exposed my whole life before those modern vivisectionists, the army of amateur psycho-analysts.

[Sidenote:  Exercise]

Third:  Exercise.  Great muscular exertion should be avoided, but the setting-up exercises that I advise, if begun with moderation and increased gradually, will undoubtedly stimulate the appetite and help the body functions to be better performed.