[Sidenote:  Not?]

“Those diseased individuals should be under the care of a physician.  Probably the secretory glands are somewhat inactive or sluggish in the healthy fat individual.  I use the word healthy here in contradistinction to the other type.  In reality, individuals very much overweight are not really healthy, and they should also visit their physician.”

“Yes, Mrs. Ima Gobbler?”

[Sidenote:  Mrs. Ima Gobbler]

[Sidenote:  Doctor Dear]

“But, Doctor dear, what’s the use of dieting?  I only get fatter after I stop.”

(Answering delicate like, for I’m fond of her and she is sensitive): 

“You fat—!  You make me fatigued! You never diet long enough to get out of the fireless cooker class. If you did, you wouldn’t."

“Is there anyone else who would like to be recognized?  No?”

[Sidenote:  Nothing That I Don’t Know]

It is well.  I will probably answer more as I go along, for there is nothing that I don’t know or haven’t studied or tried in the reducing line.  I know everything you have to contend with—­how you no sooner congratulate yourself on your will power, after you have dragged yourself by the window with an exposure of luscious fat chocolates with curlicues on their tummies, than another comes into view, and you have it all to go through with again, and how you finally succumb.

I hope sometime it will be a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment, to display candy as shamelessly as it is done.

Many fond parents think that candy causes worms.  It doesn’t, of course, unless it is contaminated with worm eggs, but, personally, I wish every time I ate a chocolate I would get a worm, then I would escape them.  The chocolates, I mean.  I will tell you more about worms when I discuss meat.

[Sidenote:  Vampires]

[Sidenote:  Malicious Animal Magnetism?]

I know how you go down to destruction for peanuts, with their awful fat content.  It is terrible, the lure a peanut has for me.  Do you suppose Mr. Darwin could explain that?

Perhaps I was a little too delicate like in my answer to Mrs. Gobbler’s question,—­What’s the use of dieting, she only gets fatter after she stops?

So many ask me that question, with the further pathetic addition,—­Will they always have to keep it up?  And it ever irritates me.

The answer is,—­Yes!  You will always have to keep up dieting, just as you always have to keep up other things in life that make it worth living—­being neat, being kind, being tender; reading, studying, loving.

You will not have to be nearly so strenuous after you get to normal; but you might as well recognize now, and accept it as a fact, that neither you nor anybody else will be able to eat beyond your needs without accumulating fat or disease, or both.