No food with my meals
Date: 2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Diet; Obesity

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Title: No food with my meals

Author: Fannie Hurst

Release date: March 17, 2026 [eBook #78225]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78225

Credits: Tim Lindell, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS ***

NO FOOD
WITH MY MEALS

O

BOOKS BY

FANNIE HURST

O

JUST AROUND THE CORNER
EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG
GASLIGHT SONATAS
HUMORESQUE
STAR DUST
THE VERTICAL CITY
LUMMOX
APPASSIONATA
MANNEQUIN
SONG OF LIFE
A PRESIDENT IS BORN
PROCESSION
FIVE AND TEN
BACK STREET
IMITATION OF LIFE
ANITRA’S DANCE

NO FOOD
WITH MY
MEALS

by

Fannie Hurst

1935

HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS

Copyright, 1935, by Fannie Hurst

Printed in the United States of America

All rights in this book are reserved. It may not be used for dramatic, motion- or talking-picture purposes without written authorization from the holder of these rights. Nor may the text or part thereof be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing. For information address: Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd Street, New York, N. Y.

FIRST EDITION

A-K

NO FOOD
WITH MY MEALS

O

Sometimes, regarding my slimmed human envelope, which at best seems designed more for service than beauty, I do ponder.

Not so much upon its frailty, which has been achieved at the cost of no food with my meals, but upon the frailty of the spiritual inhabitant of that envelope.

Regarding that spiritual inhabitant at the restless business of trying to learn to live in her house of clay, faint ironic laughter, the kind apt to be induced by a breakfast of lemon juice and hot water, rumbles along the inner me.

Some women are born frail. Some have frailty thrust upon them. Still others achieve it, and at what price glory!

Trivia, you say?

Not at all.

What is trivia, and what is not?

If, by virtue of its relativity to my concerns, the dahlia in my garden, the color of my tweeds, the nick in my dining-room table, or the market price of strawberries become important, then they are important. Everything or nothing matters.

When even half of one hundred and twenty-three million human beings on a North American continent begins to care passionately about adhering in standards of beauty to formulae concocted somewhere between anywhere and Hollywood, then that state of mind becomes important. Sufficiently so to create neurosis, psychosis, and acidosis.

No state of mind or body flecked with evidence of phobia can remain trivial, no matter how trivial the minds and bodies themselves.

It was about four years ago that the slimming phobia of my sex and era first began to fleck me with its rabies-like foam.

Up to that period, although overweight by a not inconsiderable poundage, I had not given complete rein to the latent unease which sporadically smote me at my abundance.

In fact, overweight from my advent as an eleven-pound baby, there was a brief period around adolescence when my opulence seemed something of an asset.

“Guess how much she weighs,” I can hear my grandfather proudly challenging, as he stood me on the sitting-room table and named a good eight or ten pounds over and above the most conservative estimate.

Ladies called me apple-cheeked, and gentlemen pinched them. I strutted, but even back there, there was unease in that strut.

But generally speaking, up to the time of my acute surrender to my sex’s phobia for slimming, the matter of anatomical distinction or peculiarity was scarcely within the pale of discussion. You were fat or slim, narrow or wide, dark or blond, according to a divine appropriation over which you had little control. To be sure, there was usually a “Fatty” in the schoolroom or on the block, but generally speaking, one did not dwell upon the flesh, or lack of it.

Beauty, had it not been parceled out in your direction, was something that could be brewed within the spirit in a manner to offset the external lack. This you were taught at the parental knee. Although it was not very satisfactory, you let it go at that. Except, why were hearts of gold and curls of gold so rarely supposed to strike simultaneously. How odd of God....

Now take this matter of being a plump little girl. You were apple-cheeked and got pinched for their cuteness, but then, you had to go and be a fat little girl, too. Why couldn’t one be a slender little girl—and apple-cheeked!

If you were unduly slim, you were simultaneously apt not to be apple-cheeked. There God went again, being odd. Slim, your portion was usually the bitter one of cod-liver oil and shoulder braces, whereas in plump reverse, you were called the picture of health and encouraged in your natural predilection for the creamed potatoes and marshmallow fillings which were usually anathema to the slim cod-liver oilers.

There was to come an adult time however, in the life of this narrator, when as the hum of a swarm of locusts over the peace of her mind, the dietary chant of the dieting women began to separate itself into a specific and ominous roar all its own.

Gradually, and oh, so insidiously, the spectacle of you, going your somewhat robust routine of three normal, if perhaps unscientific meals a day, in a state of taken-for-granted health that made it no theme for discussion; gradually you became to yourself a not edifying spectacle.

There was too much of something with you. Yourself.

Awareness, faint as the footsteps of a fly along the back of a neck, began to creep upon you so lightly at first that it was scarcely more than a tickling across your consciousness.

It began from who knows what remote scratchings of unease, in a changing attitude toward such cardinal institutions as breakfast.

There had recently arrived a newcomer in our Middle West midst, a Mrs. de Lisle from New York, a slim, pretty little lady much criticized by the impeccable housewives on the pretty residential street of our pretty city, for lax housekeeping, and who was openly known to have her breakfast (roll and coffee) in bed.

Now you take what has since become this more or less national institution of roll and coffee in the morning. It has its points æsthetically and doubtless gastronomically. But along about ten-thirty in the affairs of a busy morning those points, during the first period of the transition from more substantial matinal fare, begin to reside chiefly in the aching void at the pit of the stomach.

Breakfast tradition dies hard, particularly if that tradition happens to have been born and bred in the Middle West.

We lived not on a farm mind you, in these years of my late teens when too much of the corporeal me first began to seem too much with me, but in a large Middle West metropolis of urban habits of a most complicated nature. We ate our corn on cob from silver end-pieces, traveled east in a manner your Easterner seldom traveled west, and were among the first of the American communities to be stricken with such respective epidemics as burnt wood, honitan, ping-pong, Kinloch telephones, horseless carriages and hobble skirts.

At seven-thirty o’clock during the first eighteen years of my life spent there, a family of three, consisting of my father, the president of a fair sized shoe factory, but who nevertheless, punctiliously slid back his roll-top desk at eight o’clock; an alert and brainy housekeeper, my mother, and a slightly overweight youngster, myself, sat down to a breakfast worthy of the name. Literally we broke fast. Oatmeal in a covered dish was served out with plentiful additions of butter, sugar and yellowish cream. A platter of bacon and eggs, the eggs not necessarily portioned out along the conventional lines of two per person. My father was not adverse to a third, the frailer members of the family usually contenting themselves with two. Toast or hot biscuits or both arrived in a wicker basket, all tucked in under a red-and-white napkin with a fringed edge. There was usually hominy or grits or stacks of griddle cakes with apple jelly or molasses. Coffee and plenty of it in a beautiful old “Meissen” china pot with a gilt snout, and, more often than not, crumb coffee cake, still hot, and thickly sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

You ate, aided and abetted, it is true, by maternal duress of the most insistent nature, to have more of this, and another helping of that, on the respective suppositions that a business man was facing a long and exacting day, a growing child her school, and a housekeeper her arduous routine.

You ate! And thereby were to become susceptible for life to a tickling of the nostrils at the smell of frying bacon rushing up from the servant’s quarters as you, in your bedroom, sip black unsweetened coffee or gulp orange juice.

I was reared to like breakfast. I still like breakfast. Heaven my witness, I have not eaten a breakfast in twelve years.

Because it was about twelve years ago that the first whirrings of the dietary chant of the dieting women began to assail my ears. In fact, glancing back, it becomes apparent that about the time rolls-and-coffee became synonymous for the old noun breakfast, was launched the dietary era of my life.

It was all insidious, it was all as the humming of locusts, it was all as the fluty wings of the voice of my sex.

What had hitherto been only the vague unease at the poor, or rather the ample, showing put up by my externalities of figure; an unease which had been sweetly soothed by parents, now began to assert itself more positively.

Suddenly, or so it seemed to a languidly awakened awareness, the biology of my entire sisterhood seemed to have undergone an evolution. Female silhouettes began to take on the concavity of the letter C. Curves, only as they collapsed inward upon the anatomy, were apparently fit to be visible to the naked eye of the beholder. The bust measurements of the potential and actual mothers of the race dropped to the proportions of their young sons and brothers. The old, well-nourished ideal of the Venus de Milo became a lummox. Something actually rodential began to characterize the upper lips of the women of the slimming era as they gnawed at the raw carrot and the herbaceous green.

Out of the stuff of enameled rolling-pins for kneading too, too solid lady-flesh, rubber reducing girdles, bathroom scales to match any color scheme, reduction salts in the pastel shades, electric-light cabinets, rowing-machines, et al., new industries were born. Restaurateurs became Melba toast, spinach, and saccharine conscious. Spas began to find obesity, real and imagined, more profitable than liver complaint, gall stones, and gout rolled in one. Came the dawn of a dark hour when public opinion demanded that a grand-opera diva must be able to look down and see her own toes.

Such diet-derivative expressions as incompatibility, mental cruelty, fanaticism, irritability, cussedness, began more and more to creep into the phraseology of the divorce courts.

Overnight, as it were, that quick barometer, the show girl, achieved the biological phenomenon of shedding her hips, and measurements fluctuated more violently than a falling stock market. Figures began to slump and tip the scales at far below the Venus de Milo par. The way to compute your approach to the norm of the current ideal of beauty was to divide Lillian Russell’s adult weight by two, her measurements by three, and her vitality by four.

A favorite hypothesis has it that, in the main, women dress and adorn themselves primarily for the appraising eye of women. It is then also fair to assume that women reduce for women. Until his eye and arm became trained to the lesser lines of his womanhood, the male-in-the-streets’ reaction was scarcely nothing at all.

You’re all right as you are. What you want to reduce for? What’s the idea? You look good to me. Never did like skinny women. Cut out the dieting.

The very new crop of adult young men, a generation born and reared in the slimming era, probably cerebrates about it not at all, except that by now our new male adults are trained to like their fair sex, should they stop to think at all, slab-like, flat-chested, hipless, and with skin tones of emacia carefully smeared over with sunburn, real or artificial.

Next, starting from proportions which at first had seemed no more ominous than that cloud no larger than a man’s hand, the home-wrecking, nerve-wracking noun of the age burst explosively upon the scene. Calories! And the counting of the women within the shadow of a guillotine became as naught, compared with the counting of the dieting women.

Five medium slices pickled beet | 25 calories
One cup black unsweetened coffee | 0 calories
One medium-sweet pickle | 25 calories
Two tablespoons lemon juice | 10 calories
Average helping lettuce, no oil | 0 calories
One plum | 30 calories
One-half one small peach | 30 calories
Five strawberries | 25 calories
One stalk celery | 3 calories
One slice cucumber | 1 calorie
Four ounces consommé, no fat | 15 calories

It was along about then, free, white, and over twenty-one, that the rabies-like foam of the slimming phobia of my era began to fleck me.

In fact, it is possible to lay finger upon the very occasion of my surrender to the caloric age.

Suddenly, and at one fell swoop, as they would have put it back in the days when Venus de Milo was not considered a stylish stout, all the inchoate unease of my overweight lifetime burst forth.

A slim and lovely woman invited me to lunch with her at one of the town’s smart hostelries. As we walked through crowded dining-rooms, heads turned to the rhythm of her svelte grace. With the prerogative of the guest, I ordered first, off a menu the size of a tabloid newspaper. About my usual. A creamed celery soup (specialty of this particular hotel). A grilled chop rolled around a kidney. Green salad with an oil dressing. A sweet and coffee. Mine hostess, whose neck, so slim, was like a swan’s, ordered plain spinach (en branch please—not even buttered) and a demi-tasse.

“Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m dieting. Came back from White Sulphur last week one hundred and nine pounds, which is just exactly nine more pounds than this five-feet-nine is going to drag around. I’m foul with overweight.”

Reader, as they would say back in the days when Lillian Russell attached her corset strings to the bed post and took three deep breaths, I died that day. Of shame. Suddenly it seemed to me, sitting there in the abundant coverage of thrice nine pounds overweight, that of grossness I must perish before the very eyes of the waiter so solicitously placing my four hundred calories of cream of celery before me. The hand with which I toyed at the tablespoon designed to convey them to my stiffened lips became as a pale and flaccid ham. The dead hammish hand of a lady who had suddenly died of the shame of her overweight. From every corner of that opulent dining-room, there appeared the delusion of the slim hands of slim ladies mocking at one of their sex who permitted indenture space for dimples on the backs of her hands, whose neck seemed shorter than it need have, who was fair, fat, and alas! size forty.

And all the while, the waiter never even suspected that the lady toying with her cream-of-celery soup was dead. Of shame. And neither did her rodential hostess, nibbling at her spinach with her quivering little upper lip.

So out of this moment of this dream of slenderness honing herself still further on a diet of a concoction that looked like a small portion of boiled green tissue paper, was born resolution.

Mine no longer to reason why, mine but to do and diet.

To be sure, over a period of years dating back to days when a college senior who detested basket ball had played it vociferously, and had swapped her cream pie at dormitory for abominated jello, there had been varied and expensive attempts at reduction.

Subsequently, one unsuccessful experiment followed another. I had eighteen-dayed, counted calories, lamb-chopped-and-pineappled, sat in an elegant electric cabinet, and been treated exactly like a fowl in a Dutch oven; taken punishment from a famed Hollywood masseuse, that put me in the red, the black and blue; immersed my too, too solid self in baths of paraffine and mud; walked around reservoirs in sweat shirts; and without making appreciable inroads, had indulged in every out-and-indoor sport dear to funny-paper compilers.

But this day of the spectacle of the dream of slenderness honing herself down on boiled green tissue-paper, something toward which the not inconsiderable bulk of me had doubtless sub- or unconsciously been traveling since the basket-ball-jello days, was suddenly bang up in front of me.

Life, except on the basis of a lesser me, was no longer endurable. The fulsome sensation of being me, of having the vendeuse in the shop smear me, as I approached, with her appraising eye: “Blouse? Er—yes—er—size forty?” had reached its limit.

Invalid, suddenly intolerable, were the years of the benignity of friends: “But you are really not too stout, my dear. You’re just plump. Nonsense! You wouldn’t be you, thin. Don’t you go dieting and ruin your health. Why, my sister-in-law got herself down to a bag of bones and died of getting herself there, that’s what happened to my sister-in-law. Yes, of course I diet, but I wouldn’t if my weight was as becoming to me as yours is.”

Apple sauce! I found myself hissing to myself in the days when that elegant compound noun was eloquent. Apple sauce! (without sugar in it).

Suddenly the too, too solid flesh and I were in the death grapple.

Latently, beneath my poor numbed powers of logic where this faddistic subject of diet was concerned, there stirred insurrection.

Beneath the superficial layers of puerile and sometimes pernicious panaceas, eighteen-day ones, rolling-machine ones, sweat-shirt and hair-shirt ones, must somewhere lurk a fundamental truth.

Casting aside, except as subsidiaries, the dumbbells, the static bicycle in its sweat-cabinet, the vibratory machine, the rowing-machine, the electric horse, I set up a fundamental truth for myself.

Food makes fat.

Exercise may aid and abet its con- or destruction, baths, massage, health waters and what not, be its handmaidens, but fundamentally, chemically, irrefutably, it is certain foods which make fat! And so it came about that the lesser me that corresponds to the one you see in reduction advertisements etched in dotted lines beside the before-taking silhouette, rose to the supreme heights of decision. Casting away the cluttering paraphernalia of the blue-enameled rolling-pins, the indoor bicycle, the five-foot Diet-book shelf, I decided to set out afresh upon the single supposition that in the normally functioning human being, food makes fat.

I sought out the most all-around wise man of my acquaintance. He, in turn, directed me to a man especially wise in the highly specialized field of dietetics.

There was little in this physician’s laboratory-like office to suggest what I had come to regard as part of the sumptuous adjuncts of slimming.

The address was not good.

I arrived there finally, to be received by a tall, rangy man with no manner at all, who promptly proceeded to take from me what had never been taken before, my metabolism.

Metabolism is something that you surrender with a clothespin on your nose and what seems to be the cork end-piece of a bicycle handle bar inserted into your mouth.

This walling up of the two major points of egress of what is known to the laity as your breathing, results in an inner panic which is recorded by an automatic pen attached to the apparatus which records the goings-on of your trapped breath.

You do not give your metabolism standing up. You lie prone, first thinking you are going to die, then hoping it.

The results of this sudden internal commotion, as recorded by the metabolism-machine, established my metabolistic processes as normal. This fact, in turn, established the further fact that there were no glandular alibis or pathological peculiarities to exonerate this case of overweight.

To put it bluntly, food in wrong selection, proportion, and combination was the root of the evil.

Now if the motif of my words seems to have chiefly to do with food and editorial we, please bear in mind that these words have chiefly to do with food and editorial we. The sum, substance and portent which give whatever justification I may be able to eke out of the penning of these pages of adjectives and split infinitives, being food and editorial we.

This, however, is neither the time nor the place to go into the details of this new post-metabolism regime, except to emphasize that after years of dangerous and rudderless experimentation, I had at last found a man who seemed to understand the science of food as it applied to my human envelope.

The lesser me (who now purchases her blouses in the misses’ department) has not got it left in her to display the behaviorism of your true hero. “It was nothing at all. I saw my duty and I did it.” It was something, let me tell you that. It was lean and rocky going, full of thorn. Rocky going and slow and uphill and torturous and to a dreadful sing-song rhythm that more and more frequently got into my way: What-of-it-what-of-it——

Neither is the transformation from my hitherto normal attitude toward food as a pleasant means of subsistence, pretty telling.

There were hours, there were days, during the long lean siege of the post-metabolism era, when part of a newly developed form of self-torture was to rise from the pickings of my table and retire to a solitude I sought chiefly in order to visualize, while the tortured saliva ran, the meal it might have been. Instead of the soulless and fatless broth, consisting of the water off boiled greens, creamed soup to cling warmingly to cold ribs; instead of the cube of boiled beef (three ounces, cooked), a filet of sole, lying tenderly beneath a velvety sauce and sprinkled through with capers, like the black tips of little ermines; hot rolls slit on the side and then pressed down again on a cube of sweet butter to fit into the aching void of no bread. A sweet, preferably souffléd, or even a lowly, a sugared and cinnamoned baked apple under cream, to take the place of eight gulps of water.

There was to come a time, fallen so low had I, when to stand with my nose plastered against the plate-glass windows of lunch-room emporiums, where flapjacks, later to be smothered under melting butter and golden syrup were being juggled, became one of my favorite outdoor sports.

Time has healed those aching voids. Alas! one of the cruel anachronisms of this whole cruelly anachronistic business is that deep within the lesser me nests regret that my palate, doubtless also leaner, has lost much of its fine gusty capacity to yearn.

Today a dish of flapjacks beneath a golden blanket of maple syrup; a Roquefort dressing flowing off the smooth red flank of a stuffed tomato, a soufflé, a marron glacé, a crêpe suzette, a marzipan, leave me cold and without zest. Before them now I stand bowed with a regret that I have lost my capacity to regret them.

But there is no denying the fact that there was that period when my secret absorption upon the subject of food (food denied me) became shamefully dominant. Not the fierce legitimate hunger pangs of one starving for lack of the ability to obtain food, but the flabby, rather shameful spectacle of one in the midst of the plentiful prerogatives of three meals a day, self-denied them.

Frightening, mental traits began to creep upon me.

Living chiefly upon myself, stoked on the low fuel values of lean meats and five-per-cent vegetables boiled in water, going through my pallid days always conscious of a catherine wheel of desire spinning somewhere within the center of my denied and shrinking anatomy, I began to take on a quite horrible and private pleasure in watching other people eat, or preferably, overeat.

Myself relentless in passing up a toothsome dish, often as not especially prepared by a gracious hostess, I showed neither mercy nor consideration. But let that same hostess sit down at my own board and I became sly and spider-like, luring my victim into my gastronomic den of rich foods.

Eat and overeat, something devilish within me seemed to shout. Eat, in order that I may all the more exultantly deny and work myself up into the ecstasies of martyrdom. How the saints must have learned to love their sweet agonies!

Nor were these macabre mental processes to remain unsuspected. Chilly laughter began to greet the dreadful might of my hospitality. Glances flashed between my guests as sawing away at a thin slice of especially prepared lean beef, fried in mineral oil, I importuned, nay commanded, my futilely resisting guests to more of this and that richly devised concoction; pressed upon them the au gratin potato, the sherry-flavored tart, while I tinkled ice water against denied but omnivorous teeth, dallied with my chaste unused dessert spoon and rammed persuasion and second helpings of pistachio Melba down my friends.

“Dammit,” cried one of my obese guests one night, goaded (and tempted) beyond endurance, “I won’t overstuff myself with another helping of this delicious bouillabaisse in order to enhance your lean inner spirit of self-righteousness! Dammit, I tell you, no! Well, just a little more—just a damn little more.”

Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies “padded,” my friend, alas! spoke too truly. Hungry, whetted with a desire for foods that hitherto had never interested nor particularly tempted me, I schemed for the obesity of my lean friends and the greater obesity of my obese ones. Schemed, Reader! The sense of rising from my board, feebly stoked on lean meats broiled in mineral oil, five-per-cent vegetables (the ones that grow on the wrong side of the gastronomic railroad tracks; parsnips, cabbage, spinach, beets, greens, leeks, dandelions) brought me the strange sadistic martyr-like delights herein elsewhere described. I began to lose my friends.

Neither, alas! did it stop here. As week by week, under a scientifically ordered regime which I partially defeated by overdoing my doctor’s dietary orders, the coverage began to diminish too rapidly to please him, and the strange psychology of a lady in the throes of a too rigid diet continued its baffling manifestations.

About the time that my slimming success began to be apparent to the appraising eyes of the sisterhood, my entrance into a room was the occasion for a gust of Oh’s and Ah’s, How-did-you-do-it? Why, I wouldn’t have known you! My dear, you’re marvelous! The heady wine of my success (on an empty stomach) began to induce giddiness.

Hollow-eyed and a bit necky, I began to indulge in the private procedure of posing before my mirror, pinning in my loose waistband and twisting about a slightly loose-fleshed neck for the Jean Harlow angle or the Hepburn line of jaw. The first faint knob pushing out through my neck was something on which to hang high hope.

It was during this period that, after having goaded her with food, I would remark maliciously to a friend: “Look over there at that spectacle! It is enough to cause a scientist to faint! A stout woman eating a potato!”

Oh, I was the subject for inclusion in the rows of introspective ladies waiting in the outer rooms of smart Park Avenue psychoanalysts, I can tell you!

It enraged me to see my friends eat, or, for that matter, drink, although a taste for alcohol or spirituous liquors had never made them part of my problem. It enraged me to see them eat; I could not bear not to see them overstuff.

I now pitied obesity in others, and did all in my power to either induce or encourage it.

Smoldering rage began within me if my entrance into a group of friends failed to elicit pæans of surprised admiration. In the twelvemonth of fanatical defiance of my doctor’s admonitions for temperance, I became a narrow-looking, bony individual with a disproportionately large head, wide, uninhabited-looking shoulders, old-looking hands, and a cold kind of chic.

There was not a laugh in a carload of me.

I had been through a grim, hungry, cold, and lonely fight, and always to that insistent tom-tom of rhythm, relentless as a drum-beat: What-of-it-what-of-it-what-of-it.

I had won my spurs and they stuck out all over me.

People with two chins and plenty of laughter above and below them said, without rue, that I had character. Friends, to my face at least, said I had “looks,” although toward the end even some of them began to admit that they had liked me better “before.”

I had lost pounds and my sense of humor.

The miracle of it, cheating my doctor as I did, was that I had not lost my health. Perhaps the funniness of me came rushing over me just in time to avert that. Perhaps the spectacle on all sides of women almost deliberately throwing the incomparable asset of their health away upon the absurd altar of slimming, for no other reason than the desire to be slim, helped, Reader, to snatch me from the jaws of a dieting lady novelist’s more or less untimely death.

Not that I have come far enough along the line of mental readjustment to relinquish my diet. Slimming is a battle that is never won. But at least I am on to myself. I can laugh it off. And the spectacle of me to myself in the mirror is really nothing to leave home about, nor, so far as I can see, has there been the impulse on anyone’s part to indulge in that drastic measure in my behalf. I have not observed that those nearest and dearest, or that friends in general, like me any the more or less. If anything, you may deduce, less.

Now this is not to convey that all diets for æsthetic ends are pernicious and that all slimming is vicious.

On the contrary, excess baggage of flesh is not only unwieldy and unbeautiful, but it is more usually a health liability than an asset (see life-insurance-risk charts).

As a matter of fact, undereating may generally be counted as a cardinal virtue. A wise and disturbing man it was who first passed out the golden advice to always leave the dinner table a little unsatisfied. Particularly since nature has seen fit to pester the human race with various appetites which are so far and away beyond requirements, are food and drink restraints to be regarded on the benign side.

Moderation is one of the nicer practices.

It is upon the widespread perils of the abuses of moderation in reduction diets that I would dwell.

My average daily allotment of food allowed by a careful dietitian might not have always been to my liking, but it was ample to accomplish the slimming desire and at the same time maintain and nourish.

Here is an average day’s menu; a menu which I advise no one to emulate without first consulting a physician. It is simple to understand its component parts. Proteins and minerals are emphasized; carbohydrates, fats, minimized:

Breakfast

1/2 small grapefruit
2 eggs (boiled poached)
1 tablespoon milk for coffee.

Lunch

1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.)
5 per cent vegetables (the wrong-side-of-the-railroad-track ones).

Dinner

Same as lunch.

Six to eight glasses of water per day.

Do not take additional foods unless otherwise specified.

“Not so bad,” you observe, “more than I usually consume during an average day.”

Perhaps more food, but not more nourishment. But the point is that on this prescribed diet, with certain highly conservative expeditions after appreciable reduction had taken place, over into carbohydrates and fats, results would almost undoubtedly have been achieved. In time! But as the poundage begins shyly to retreat, the frantic psychology, characteristic of the thousands of the slimming women, present company included, sets in.

Ours not to reason why. Ours but to diet and sometimes die.

Despite physician’s admonitions to the contrary, fascinated by the gradual retreat of a hitherto more or less immutable, excess poundage; egged on by the appraising women; goaded by the diminishing story of the bathroom scales—the fascination for speed began to cause this eye to glitter.

More pounds per week. Faster. Quicker. Slimmer!

The daily menu, about which I not infrequently lied to my doctor, began to read something like this:

Breakfast

Black unsweetened coffee
1/2 small orange.

Eleven A. M.

Black unsweetened coffee.

Lunch

1 head lettuce or
1/2 head cabbage-slaw, mineral-oil dressing.

Three P. M.

Black unsweetened coffee.

Dinner

1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.)
5 per cent vegetables.

Lean pallid days had arrived along about now; days when I went about with the strained face of a plucked fowl, brittle-looking skin sagging for want of some place to go.

No conversation survived my entrance into a room. The men might struggle a bit to carry forward with a bit of technocracy, Muscle Shoals or World Series, but the following two or three minutes carried a guarantee that one subject alone would predominate.

How did you do it? Tell me what you eat. Are you taking medicine? Awfully dangerous, you know. Now tell me what you had for breakfast. Do you mix your starches and proteins? Awfully bad for you! Now isn’t that curious, somebody told me you were living on some sort of a reduction tea made by an East Indian and had not touched solid food for two months. But my dear, you mustn’t let yourself get haggard. Not that you are!

Oh no, not that I was.

Sometimes dragging myself to bed, triumphant, faint, cold, tired, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, with not quite the energy to do either, I dared not glance at the white rattletrap my mirror would have revealed to me.

Instead I crept to rest, gladly, exhaustedly, and, to keep from laughing or crying or both, fell to contemplating the slight ridge my body made beneath the coverings, or trying to crowd back across my darkness not, “fancies freed, transient and exploring,” but fancies of a froth of café parfait foaming down the flank of a long slim goblet or of a slice of four-layer cream cake in which to sink teeth was denied, in order to remove taste and memory of liver fried in mineral oil and lettuce with its cutting dash of lemon juice.

I must have been as easy to live with, during that period before I lost both appetite and desire for the foods that used to haunt me, as a lady in a padded cell.

Strangely, the vigor for work did not desert. It was an escape, to sit down at a desk and throw off the gnawing awareness of the human envelope. One can almost concoct the fantastic doctrine that the brain is a favorite child of the human body and before any other part is fed, is given the cream (or in this case skimmed milk) of the intake.

However, just what mental processes might have resulted from that same period, corn fed, must remain forever, to those who palpitatingly would know, in the limbo of the hypothetical.

Like almost everything else in moderation, slimming has its points. Its excellent points. Outside moderation, and ’tis of thee I sing, it takes on the proportion of menace to that half of the race which is intrusted with incubation and delivery of the species.

Biological years move slowly and science does not pretend to offer up prematurely compiled data to prove that slenderized women are necessarily better or worse breeding-machines.

Besides, my own paternal ninety-eight-pound grandmother, who produced six two-hundred-pound sons was remarked, but scarcely remarkable, for it.

On the other hand, it requires no barrage of data to logically assume and conclude that a race of undernourished, highly nervous women with a low resistance to disease and an abhorrence of bust measurements, is going to leave its mark upon tomorrow’s child.

In Italy, Il Duce openly commands that women be big, ripe, fecund, intimating, with no particular authority for it, that these processes go together. As a rule he assumes, and rightly, that women who have many children stop being slender in the process. And so he extols the robust mother who concedes that her beauty lies not in her shape, but in her rôle as mother.

I see no reason why it cannot lie in both, unless the beauty standards of the female of an era drop so low that the proportions of a fertile adult woman must hover around those of a fourteen-year-old boy....

To be sure, for the moment, in America at least, the movement away from the boyish figure seems to be on the up and up, although the Mae West atavism seems to be little more than a half-hearted fad, and millions lie waiting for the chemist or alchemist who can present the human race with the miracle of a slimming serum.

Perhaps after that day comes we will be a happier and a healthier race and the laugh will be on nature, who for thousands of years had made us the butt of her old joke on the fats and the thins, plying some of us with her too, too ample coverage, condemning others to an immutable destiny of skin and bones.

Of the two evils, the latter, by insurance companies at least, is reckoned the least hazardous.

For myself, alas! I cannot even claim that I feel better slim than I did, not so slim. I felt vigorous then. I feel almost as vigorous now. Overweight in excess is beyond controversy an undesirable and dangerous state. If the male more easily escapes its æsthetic menace, he falls rigidly within its pathological perils. The female of the species, more’s the pity, is its social, biological and æsthetic victim.

But now that the laugh has come back to me, I want to reach out a deterring, an ancient-looking hand, to the hordes of slimming women as I observe them nibbling at celery stalks over lunch tables, swapping their diets across bridge tables, baring their backs to the rolling-machine and their breasts to camphor rubs.

And even to those who are dieting for good and authentic reason of one sort or another, I want to reach out that same ancient-looking hand to impress upon them the danger of the short-cut food fad; of following any diet regime outside a physician’s prescribed one; of succumbing to the perils of the pineapple and lamb-chop group of fantasies; of the terrible risks involved in accepting what is almost certain to be the he-says and the she-says dietary word of their not always thoughtful dieting sisters; of the falseness of current æsthetic values as they fluctuate to the season’s fashion; of the absurdity of a woman weighing one hundred and nine pounds undernourishing herself on boiled green tissue-paper.

Whether it is to his credit or due to just plain lack of self-discipline, the fact remains that with his middle-aged susceptibility to embonpoint, the male has not gone to extremes in combating his foe. True, too often he self-indulgently tolerates its perilous and heavy folds about his heartbeat, and rather than suffer the weary battle of reduction, allows himself to take on the convexity of a barrel. The spas are crowded with him, he is not beautiful, and one doubts if he is as happy as he pretends to look. But at least he had not reduced the dietary habits of a nation to roughage, bulk and greens. In fact, watching his women totter past him on their fanatical way to the altar of the emaciated false goddess of their passion, he is apt to look back rather wistfully upon the good old days when Pauline Hall was the hour-glass beauty of his dreams.

Observe the shopkeeper catering to this psychological invalidism of his women customers. The gown he hangs in his show window is shrewdly pinned back at the waist line to one third its natural size, thereby capturing with its suggestion of anemia, the eye of the woman who visualizes herself commensurate with it.

The measurements of the mannequins upon whom are draped the models of the couturières and by way of whom the measurement standards for women are devilishly established, are usually those of underdeveloped boys.

The woman of average proportion who enters such a shop in the hope of finding a ready-to-wear gown is apt to depart feeling herself Gargantuan in a land of Lilliputians.

What thousands of normal healthy women have been driven to starvation, illness, even death, in order to more nearly conform to the adolescent standards established by the pale little mannequins who stand hours in workrooms while the standardizers and glorifiers of their puniness, drape their poor little flat chests, wind around the knobs of their sparrow-like hips, and wrap their little concave stomachs in fabrics designed to accent emacia!

One wonders what place the boyish-breasted flapper of half a decade ago, or the scarcely less spare female of today, will ultimately have alongside the respective ideals of Ruth among the corn, Mme. de Staël, Signorina Mona Lisa, Laura, Venus, Winged Victory, Lillian Russell.

More and more, today’s standards of American Beauty are being set up and authorized by the bizarre little so-called civilization known as Hollywood, home of the eighteen-day diet, the orange juice, the skimmed-milk-and-baked-potato, the liquid bread, the thyrodic bath salt, the paraffin sweat, the holy rolling-machine, the pugilistic massage, and almost every reduction fad known to this tormented year of our Lord.

By way of Hollywood, the young man is thereby automatically trained to accept his female of the species slinky, low in vitality, and concave in curve. In fact, a plump débutante in the family is more of a problem than a mental delinquent.

And meanwhile, the slimmed, the irritable, the hungry woman takes on the proportion of one of our minor menaces. She does not add to the gaiety of the nation or of the home; she is no healthier, she is prettier only according to the frail standards of a papier-maché city on the west coast where the human envelope is the stock in trade. She is a success chiefly to herself and to her sister of similar standards.

Now I am aware of a certain perverse psychology which you may suspect I am beginning to manifest. My definition of white hair is something you admire only when it is on another woman.

This is not a plea for the tolerance or toleration of excess weight, just so it is on the other fellow. It is a plea for intolerance of excess underweight.

I am personally too infected with this slimming phobia to hope for complete redemption. I may come back, but probably not all the way. As a matter of fact, I would not come all the way. My struggle is to find the moral courage to make the partial return. The slimming years have been so long. I have won my battle knowing that it is a battle that is never truly won and that the helmet and the spurs cannot be laid aside.

It remains practically impossible for me to sit down whole-heartedly to a meal among whole-hearted folk. What has long since become the more or less rare spectacle of an American woman partaking of potato is still sufficient to send chills down this spine. By now, expert in that strange branch of lower mathematics, the counting of the calories, I can compute on sight the heat and food value of a helping of filet of sole (3 × 2-1/2) or of one slice of zwieback (3-1/2 × 1-1/2 × 1/2).

To violate by one calorie is to invite regrets out of all proportion to the delights of the transgression. One suck off the sugared sides of a candy sour-ball can cause one to scuttle to the scales in fear and trembling, or one spoonful off the side of the pyramid of ice-cream on your dinner partner’s dessert plate, transform you into a distrait and regretful guest.

But at least mine hungry eyes have a certain sharpened clarity which enables them to see the funniness and the menace of the spectacle of the slimming women.

We are funny. Realizing that, we might long since have learned to laugh it off, except, alas! laughter is supposed to be fattening!

It is not a simple matter to get a laugh out of a slimming woman. It is the easiest thing she does not do.

My laughs have come back slowly, mere spurts at first, as from a spring gone dry but about to yield again.

It means that even while, with me, meal-time still remains largely a process of omission and elimination, I am at least on to myself. Ladies, really, it is to laugh.

Today, four unrelenting years after the episode of the boiled tissue paper, I now enter a shop to have a vendeuse glide up to me with: “For yourself? Misses department across the aisle.”

Well, what of it?

This much of it! If a slimmer, a sadder, and perhaps a wiser me has succeeded in helping to convey to the slimmers of today and the potential slimmers of tomorrow some of the ridiculousness and some of the perils of the slimming age, then the public sacrifice of myself upon the altar of mine own absurdities will not have been in vain.

Would I do it all over again?

“Well,” I reply, as I continue to count my calories, “well—er——”

In conclusion, Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies munched chocolates in bed, I desire to make public the following acknowledgments:

To a husband who bore with me during a period when a snapping-turtle shared roof with him.

To my doctor to whom I lied.

To my many friends upon whom at my supposedly hospitable board, my greenly glittering eye rested in one hatred or another.

To a cook who learned to defile her art in order to brew me dishes unwanted and unsavory.

To the books written during this period which abound perhaps unduly in foods coveted by their author.

To hosts and hostesses who offered me their hospitality only that I might wave aside with supercilious celery stalk their good meat and wassail.

To my comfortably stout friends upon whom my disdainful eye rested not kindly.

To my slender friends upon whom my good-as-you-now gaze has assailingly glared.

To the human race for bearing with me.

To myself for finally realizing that I am funnier than any character I have ever succeeded in depicting in fiction.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

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Table of Contents

- NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS
- NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS
- NO FOOD WITH MY MEALS
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE