Almost any doctor can tell you how to get thin.  To be sure, no doctor will tell you to do the same things any other doctor prescribes, but it all simmers down to the same thing:  Cut out the starchy foods and sweets, and take exercise.  Also:  Don’t drink alcohol.  The variations that can be played on this simple theme by a skillful doctor are endless.  When a real specialist in fat reduction gets hold of you—­a real, earnest reducer—­he can contrive a diet that would make a living skeleton thin—­and likewise put him in his little grave.  I have had diets handed to me that would starve a humming-bird, and diets that would put flesh on a bronze statue; and all to the same end—­reduction.  Science has been monkeying with nourishment for the past ten or fifteen years to the exclusion of many other branches of research; and about all that has happened to the nourishment is the large elimination of nutriment from it.

CHAPTER II

THE SO-CALLED CURES

Broadly speaking, the methods of fat reduction most in vogue are divided into four classes—­mechanical, physical, medicinal and dietary.  The first two are not worth considering by a man who has anything else to do.  I do not doubt that a man who could devote his whole time to the work could, by means of some of the appliances offered—­from the apparatus in a gymnasium to rubber shirts, get off fat—­nor do I doubt the efficacy of exercise and its accompaniments in the way of sweating and baths and all that; but when a person has a living to make these methods are useless, not through any demerit of their own but because the man who is fat hasn’t the time or opportunity and, more than all, soon fails in the inclination to use them.

If you can tell me anything more ghastly than taking a system of canned exercises in the morning or at night in one’s bedroom or bathroom, or elsewhere, with no other incentive than some physical gain that, when you come to sum it up, is largely fictitious in value—­or comes inevitably to be thought so—­I would like to have you step forward and name it.  I have been all through that phase of it, and I know; and I also know by heart the patter of the persons who recommend it.  Further, I know the person round the forties doesn’t live who enjoys this sort of thing—­no matter what he says about it; and without enjoyment exercise is of no use or worse than useless.  It can be done, of course; and lumps of muscle can be stuck on almost any part of the body—­but what’s the use to the person who has to make a living?  Then, too, I am speaking now of methods that can be used by men and women who are no longer young.  A young man can and will do stunts in physical culture that an older man cannot do, either satisfactorily or comfortably.