This is about the layout for luncheon and dinner.  It is all about as exciting and appetizing as that.  The proposition is, of course, that you are not taking food which will make fat and you must, therefore, inevitably lose flesh.  So far so good; but the difficulty is not in the system, but in the hardship of carrying it out.  You can’t have anything to eat that you want to eat.  You torture yourself for a space and lose some flesh; then when you do go back to your normal method of eating the flesh comes galloping back—­and there you are!  It is the same with exercise.  You can take off fat by exercise; but, once you begin, you are doomed to everlasting exercise, for the minute you stop back comes the fat—­and more of it than you had before you began to reduce.

It is a tough game, anyway you play it, if you are disposed to be fat.  No man living, who isn’t a freak, can persist always in one diet.  Nor can any man who has anything else on his mind be always exercising—­especially after he has reached forty years of age, when there are so many better things to do and time is valuable, and the real idea of how to live has just begun to percolate.  Also, until one is forty, if reasonably healthy, flesh is a joke, and not so much of a burden as it becomes later.  I haven’t a thing in the world against any or all of these methods.  I have tried most of them and know most of them are bogus; but I am not trying to dissuade any person from taking off fat in any way that suits any individual fancy or the fancy of any reducer into whose hands the victim may have fallen.  If you have a good method go to it—­and more power to you!

My idea is this:  I am setting down here a record of my own experiences, and that is all.  Every person who does not like what I have to say is cheerfully advised to lump it.  Any person who is as fat as I was and who wants to get thinner is at liberty to follow my method.  If circumstances are similar results will be similar.  If not there will be no results.  I am not advising or urging or putting forth any propaganda.  Here is what happened.  It may suit you or it may not.  Either way I am indifferent.  In the words of the coon song:  “I’ve got mine!”

I hope I make myself clear.  I have no mission or message or any flubdub of that kind.  I am not one of those boys who urge you to do this for your own good.  I have read a ton of literature put out by persons who found something that agreed with them and immediately started out to reform the world along that line.  Your reformer, anyhow, is a person who wants all the rest of the world to do as he wants the rest of the world to do, not as the rest of the world wants to do.  And the reason reformers get past so numerously is because our society is so constituted that we spend every one of our brief years doing what other people want us to do and tell us to do, and never do anything we ourselves want to do.  Once I got seventeen pounds of books