ble end. If it kept on I knew I should blow up some fine day.
Besides, I was uric-acidy, rheumatic and stertorous and clumsy. I had
about fifty or sixty pounds of poisonous junk wrapped round me, and I
knew I should suffer for it in the end, though I didn't feel it much and
carried it with a fair assumption of lightness.

I was not an amateur at the game. I had been through the mill. I spent
several days in going over the whole matter. It was reasonably simple,
too, and needn't have taken so much of my time; but I was protecting
myself, you see, gold-bricking myself--trying to find a way out that
would not deprive me of things I liked to do, of pleasures I wanted to
enjoy. It was pure selfishness that dominated me and made me do so much
figuring on a proposition I knew was contained in a sentence; but I did
fight to hang on to the old way of living.

After each session of false logic and selfish hypothesis I invariably
came back to the same proposition, which is the only proposition--and
that was: What makes fat? Food and drink. How can you reduce fat? By
reducing the amount of food and drink--that is all there is or was to it.
The only way to get rid of the effects of overeating and overdrinking is
to stop overeating and overdrinking.

I went over my food habit. I was accustomed to eating a big hired-man's
breakfast--fruit, coffee, eggs, waffles, hot bread, sausage, anything
that came along; and I heaved in a lot of it--not a little--a lot! I
didn't eat so much at luncheon, but I ate plenty; and at night I simply
cleaned up the table. I wasn't so strong on sweets and pastry, because I
usually drank a few highballs during the day, and highballs and cocktails
and sweets do not go well together--that is, the man who takes alcohol
into his system usually does not care for sweets. Beer was one of my
long suits too--Pilsner beer. I did like that!

I looked this food habit squarely in the face. I impaled the drink habit
with my glittering eye. I knew I was eating about sixty per cent more
than I needed or could use, and that I was drinking a hundred per cent
more. I knew that nothing makes fat but food and drink. I knew excess
of food will make any animal fat and I saw I had been eating freely of
the most fattening kinds of food. I knew beer and liquor were made of
grain, and that grain is used to fatten steers and cows and pigs. I
refused to adopt a diet like any of those unpalatable ones I had
experim