iets 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.

So far as the medicinal or drug method of fat reduction is concerned,
any fat man or woman who takes drugs to reduce flesh, or to help,
deserves all that he or she will get--and that will be plenty. There's
no need of saying anything further on that subject. Th