Yuck! I do not like it when a house fly lands on me, or flies in front of me or, let us face it, when a house fly dares to enter my home!
I want to create havoc and mayhem...
But, I must face some facts
1. Flies were not put on this earth by the devil, to torment humans and animals.
2. Flies are not a cross to bear for real or imagined sins.
Actually flies, 'house' flies in particular, are major pollinators of most of the earth's plants.
Everyone says that bees are the major pollinators, but that is because we love to eat bee vomit, honey.
Sorry folks, flies are very important to the environment.
BUT, not in my home, office or barns.
So, how do we get rid of them, when they are where we (I) do not want them?
1. Reduce their population, by reducing their food sources.
In other words, CLEAN YOUR HOUSE and BUILDINGS
Let your chickens roam free. Chickens can find bug larvae and the nests and will clean out the pests.
Encourage birds, of all kinds to eat the bugs, outside your home.
Clean up and stack old lumber and your goody piles away from your buildings. Clean out from under foundation plantings, trim the bottom branches, up off the ground, at least 6 inches.
This will dry up the area and destroy a lot of bug nesting sites.
Consider a wrap around porch, with an on the ground solid concrete apron, at least 6 feet out from the house and buildings. This will stop a huge amount of bugs, since bugs generally don't travel far from their birth places. At least not voluntarily.
Use old used filtered motor oil, old used, filtered cooking oil and pour them into a garden hose mixer. You can filter the old used oils through several layers of loosely woven cloth.
No, you won't get cancer and die from using old oils to mix with water and spray your trees, shrubs, plants, building and dark creepy spaces.
But, you can get very sick if you use the commercial pesticides and bug controls.
The old oils will coat and suffocate the infant and baby bugs and block the adult bugs reproductive areas. A whole lot less bugs in just a few days!
The clean up, birds, oil sprays, and fly swatters will take care of a lot of the bugs.
Adding some apple cider vinegar to the animals watering bowls, will also help. Careful, not to much, a cup to ten galleons should do the trick.
If you need even more bug control try the bottle traps. Bugs fly in and can't get out.
These are best used away from the house and buildings and hung in the shade.
They can get stinky after awhile to try to hang them downwind of your home.
They are a lot of fun and you can trap thousands of pests in a very short period of time.
The simplest way to control house flies is to change your attitude about them, once you realize they are important to the earth, you can find simple ways of removing them from your domain.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Posting a Technoratic Verifying Code to a Blog
This is a verifying code for Technoratic.Technoratic is a tag and ping outfit, check them out at Technoratic M66H8DNUZYE5
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Useful Information about: Going Green for the Environment-Go Green with Tele...
Useful Information about: Going Green for the Environment-Go Green with Tele...: "Going green for the environment can be as easy as giving up driving to those weekly meetings. You can go green with teleconferencing. 1. N..."
Going Green for the Environment-Go Green with Teleconferencing
Going green for the environment can be as easy as giving up driving to those weekly meetings. You can go green with teleconferencing.
1. No more rush hour traffic!
2. No more pumping good hard cash into your fuel tank!
3. No more rushing to meet the train or bus!
4. No more wasted time in the airport security lines!
5. No more time away from your significant other...wondering what they are up to, while you are away!
Imagine if your business was all conducted from your home and the homes of your employees. Do you really need a huge office downtown, anymore?
1. No more rush hour traffic!
2. No more pumping good hard cash into your fuel tank!
3. No more rushing to meet the train or bus!
4. No more wasted time in the airport security lines!
5. No more time away from your significant other...wondering what they are up to, while you are away!
Imagine if your business was all conducted from your home and the homes of your employees. Do you really need a huge office downtown, anymore?
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Recipes-All Recipes-Easy Recipes: Gravy Recipes-How to Make Gravy
Recipes-All Recipes-Easy Recipes: Gravy Recipes-How to Make Gravy: "GRAVIES. A few general observations are necessary on the subject of soups and gravies. Note: These gravy recipes and notes were written dow..."
Useful Information about: Diet-Weight Loss-Weight Loss Tips
Useful Information about: Diet-Weight Loss-Weight Loss Tips: "We have all searched for the perfect diet, looking at a lot of diets along the way. diet plans, FREE diet plans, diet programs, online diets..."
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Diet-Weight Loss-Weight Loss Tips
We have all searched for the perfect diet, looking at a lot of diets along the way. diet plans, FREE diet plans, diet programs, online diets. We search for weight loss, fat loss, for weight loss tips, ways to lose fat.
We are embarrassed by fat people and fat people jokes. We want the best way to lose weight, to look good, to feel good. We want to wear that sexy evening gown or evening wear. We want to wear those adult exotic costumes. We want to be the very best we can be…
Read every word of this…
THE FUN OF GETTING THIN
How To Be Happy and Reduce the Waist Line
by
SAMUEL G. BLYTHE, 1912
THE FUN OF GETTING THIN
FAT
A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes--one on herself and
the other on her husband. Half the comedy in the world is predicated
on the paunch.
At that, the human race is divided into but two classes--fat people who
are trying to get thin and thin people who are trying to get fat.
Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out the
last two letters of the indictment.
Fat is fat.
It isn't any more fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it's a
darned sight more uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin or
unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the long
end of it.
I never was thin, so I don't know.
However, I have been fat--notice that "have been"?
And if there is any phase of human enjoyment, any part of life, any occupation,
avocation, divertissement, pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it
in any regard, I failed to discover it in the twenty years during which I looked like
the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a bale of hay.
When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor
you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent, directly or indirectly, in the assay.
The personal equation is the ruling equation.
Women want to be thinner because they will look better--and so do men. Likewise, women want to be plumper because they will look better--and so do men.
This holds up to forty years.
After that it doesn't make much difference whether either men or women look any better than they have been looking, so far as the great end and aim of all life is concerned.
Consequently fat men and fat women after forty want to be thinner for reasons of health and comfort, or quit and resign themselves to their further years of obesity.
Now I am over forty.
Hence my experiments in reduction may be taken at this time as grounded on a desire for comfort--not that I did not make many campaigns against my fat before I was forty.
I fought it now and then, but always retreated before I won a victory.
This time, instead of skirmishing valiantly for a space and then being ignominiously and fatly routed by the powerful forces of food and drink, I hung stolidly to the line of my original attack, harassed the enemy by a constant and deadly fire--and one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.
It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losing flesh--unless, of course, the decrease in weight is due to illness.
No healthy person, predisposed to fat, ever lost any flesh.
If that person gets rid of any weight, or girth, or fat, it isn't lost--it is FOUGHT OFF, BEATEN OFF.
The victim struggles with it, goes to the mat with it, and does not debonairly drop it. He eliminates it with stern effort and much travail of the spirit.
It is a job of work, a grueling combat to the finish, a task that appalls and usually repels.
The theory of taking off fat is the simplest theory in the world.
It is announced, in four words: Stop eating and drinking.
The practice of fat reduction is the most difficult thing in the world.
Its difficulties are comprehended in two words: You cannot.
The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak.
The success of the undertaking lies in the triumph of the will over the appetite. There's a lovely line of
cant for you!
Triumph of the will over the appetite.
It sounds like the preaching of a professional food faddist, who tells the people they eat too much and then slips away and wolfs down four pounds of beefsteak at a sitting.
However, I suppose it is necessary to say this once in a dissertation like this--and it is said.
In writing about this successful experiment of mine in reducing weight I have no theories to advance except one, and no instructions to give.
I don't know whether my method would take an ounce off any other person in the world, and I don't care.
I only know it took more than fifty pounds off me.
I am not advancing any argument, medicinal or otherwise, for my plan.
I never talked to a doctor about it, and never shall.
If there are fat men and fat women who are fat for the same reasons I was fat I suppose they can get thin the way I got thin.
If they are fat for other reasons I suppose they cannot. I don't know about either proposition.
I have great respect for doctors--so much respect, in fact, that I keep diligently away from them.
I know the preliminaries of their game and can take a dose of medicine myself as skillfully as they can administer it.
Also, I know when I have a fever, and have a working knowledge of how my heart should beat and my other bodily functions be performed. I have frequently found that a prescription, unintelligibly written but
looking very wise, is highly efficacious when folded carefully and put in the pocketbook instead of being deposited with a druggist.
I suppose that comes from a sort of hereditary faith in amulets. No doubt the method would be even more efficacious if the prescription were tied on a string and hung around the neck.
Still, doctors are interesting as a class. After you get beyond the let-me-feel-your-pulse-and-see-your-tongue preliminaries they are versatile and ingenious. Almost always, after you tell them what is the matter with you, they will know--not every time, but frequently.
Also, they will take any sort of a chance with you in the interest of science.
However, they generally send out for a specialist when they are ill themselves. When you come to think of it that is but natural.
Almost any man, whether professional or not, will take a chance with somebody else that he wouldn't quite go through with on himself.
Besides, doctors treat comparative strangers for the most part, and the interests of science are to be conserved.
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.
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.
Then there remains the dietary method--the old familiar friend, diet.
Starting with William Banting--maybe it didn't start with William, but before him--but, starting with Bill for present purposes, there have been more systems of diet invented and promulgated than there have been systems of religion--and that means about one in every hundred has evolved a system.
You can get them of all sorts and all sure to do the work, ranging from an exclusive diet of beefsteak and spinach to desiccated hay and creamed alfalfa.
There are mono diets, duo diets, vegetable diets, fruit diets, nut diets --all kinds of diets--each guaranteed to take off flesh if you have too much or to put it on if you have too little.
Basically, however, the anti-flesh diets are about the same. You are told to cut out everything you want to eat and exist on triply toasted bread and the white meat of a chicken, or string beans and sawdust, or
any other combination the sharps say will not produce fat, but will sustain life in a lingering form.
They surround these diet talks and presentments with a lot of frills about proteins and calories and all
that sort of guff, and make it as difficult as possible.
Now, mark you, I am not saying diet--scientific diet--is not a good thing, a magnificent step forward in the progress of this world; but I am saying that the average fat-reducing diet is impossible to any but a man or
woman of the ultimate will-power, and is a hardship that need not be endured.
I have tried these diets, and I know!
They may help reduce flesh, but they are not easy to follow and they do not contain things that any person wants to eat or is accustomed to eat, or will eat, to the exclusion of things that person does want to eat and will eat.
It can be done.
One of these diets can be followed if the will-power is there, and the flesh will come off; but the method does not conduce to the best results--the physical force is reduced, and there is a much easier way.
I have one of these diet lists before me now from the highest-priced flesh-reducing specialist in the world, who claims to have taken mountains of flesh off mountainous men.
In the beginning, for example, it says: "You will understand, of course, that sugar is entirely debarred. Also, that fats, milk, cheese, cream, eggs, and so on, are cut off for the time being. Also that bread and farinaceous foods are all cut off. In place of bread or toast you must use gluten biscuits."
For breakfast, in this dietary, one or two gluten biscuits are allowed and a cup of unsweetened coffee. Also, six ounces of lean grilled steak, chops or chicken, and any white fish--or the whites of two eggs.
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 flub dub 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 telling that the only way to cure everything was to fast.
I knew a man who tried that. The results were grand. He fasted a long time and cured himself of what ailed him.
Only, unfortunately, just before the last vestige of disease was removed the fasting killed him.
I contend that man might just as well have died of what ailed him originally as to cure that disease and die of the cure. It seems to me it is as broad as it is long.
However, have at this fat-reduction process of mine! You must bear with a few personal reminiscences.
I was a big, husky brute of a boy--thick-chested, broad-shouldered, country-bred and with an appetite
that knew no bounds.
After I got going at my business, when I was twenty-five or so, I was pinned down to a desk for about ten years.
I worked hard in a most exacting place.
I was so healthy it hurt. I had just as much appetite for food as I had ever had; but I didn't get a chance to bat around as I had been accustomed to do and burn up that food.
The result was inevitable.
I began to get fat!
I had a big chest--forty-six inches--and the fat filled in underneath. That big chest, combined with my broad shoulders, concealed the size of my paunch, and I didn't realize I was accumulating that paunch until it
was soldered, riveted, lashed, glued, nailed and otherwise fastened to me.
When I got my growth I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds and was a pretty formidable physical proposition.
When I woke up to the fact that I was getting fat I found I weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. That extra thirty-five pounds was mostly fat--excess baggage.
Still, it didn't bother me any. I had the strength to tote it round and had the shoulders and the chest to conceal it. I didn't show any bay window, as most fat men do.
As they used to say: "You're big all over. You carry it all right."
All this time I was eating three or four times a day and eating everything that came my way. Also, I drank some--not excessively, but some whisky and some beer, and occasionally some wine and cocktails--about the average amount of drinking the average man does.
I thought I was getting too fat, and I wrestled with a bicycle all one summer, taking long rides and plugging round a good deal.
I did some centuries, but continued eating like a horse--naturally because of the outdoor exercise--and drank a good deal of beer.
As will be seen, all the fat I had was legitimate enough. I put it on myself. There was no hereditary nonsense about it. I was responsible for every ounce of it.
The net result of that summer's bicycle campaign was a gain of five pounds in weight. I was harder--but I was fatter, too.
When I was thirty-five I began to experiment. I then weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. I went to the canned-exercise, the physical-torture professor, the diet, the salts, and all the rest of it, taking off a few pounds but putting it all back again--and more--as soon as I stopped.
These attempts numbered about two a year. Between times I ate as I wanted to and drank as I pleased. Things ran along until the first of January, 1911.
I knew I was getting fatter, for my tailor told me so and my belts and old clothes all proved it. Still, I didn't bother much. I thought I was lingering round about two hundred and thirty-five--too much, of course; but I got away with it pretty well, except in hot weather and when I went up in the high mountains, and I
was reasonably content.
I was fat, all right.
My waist was only two inches smaller than my chest and that meant my waist was forty-four
inches in girth. As a matter of fact, being scant five feet ten and a half, I was bigger than a house; but I deluded myself with that stuff about my broad shoulders and my deep chest, and thought it didn't show.
It did show, of course. I was a fat man--a big fat man--carrying forty pounds or more of excess weight.
I had dieted and quit; exercised and quit; gone on the water wagon and fallen off; had fussed round a good deal, spending a lot of money in the attempt, and I was getting fatter all the time.
I hated to admit that fact. I tried to fool myself into the conviction that I wasn't getting any larger--and all the time I knew I was.
I even went so far as to stop getting on the scales; and when anybody--as almost everybody
did--said, "Why, you're getting bigger, ain't you?" I always replied: "No, I think not. I stick along about two hundred and thirty-five pounds."
A year ago last summer I went up into the mountains, where I usually go for my fun. I had noticed a shortness of breath and a wheeziness in previous summers, and had felt my heart pounding pretty hard; but that summer I noticed these things acutely. I couldn't get any air to breathe.
My heart pounded like a pneumatic riveter. Any little exercise tired me; and when in the lowlands in hot weather I was the perspiring marvel and the most uncomfortable as well as the sloppiest person you ever saw.
It was fierce!
I was doing a good deal of walking in those days--had to burn up the fuel I was taking into my body. Also, I noticed it was mighty hard to keep awake after dinner unless I got out into the air and kept moving.
I felt well enough and the doctors said I was organically all right. I kept informed on those points--but I was fat!
Also, though I lied to myself, I knew I was getting fatter.
FACING THE TISSUE
On New Year's Day, 1911, I weighed myself. I don't know why, for I hadn't been on a scale for two or three years. I set the weight at two hundred and thirty-five and it bounded up like a rubber ball; so I shoved it along to two hundred and forty and it still stayed up in the air.
When I got a balance I found I weighed two hundred and forty-seven pounds.
I was amazed!
Also, I was scared; for it instantly occurred to me that if I had gone up to two hundred and forty-seven in two or three years from two hundred and thirty-five I should keep on going up if my manner of living didn't change--and that presently I should weigh three hundred!
That two hundred and forty-seven pounds was a facer. I was forced to admit to myself that I was fat, disgustingly fat--too fat; and that I should get fatter!
So I sat down and looked the situation in the eye.
I recounted all my former efforts to get thin and discarded them one by one.
I knew myself, and knew the ordinary diet proposition and the ordinary exercise proposition were not for me.
I knew I was wheezy and that my heart was getting choked with fat; that there were great folds of it on me, and that it was up to me to get rid of it or quit and wait for the inevitable 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 over eating and over drinking is to stop over eating and over drinking.
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 experimented with, but the remedy was as plain as the cause.
It was simple enough if I had the nerve to go through with it.
Inasmuch as an excess of food and drink make an excess of fat, it follows that the reduction in the amount of food will stop that fat-forming and give the body a chance to burn up the excess fat already formed.
That was my conclusion.
Mind you, I reached that conclusion before I made any of my arguments; but I didn't want to admit it as reasonable or logical, for I hated to give up the pleasures of the table and the sociability that came with the sort of drinking I did.
I was trying to find a way out that would be easy and comfortable.
And all the time I was getting fatter!
The scales told me that.
This backing and filling and argument with myself lasted all through January and part of February.
It took me six weeks to get myself into the frame of mind where I admitted the truth of my conclusion.
I was no hero.
I didn't want to do it.
I loved it all too well.
I was as rank a coward in the beginning as you ever saw!
It appalled me to think of restricting myself in any way, for I liked the pleasures that I knew I
must forego.
However, when I got up to two hundred and fifty pounds I sat down and had it out with myself.
"Here!" I said to myself. "You big stuff, you now weigh two hundred and fifty pounds! In another year or two you will weigh two hundred and seventy-five pounds!
You are uncomfortable and heavy on your feet, and you are gouty and wheezy; and it's a cinch you'll die in a few years if you keep on this way.
You know all this fat is caused by an excess of food and drink, and you know it can be taken off by a reduction in those Fat makers.
Are you going to stick round here so fat you are a joke, uncomfortable, miserable when it's hot, in your own way and in the way of everybody else, when, if you've got the will-power of a chickadee, you can get back to reasonable proportions and comfort merely by denying yourself things you do not need?"
All the old arguments obtruded.
See what I should lose!
Life would be a dull and dreary affair--a dun, dismal proposition.
I admitted that.
On the other hand, however, life would not be a wheezy, sweaty, choked-heart, uncomfortable proposition.
I finally decided I would go to it.
And I did.
My method may be utterly unscientific.
I suppose it hasn't a scientific leg to stand on.
Still, it did the business.
And I maintain that results are what we are looking for.
The end justifies the means.
I didn't figure out a diet.
I had a dozen of them at home that had cost me all the way from two dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars each.
I didn't buy a system of exercise.
I read no books and consulted no doctors.
What I did was this:
I cut down the amount of food I ate sixty per cent and I cut out alcohol altogether!
I carried out my argument to its logical conclusion so far as it concerned myself.
I didn't give a hoot whether it would help or hurt or concern any other person in the world.
It was my body I was experimenting on, and I did what I dad-blamed pleased and asked no advice--nor took any.
Instead of a hot-bread--I have the greatest hot-bread artist in the world at my house, bar none!--waffle, sausage, kidney-stew, lamb-chop, fried-egg and so forth sort of breakfast, I cut that meal down to some
fruit, a couple of pieces of dry, hard toast, two boiled eggs and coffee.
I cut out the luncheon altogether. No more luncheon for me!
I cut down my dinners to about forty per cent of what I had been eating.
I diminished the quantity, but not the variety.
I ate everything that came along, but I didn't eat so much or half so much.
Instead of two slices of roast beef, for example, I ate only one small slice.
Instead of two baked or browned potatoes, I ate only half of one.
Instead of three or four slices of bread, I ate only one.
I didn't deprive myself of a single thing I liked, but I cut the quantity away down.
And I quit drinking alcohol absolutely.
What happened?
This is what happened: Eating food is just as much a habit as breathing or any other physical function.
I had got myself into the habit of eating large quantities of food.
Also, I had accustomed my system to certain amounts of alcohol.
I was organized on that basis--fatly and flabbily organized, to be sure, but organized just the
same.
Now, then, when I arbitrarily cut down the amount of food and drink for which my system was organized that entire system rose up in active revolt and yelled for what it had been accustomed to get.
There wasn't a minute for more than three months when I wasn't hungry, actually hungry for food; when the sight of food did not excite me and when I did not have a physical longing and appetite for food; when my stomach did not seem to demand it and my palate howl for it.
It was different with the drinking.
I got over that desire rather promptly, but with a struggle, at that; but the food-yearn was there for weeks and weeks, and it was a fight--a bitter, bitter fight!
When I went to the table and saw the good things on it, and knew I intended only to eat small portions of them, especially of my favorite desserts and my beloved hot-bread, I simply had to grip the sides of my
chair and use all the will-power I had to keep from reaching out and grabbing something and stuffing it into my mouth!
My friends used to think it was all a joke.
It was farther from being a joke than anything you ever heard about.
It was a tragedy--a grim, relentless tragedy! It was acute physical suffering.
My body cried out for that same amount of food I had been giving it all those years.
I wanted to give it that same amount.
I have had to leave the table time and time again to get hold of myself and go back to the smaller portions I had allotted to myself.
I liked to eat, you know.
Nothing much happened for a few weeks, though the waistband of my trousers grew looser.
Then a lot of excess baggage seemed to drop away all at once.
I weighed myself and found I had taken off twenty-five pounds.
Friends told me to quit--that I should overdo it.
I laughed at them.
I knew I was still twenty-five pounds too heavy and I was just getting into my stride.
It is strange how men, and especially fat men, who haven't the nerve to reduce themselves, think a man must be sick if he takes off flesh.
I knew I wasn't sick. Indeed, I was just beginning to get well.
By the end of three months I had taken off thirty-five pounds.
It was coming off well, too.
My face wasn't haggard or wrinkled.
I looked fit.
My eye was clear and my double chin had disappeared.
Also, I had conquered my fight with my appetite.
I had won out.
I was satisfied with the smaller quantities of food and I felt better than I had in
twenty years--stronger, fitter--and was better, mentally and physically.
After that it was a cinch.
I kept along, eating everything on the bill-of-fare, but in small quantities.
I didn't vary my diet a bit, except for the eggs at breakfast.
If I wanted pie I ate a small piece.
If I wanted ice cream I ate a small dish.
If I wanted pudding I ate some of that.
I ate fat meat and lean meat and spaghetti, and everything else interdicted by the reduction dietists--only in small quantities!
And I kept on getting smaller and smaller.
The fat came off from everywhere.
I had been encased with it apparently.
My waist decreased seven inches.
A big layer of fat came off my chest and abdomen.
My legs and arms grew smaller but harder.
Even my fingers grew smaller.
My excess of chin evaporated.
And at the end of the fifth month I had taken off fifty-five pounds.
I weighed then one hundred and ninety-five pounds, which is what I weigh today.
Every person, I take it, has a normal weight; and if that person gives his body a chance, and ill health does not intervene, the body will find that normal and stay there.
I take it that my normal weight, on account of my big frame and bones, is about one hundred and ninety-five pounds, at the age of forty-three.
At any rate, it has stayed at a hundred and ninety-five since the first of last July, and in that time I have loafed for two months and ridden on Pullman cars for two other months, and have not taken any exercise to speak of; but I have maintained my schedule of eating and I have not taken any alcohol.
I figure I can stay where I am indefinitely on that program--and that is my program indefinitely.
There are certain economic phases of a campaign of this kind that should be mentioned.
It is expensive.
Not one item of clothing which fitted me last January is of the slightest use to me now.
I didn't get to cutting down clothes until I was sure I would stick.
Since that time the tailors have had a picnic at my expense.
My shirts were too big.
Instead of wearing a seventeen-and-three-quarters collar, I now wear a sixteen-and-three-quarters.
My waist is seven inches smaller.
I even had to have a seal ring I wear cut down so it would not slip off my finger.
While in the transition stage I looked like a scarecrow.
My clothes hung on me like bags.
Since I have had my clothes re-made and new ones constructed I am an object of continual comment among my friends.
They all marvel at my changed appearance.
They are all solicitous about my health.
They do not see how a man can take off more than fifty pounds and not hurt himself.
I do not see how he can keep it on and not kill himself.
They tell me I look like a boy--and I feel like one.
I'm as active as I was twenty years ago.
When I was in the mountains this summer, at an altitude of seventy-five hundred feet, I could climb slopes with no exhaustion that I couldn't have gone fifteen feet up the year before.
My mind is clearer; my body is better.
I figure I have added a good many years to my life.
And all this time I have had everything I wanted to eat, but not all I wanted to eat until I got myself readjusted to the new system.
I missed the alcohol at first, but that is all over now.
It was a part of the game and I used to think a necessary part.
I have cured myself of that delusion.
If there is a thing on earth the matter with me the ablest doctors in this country can't find out what it is.
I am a rejuvenated, reconstructed person, no longer fat, aged forty-three--and Mankind's Hope!
As to the exercise end of it, there wasn't any exercise end.
It happened that I met a man last March, when I was in the first throes of this campaign, who had made some study of the human body.
I liked him because he was modest about what he knew, and not a faddist.
We talked about exercise. He told me one thing that stuck.
He said: "Walk a little every day. If you have half an hour walk a mile. If you have an hour walk two miles. Don't try to see how many miles you can walk in the half-hour or the hour, but take your time.
Look at things as you go along. Be leisurely about it.
When a man goes out for a walk and walks as hard as he can or does anything else in the shape of exercise as hard as he can he is subjecting himself to just as much nerve strain as he can subject himself to in any other way.
Be calm about your walking, or whatever else you do."
Formerly it had been my custom to plug out after breakfast and gallop three or four miles as hard as I could and then go to work.
I cut that out.
I walked an easy, leisurely mile or two miles, looking at the trees and flowers and watching the people and looking into shop windows, and I got a lot of good out of it.
Then it grew hot, and I cut my walking to half a mile or so down to my office in the morning and back at night.
Occasionally, after dinner, I would walk a couple of miles.
This summer I went fishing and tramped about some, but not much.
In reality, I had no scheme of exercise, and I took little.
I didn't need it.
I didn't have masses of food and drink in me to be burned up.
I was normal.
As I said, I suppose all this is absurdly unscientific--and I don't give a hoot if it is.
It worked for me.
I don't know whether it will work for any other person on this earth.
Nor do I care.
If you want to try it on, provided you are fat, here are the specifications: I assume it is
an axiom that we all eat too much.
I know I did--about sixty per cent too much.
Still, I guarantee nothing.
I make no claims.
I have set down the facts; and the only warning, advice or admonition I have to give
is that any person who makes up his mind to try this method and thinks he isn't in for the
hardest struggle of his life would do well not to try.
This isn't a frolic.
It's a fight and at first it is WAR!.
Hi,
I made one change from his ‘diet’ since I seldom (maybe once every two months) drink alcohol I didn’t cut out alcohol, but I drank 4 or 5 sugared Ice teas a day and sometimes sodas. So I cut out the sugared drinks.
NO ‘diet’ drinks either. They contain chemicals that sit in your stomach undigested and keep going off like a sugar substitute bomb for weeks after drinking them.
This ‘diet’ works. And the first few weeks were torture.
I live alone, I work from home and I also live about twenty miles from the nearest store so I was able to remove all temptation (I drank all of the sodas, before I started). I ate my regular food, only instead of three eggs I had two, instead of 4 taco shells I had two, that sort of thing.
We are embarrassed by fat people and fat people jokes. We want the best way to lose weight, to look good, to feel good. We want to wear that sexy evening gown or evening wear. We want to wear those adult exotic costumes. We want to be the very best we can be…
Read every word of this…
THE FUN OF GETTING THIN
How To Be Happy and Reduce the Waist Line
by
SAMUEL G. BLYTHE, 1912
THE FUN OF GETTING THIN
FAT
A fat man is a joke; and a fat woman is two jokes--one on herself and
the other on her husband. Half the comedy in the world is predicated
on the paunch.
At that, the human race is divided into but two classes--fat people who
are trying to get thin and thin people who are trying to get fat.
Fat, the doctors say, is fatal. I move to amend by striking out the
last two letters of the indictment.
Fat is fat.
It isn't any more fatal to be reasonably fat than to be reasonably thin, but it's a
darned sight more uncomfortable. So far as being unreasonably thin or
unreasonably fat is concerned, I suppose the thin person has the long
end of it.
I never was thin, so I don't know.
However, I have been fat--notice that "have been"?
And if there is any phase of human enjoyment, any part of life, any occupation,
avocation, divertissement, pleasure or pain where the fat man has the better of it
in any regard, I failed to discover it in the twenty years during which I looked like
the rear end of a hack and had all the bodily characteristics of a bale of hay.
When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor
you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent, directly or indirectly, in the assay.
The personal equation is the ruling equation.
Women want to be thinner because they will look better--and so do men. Likewise, women want to be plumper because they will look better--and so do men.
This holds up to forty years.
After that it doesn't make much difference whether either men or women look any better than they have been looking, so far as the great end and aim of all life is concerned.
Consequently fat men and fat women after forty want to be thinner for reasons of health and comfort, or quit and resign themselves to their further years of obesity.
Now I am over forty.
Hence my experiments in reduction may be taken at this time as grounded on a desire for comfort--not that I did not make many campaigns against my fat before I was forty.
I fought it now and then, but always retreated before I won a victory.
This time, instead of skirmishing valiantly for a space and then being ignominiously and fatly routed by the powerful forces of food and drink, I hung stolidly to the line of my original attack, harassed the enemy by a constant and deadly fire--and one morning discovered I had the foe on the run.
It always makes me laugh to hear people talk about losing flesh--unless, of course, the decrease in weight is due to illness.
No healthy person, predisposed to fat, ever lost any flesh.
If that person gets rid of any weight, or girth, or fat, it isn't lost--it is FOUGHT OFF, BEATEN OFF.
The victim struggles with it, goes to the mat with it, and does not debonairly drop it. He eliminates it with stern effort and much travail of the spirit.
It is a job of work, a grueling combat to the finish, a task that appalls and usually repels.
The theory of taking off fat is the simplest theory in the world.
It is announced, in four words: Stop eating and drinking.
The practice of fat reduction is the most difficult thing in the world.
Its difficulties are comprehended in two words: You cannot.
The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak.
The success of the undertaking lies in the triumph of the will over the appetite. There's a lovely line of
cant for you!
Triumph of the will over the appetite.
It sounds like the preaching of a professional food faddist, who tells the people they eat too much and then slips away and wolfs down four pounds of beefsteak at a sitting.
However, I suppose it is necessary to say this once in a dissertation like this--and it is said.
In writing about this successful experiment of mine in reducing weight I have no theories to advance except one, and no instructions to give.
I don't know whether my method would take an ounce off any other person in the world, and I don't care.
I only know it took more than fifty pounds off me.
I am not advancing any argument, medicinal or otherwise, for my plan.
I never talked to a doctor about it, and never shall.
If there are fat men and fat women who are fat for the same reasons I was fat I suppose they can get thin the way I got thin.
If they are fat for other reasons I suppose they cannot. I don't know about either proposition.
I have great respect for doctors--so much respect, in fact, that I keep diligently away from them.
I know the preliminaries of their game and can take a dose of medicine myself as skillfully as they can administer it.
Also, I know when I have a fever, and have a working knowledge of how my heart should beat and my other bodily functions be performed. I have frequently found that a prescription, unintelligibly written but
looking very wise, is highly efficacious when folded carefully and put in the pocketbook instead of being deposited with a druggist.
I suppose that comes from a sort of hereditary faith in amulets. No doubt the method would be even more efficacious if the prescription were tied on a string and hung around the neck.
Still, doctors are interesting as a class. After you get beyond the let-me-feel-your-pulse-and-see-your-tongue preliminaries they are versatile and ingenious. Almost always, after you tell them what is the matter with you, they will know--not every time, but frequently.
Also, they will take any sort of a chance with you in the interest of science.
However, they generally send out for a specialist when they are ill themselves. When you come to think of it that is but natural.
Almost any man, whether professional or not, will take a chance with somebody else that he wouldn't quite go through with on himself.
Besides, doctors treat comparative strangers for the most part, and the interests of science are to be conserved.
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.
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.
Then there remains the dietary method--the old familiar friend, diet.
Starting with William Banting--maybe it didn't start with William, but before him--but, starting with Bill for present purposes, there have been more systems of diet invented and promulgated than there have been systems of religion--and that means about one in every hundred has evolved a system.
You can get them of all sorts and all sure to do the work, ranging from an exclusive diet of beefsteak and spinach to desiccated hay and creamed alfalfa.
There are mono diets, duo diets, vegetable diets, fruit diets, nut diets --all kinds of diets--each guaranteed to take off flesh if you have too much or to put it on if you have too little.
Basically, however, the anti-flesh diets are about the same. You are told to cut out everything you want to eat and exist on triply toasted bread and the white meat of a chicken, or string beans and sawdust, or
any other combination the sharps say will not produce fat, but will sustain life in a lingering form.
They surround these diet talks and presentments with a lot of frills about proteins and calories and all
that sort of guff, and make it as difficult as possible.
Now, mark you, I am not saying diet--scientific diet--is not a good thing, a magnificent step forward in the progress of this world; but I am saying that the average fat-reducing diet is impossible to any but a man or
woman of the ultimate will-power, and is a hardship that need not be endured.
I have tried these diets, and I know!
They may help reduce flesh, but they are not easy to follow and they do not contain things that any person wants to eat or is accustomed to eat, or will eat, to the exclusion of things that person does want to eat and will eat.
It can be done.
One of these diets can be followed if the will-power is there, and the flesh will come off; but the method does not conduce to the best results--the physical force is reduced, and there is a much easier way.
I have one of these diet lists before me now from the highest-priced flesh-reducing specialist in the world, who claims to have taken mountains of flesh off mountainous men.
In the beginning, for example, it says: "You will understand, of course, that sugar is entirely debarred. Also, that fats, milk, cheese, cream, eggs, and so on, are cut off for the time being. Also that bread and farinaceous foods are all cut off. In place of bread or toast you must use gluten biscuits."
For breakfast, in this dietary, one or two gluten biscuits are allowed and a cup of unsweetened coffee. Also, six ounces of lean grilled steak, chops or chicken, and any white fish--or the whites of two eggs.
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 flub dub 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 telling that the only way to cure everything was to fast.
I knew a man who tried that. The results were grand. He fasted a long time and cured himself of what ailed him.
Only, unfortunately, just before the last vestige of disease was removed the fasting killed him.
I contend that man might just as well have died of what ailed him originally as to cure that disease and die of the cure. It seems to me it is as broad as it is long.
However, have at this fat-reduction process of mine! You must bear with a few personal reminiscences.
I was a big, husky brute of a boy--thick-chested, broad-shouldered, country-bred and with an appetite
that knew no bounds.
After I got going at my business, when I was twenty-five or so, I was pinned down to a desk for about ten years.
I worked hard in a most exacting place.
I was so healthy it hurt. I had just as much appetite for food as I had ever had; but I didn't get a chance to bat around as I had been accustomed to do and burn up that food.
The result was inevitable.
I began to get fat!
I had a big chest--forty-six inches--and the fat filled in underneath. That big chest, combined with my broad shoulders, concealed the size of my paunch, and I didn't realize I was accumulating that paunch until it
was soldered, riveted, lashed, glued, nailed and otherwise fastened to me.
When I got my growth I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds and was a pretty formidable physical proposition.
When I woke up to the fact that I was getting fat I found I weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. That extra thirty-five pounds was mostly fat--excess baggage.
Still, it didn't bother me any. I had the strength to tote it round and had the shoulders and the chest to conceal it. I didn't show any bay window, as most fat men do.
As they used to say: "You're big all over. You carry it all right."
All this time I was eating three or four times a day and eating everything that came my way. Also, I drank some--not excessively, but some whisky and some beer, and occasionally some wine and cocktails--about the average amount of drinking the average man does.
I thought I was getting too fat, and I wrestled with a bicycle all one summer, taking long rides and plugging round a good deal.
I did some centuries, but continued eating like a horse--naturally because of the outdoor exercise--and drank a good deal of beer.
As will be seen, all the fat I had was legitimate enough. I put it on myself. There was no hereditary nonsense about it. I was responsible for every ounce of it.
The net result of that summer's bicycle campaign was a gain of five pounds in weight. I was harder--but I was fatter, too.
When I was thirty-five I began to experiment. I then weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. I went to the canned-exercise, the physical-torture professor, the diet, the salts, and all the rest of it, taking off a few pounds but putting it all back again--and more--as soon as I stopped.
These attempts numbered about two a year. Between times I ate as I wanted to and drank as I pleased. Things ran along until the first of January, 1911.
I knew I was getting fatter, for my tailor told me so and my belts and old clothes all proved it. Still, I didn't bother much. I thought I was lingering round about two hundred and thirty-five--too much, of course; but I got away with it pretty well, except in hot weather and when I went up in the high mountains, and I
was reasonably content.
I was fat, all right.
My waist was only two inches smaller than my chest and that meant my waist was forty-four
inches in girth. As a matter of fact, being scant five feet ten and a half, I was bigger than a house; but I deluded myself with that stuff about my broad shoulders and my deep chest, and thought it didn't show.
It did show, of course. I was a fat man--a big fat man--carrying forty pounds or more of excess weight.
I had dieted and quit; exercised and quit; gone on the water wagon and fallen off; had fussed round a good deal, spending a lot of money in the attempt, and I was getting fatter all the time.
I hated to admit that fact. I tried to fool myself into the conviction that I wasn't getting any larger--and all the time I knew I was.
I even went so far as to stop getting on the scales; and when anybody--as almost everybody
did--said, "Why, you're getting bigger, ain't you?" I always replied: "No, I think not. I stick along about two hundred and thirty-five pounds."
A year ago last summer I went up into the mountains, where I usually go for my fun. I had noticed a shortness of breath and a wheeziness in previous summers, and had felt my heart pounding pretty hard; but that summer I noticed these things acutely. I couldn't get any air to breathe.
My heart pounded like a pneumatic riveter. Any little exercise tired me; and when in the lowlands in hot weather I was the perspiring marvel and the most uncomfortable as well as the sloppiest person you ever saw.
It was fierce!
I was doing a good deal of walking in those days--had to burn up the fuel I was taking into my body. Also, I noticed it was mighty hard to keep awake after dinner unless I got out into the air and kept moving.
I felt well enough and the doctors said I was organically all right. I kept informed on those points--but I was fat!
Also, though I lied to myself, I knew I was getting fatter.
FACING THE TISSUE
On New Year's Day, 1911, I weighed myself. I don't know why, for I hadn't been on a scale for two or three years. I set the weight at two hundred and thirty-five and it bounded up like a rubber ball; so I shoved it along to two hundred and forty and it still stayed up in the air.
When I got a balance I found I weighed two hundred and forty-seven pounds.
I was amazed!
Also, I was scared; for it instantly occurred to me that if I had gone up to two hundred and forty-seven in two or three years from two hundred and thirty-five I should keep on going up if my manner of living didn't change--and that presently I should weigh three hundred!
That two hundred and forty-seven pounds was a facer. I was forced to admit to myself that I was fat, disgustingly fat--too fat; and that I should get fatter!
So I sat down and looked the situation in the eye.
I recounted all my former efforts to get thin and discarded them one by one.
I knew myself, and knew the ordinary diet proposition and the ordinary exercise proposition were not for me.
I knew I was wheezy and that my heart was getting choked with fat; that there were great folds of it on me, and that it was up to me to get rid of it or quit and wait for the inevitable 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 over eating and over drinking is to stop over eating and over drinking.
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 experimented with, but the remedy was as plain as the cause.
It was simple enough if I had the nerve to go through with it.
Inasmuch as an excess of food and drink make an excess of fat, it follows that the reduction in the amount of food will stop that fat-forming and give the body a chance to burn up the excess fat already formed.
That was my conclusion.
Mind you, I reached that conclusion before I made any of my arguments; but I didn't want to admit it as reasonable or logical, for I hated to give up the pleasures of the table and the sociability that came with the sort of drinking I did.
I was trying to find a way out that would be easy and comfortable.
And all the time I was getting fatter!
The scales told me that.
This backing and filling and argument with myself lasted all through January and part of February.
It took me six weeks to get myself into the frame of mind where I admitted the truth of my conclusion.
I was no hero.
I didn't want to do it.
I loved it all too well.
I was as rank a coward in the beginning as you ever saw!
It appalled me to think of restricting myself in any way, for I liked the pleasures that I knew I
must forego.
However, when I got up to two hundred and fifty pounds I sat down and had it out with myself.
"Here!" I said to myself. "You big stuff, you now weigh two hundred and fifty pounds! In another year or two you will weigh two hundred and seventy-five pounds!
You are uncomfortable and heavy on your feet, and you are gouty and wheezy; and it's a cinch you'll die in a few years if you keep on this way.
You know all this fat is caused by an excess of food and drink, and you know it can be taken off by a reduction in those Fat makers.
Are you going to stick round here so fat you are a joke, uncomfortable, miserable when it's hot, in your own way and in the way of everybody else, when, if you've got the will-power of a chickadee, you can get back to reasonable proportions and comfort merely by denying yourself things you do not need?"
All the old arguments obtruded.
See what I should lose!
Life would be a dull and dreary affair--a dun, dismal proposition.
I admitted that.
On the other hand, however, life would not be a wheezy, sweaty, choked-heart, uncomfortable proposition.
I finally decided I would go to it.
And I did.
My method may be utterly unscientific.
I suppose it hasn't a scientific leg to stand on.
Still, it did the business.
And I maintain that results are what we are looking for.
The end justifies the means.
I didn't figure out a diet.
I had a dozen of them at home that had cost me all the way from two dollars to two hundred and fifty dollars each.
I didn't buy a system of exercise.
I read no books and consulted no doctors.
What I did was this:
I cut down the amount of food I ate sixty per cent and I cut out alcohol altogether!
I carried out my argument to its logical conclusion so far as it concerned myself.
I didn't give a hoot whether it would help or hurt or concern any other person in the world.
It was my body I was experimenting on, and I did what I dad-blamed pleased and asked no advice--nor took any.
Instead of a hot-bread--I have the greatest hot-bread artist in the world at my house, bar none!--waffle, sausage, kidney-stew, lamb-chop, fried-egg and so forth sort of breakfast, I cut that meal down to some
fruit, a couple of pieces of dry, hard toast, two boiled eggs and coffee.
I cut out the luncheon altogether. No more luncheon for me!
I cut down my dinners to about forty per cent of what I had been eating.
I diminished the quantity, but not the variety.
I ate everything that came along, but I didn't eat so much or half so much.
Instead of two slices of roast beef, for example, I ate only one small slice.
Instead of two baked or browned potatoes, I ate only half of one.
Instead of three or four slices of bread, I ate only one.
I didn't deprive myself of a single thing I liked, but I cut the quantity away down.
And I quit drinking alcohol absolutely.
What happened?
This is what happened: Eating food is just as much a habit as breathing or any other physical function.
I had got myself into the habit of eating large quantities of food.
Also, I had accustomed my system to certain amounts of alcohol.
I was organized on that basis--fatly and flabbily organized, to be sure, but organized just the
same.
Now, then, when I arbitrarily cut down the amount of food and drink for which my system was organized that entire system rose up in active revolt and yelled for what it had been accustomed to get.
There wasn't a minute for more than three months when I wasn't hungry, actually hungry for food; when the sight of food did not excite me and when I did not have a physical longing and appetite for food; when my stomach did not seem to demand it and my palate howl for it.
It was different with the drinking.
I got over that desire rather promptly, but with a struggle, at that; but the food-yearn was there for weeks and weeks, and it was a fight--a bitter, bitter fight!
When I went to the table and saw the good things on it, and knew I intended only to eat small portions of them, especially of my favorite desserts and my beloved hot-bread, I simply had to grip the sides of my
chair and use all the will-power I had to keep from reaching out and grabbing something and stuffing it into my mouth!
My friends used to think it was all a joke.
It was farther from being a joke than anything you ever heard about.
It was a tragedy--a grim, relentless tragedy! It was acute physical suffering.
My body cried out for that same amount of food I had been giving it all those years.
I wanted to give it that same amount.
I have had to leave the table time and time again to get hold of myself and go back to the smaller portions I had allotted to myself.
I liked to eat, you know.
Nothing much happened for a few weeks, though the waistband of my trousers grew looser.
Then a lot of excess baggage seemed to drop away all at once.
I weighed myself and found I had taken off twenty-five pounds.
Friends told me to quit--that I should overdo it.
I laughed at them.
I knew I was still twenty-five pounds too heavy and I was just getting into my stride.
It is strange how men, and especially fat men, who haven't the nerve to reduce themselves, think a man must be sick if he takes off flesh.
I knew I wasn't sick. Indeed, I was just beginning to get well.
By the end of three months I had taken off thirty-five pounds.
It was coming off well, too.
My face wasn't haggard or wrinkled.
I looked fit.
My eye was clear and my double chin had disappeared.
Also, I had conquered my fight with my appetite.
I had won out.
I was satisfied with the smaller quantities of food and I felt better than I had in
twenty years--stronger, fitter--and was better, mentally and physically.
After that it was a cinch.
I kept along, eating everything on the bill-of-fare, but in small quantities.
I didn't vary my diet a bit, except for the eggs at breakfast.
If I wanted pie I ate a small piece.
If I wanted ice cream I ate a small dish.
If I wanted pudding I ate some of that.
I ate fat meat and lean meat and spaghetti, and everything else interdicted by the reduction dietists--only in small quantities!
And I kept on getting smaller and smaller.
The fat came off from everywhere.
I had been encased with it apparently.
My waist decreased seven inches.
A big layer of fat came off my chest and abdomen.
My legs and arms grew smaller but harder.
Even my fingers grew smaller.
My excess of chin evaporated.
And at the end of the fifth month I had taken off fifty-five pounds.
I weighed then one hundred and ninety-five pounds, which is what I weigh today.
Every person, I take it, has a normal weight; and if that person gives his body a chance, and ill health does not intervene, the body will find that normal and stay there.
I take it that my normal weight, on account of my big frame and bones, is about one hundred and ninety-five pounds, at the age of forty-three.
At any rate, it has stayed at a hundred and ninety-five since the first of last July, and in that time I have loafed for two months and ridden on Pullman cars for two other months, and have not taken any exercise to speak of; but I have maintained my schedule of eating and I have not taken any alcohol.
I figure I can stay where I am indefinitely on that program--and that is my program indefinitely.
There are certain economic phases of a campaign of this kind that should be mentioned.
It is expensive.
Not one item of clothing which fitted me last January is of the slightest use to me now.
I didn't get to cutting down clothes until I was sure I would stick.
Since that time the tailors have had a picnic at my expense.
My shirts were too big.
Instead of wearing a seventeen-and-three-quarters collar, I now wear a sixteen-and-three-quarters.
My waist is seven inches smaller.
I even had to have a seal ring I wear cut down so it would not slip off my finger.
While in the transition stage I looked like a scarecrow.
My clothes hung on me like bags.
Since I have had my clothes re-made and new ones constructed I am an object of continual comment among my friends.
They all marvel at my changed appearance.
They are all solicitous about my health.
They do not see how a man can take off more than fifty pounds and not hurt himself.
I do not see how he can keep it on and not kill himself.
They tell me I look like a boy--and I feel like one.
I'm as active as I was twenty years ago.
When I was in the mountains this summer, at an altitude of seventy-five hundred feet, I could climb slopes with no exhaustion that I couldn't have gone fifteen feet up the year before.
My mind is clearer; my body is better.
I figure I have added a good many years to my life.
And all this time I have had everything I wanted to eat, but not all I wanted to eat until I got myself readjusted to the new system.
I missed the alcohol at first, but that is all over now.
It was a part of the game and I used to think a necessary part.
I have cured myself of that delusion.
If there is a thing on earth the matter with me the ablest doctors in this country can't find out what it is.
I am a rejuvenated, reconstructed person, no longer fat, aged forty-three--and Mankind's Hope!
As to the exercise end of it, there wasn't any exercise end.
It happened that I met a man last March, when I was in the first throes of this campaign, who had made some study of the human body.
I liked him because he was modest about what he knew, and not a faddist.
We talked about exercise. He told me one thing that stuck.
He said: "Walk a little every day. If you have half an hour walk a mile. If you have an hour walk two miles. Don't try to see how many miles you can walk in the half-hour or the hour, but take your time.
Look at things as you go along. Be leisurely about it.
When a man goes out for a walk and walks as hard as he can or does anything else in the shape of exercise as hard as he can he is subjecting himself to just as much nerve strain as he can subject himself to in any other way.
Be calm about your walking, or whatever else you do."
Formerly it had been my custom to plug out after breakfast and gallop three or four miles as hard as I could and then go to work.
I cut that out.
I walked an easy, leisurely mile or two miles, looking at the trees and flowers and watching the people and looking into shop windows, and I got a lot of good out of it.
Then it grew hot, and I cut my walking to half a mile or so down to my office in the morning and back at night.
Occasionally, after dinner, I would walk a couple of miles.
This summer I went fishing and tramped about some, but not much.
In reality, I had no scheme of exercise, and I took little.
I didn't need it.
I didn't have masses of food and drink in me to be burned up.
I was normal.
As I said, I suppose all this is absurdly unscientific--and I don't give a hoot if it is.
It worked for me.
I don't know whether it will work for any other person on this earth.
Nor do I care.
If you want to try it on, provided you are fat, here are the specifications: I assume it is
an axiom that we all eat too much.
I know I did--about sixty per cent too much.
Still, I guarantee nothing.
I make no claims.
I have set down the facts; and the only warning, advice or admonition I have to give
is that any person who makes up his mind to try this method and thinks he isn't in for the
hardest struggle of his life would do well not to try.
This isn't a frolic.
It's a fight and at first it is WAR!.
Hi,
I made one change from his ‘diet’ since I seldom (maybe once every two months) drink alcohol I didn’t cut out alcohol, but I drank 4 or 5 sugared Ice teas a day and sometimes sodas. So I cut out the sugared drinks.
NO ‘diet’ drinks either. They contain chemicals that sit in your stomach undigested and keep going off like a sugar substitute bomb for weeks after drinking them.
This ‘diet’ works. And the first few weeks were torture.
I live alone, I work from home and I also live about twenty miles from the nearest store so I was able to remove all temptation (I drank all of the sodas, before I started). I ate my regular food, only instead of three eggs I had two, instead of 4 taco shells I had two, that sort of thing.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
What is Wrong With America AND How To Correct It
First read and sign this Petition
Next share the information in the petition with every one you know.
The petition explains what is wrong with America AND how we can simply and easily set (and save) America back on the right path!
Next share the information in the petition with every one you know.
The petition explains what is wrong with America AND how we can simply and easily set (and save) America back on the right path!
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Animals-Animal Gestation
THE PERIODS OF GESTATION are the same in the horse and ass or eleven months each,
camel 12 months,
elephant 2 years,
lion 5 months,
buffalo 12 months,
in the human female 9 months,
cow 9 months,
sheep 5 months,
dog 9 weeks,
cat 8 weeks,
sow 16 weeks,
she wolf from 90 to 95 days.
The goose sits 30 days,
swans 42,
hens 21,
ducks 30,
peahens and
turkeys 28,
canaries 14,
pigeons 14,
parrots 40 days.
camel 12 months,
elephant 2 years,
lion 5 months,
buffalo 12 months,
in the human female 9 months,
cow 9 months,
sheep 5 months,
dog 9 weeks,
cat 8 weeks,
sow 16 weeks,
she wolf from 90 to 95 days.
The goose sits 30 days,
swans 42,
hens 21,
ducks 30,
peahens and
turkeys 28,
canaries 14,
pigeons 14,
parrots 40 days.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Soup-Soup and Broth Recipes
Enjoy These Easy Soup Recipes, written down 140 years ago…
ARTICHOKE SOUP.--Take Jerusalem artichokes according to the quantity
of soup required to be made, cut them in slices, with a quarter of
a pound of butter, two or three onions and turnips, sliced into a
Stew pan, and stew over a very slow fire till done enough, and thin it
with good veal stock.
Just before you serve, at the last boil, add a quarter of a pint of good cream.
This is an excellent soup. Season to taste with a little salt and cayenne.
As it is necessary to vary soups, we shall give you a few to choose from
according to season and taste. All brown soups must be clear and thin,
with the exception of mock turtle, which must be thickened with flour first
browned with butter in a stew pan. If the flour is added without previous browning,
it preserves a raw taste that by no means improves the flavor.
ASPARAGUS SOUP.--Three or four pounds of veal cut fine, a little salt pork, two or three bunches of asparagus and three quarts of water.
Boil one-half of the asparagus with the meat, leaving the rest in
water until about twenty minutes before serving; then add the rest of the asparagus and boil just before serving; add one pint of milk; thicken with a little flour, and season. The soup should boil about three hours before adding the last half of the asparagus.
BEEF BROTH.--Put two pounds of lean beef, one pound of veal,
one pound of mutton, sweet herbs, and ten peppercorns, into a
nice tin saucepan, with five quarts of water; simmer to three quarts,
and clear from the fat when cold. Add one onion, if approved.
Soup and broth made of different meats are more supporting, as well as
better flavored.
To remove the fat, take it off, when cold, as clean as possible; and
if there be still any remaining, lay a bit of clean blotting or
cap paper on the broth when in the basin, and it will take up every
particle.
BEEF SOUP.--Cut all the lean off the shank, and with a little beef
suet in the bottom of the kettle, fry it to a nice brown; put in the
bones and cover with water; cover the kettle closely; let it cook
slowly until the meat drops from the bones; strain through a colander
and leave it in the dish during the night, which is the only way to
get off all the fat.
The day it is wanted for the table, fry as brown as possible a carrot,
an onion, and a very small turnip sliced thin.
Just before taking up, put in half a tablespoonful of sugar, a
blade of mace, six cloves, a dozen kernels of allspice, a small
tablespoonful of celery seed. With the vegetables this must cook
slowly in the soup an hour; then strain again for the table. If you
use vermicelli or pearl barley, soak in water.
DR. LIEBIG'S BEEF TEA.--When one pound of lean beef, free from fat,
and separated from the bones, in a finely-chopped state in which it is
used for mince-meat, or beef-sausages, is uniformly mixed with its
own weight of cold water, slowly heated till boiling, and the liquid,
after boiling briskly for a minute or two, is strained through the
towel from the coagulated albumen and the fiber, now become hard and
horny, we obtain an equal weight of the most aromatic soup, of such
strength as cannot be obtained even by boiling for hours from a piece
of flesh.
When mixed with salt and the other additions by which soup is usually seasoned, and tinged somewhat darker by means of roasted onions, or burnt bread, it forms the very best soup which can, in any way, be prepared from one pound of flesh.
BROWN GRAVY SOUP.--Shred a small plate of onions, put some dripping into a frying-pan and fry the onions till they are of a dark brown; then, having about three pounds of beef cut up in dice, without fat or bone, brown that in a frying-pan. Now get a sauce-pan to contain about a gallon, and put in the onions and meat, with a carrot and a turnip cut small, and a little celery, if you have it; if not, add two seeds of celery; put three quarts, or three and a half quarts of water to this, and stir all together with a little pepper and salt; simmer very slowly, and skim off what rises; in three or four hours the soup will
be clear.
When served, add a little vermicelli, which should have previously been
boiled in water; the liquid should be carefully poured off through a sieve.
A large quantity may be made in the same proportions. Of course, the meat
and onions must be stirred whilst frying, and constantly turned; they should
be of a fine brown, not black, and celery-seed will give a flavor, it is so strong.
CARROT SOUP.--Put some beef bones, with four quarts of the liquor in
which a leg of mutton or beef has been boiled, two large onions, a
turnip, pepper and salt into a sauce-pan, and stew for three hours. Have
ready six large carrots, scraped and cut thin, strain the soup on them,
and stew them till soft enough to pulp through a hair sieve or coarse
cloth, then boil the pulp with the soup, which is to be as thick as
pea-soup.
Use two wooden spoons to rub the carrots through. Make the soup the day
before it is to be used. Add cayenne. Pulp only the red part of the carrot, and
not the yellow.
CLAM SOUP.--Cut salt pork in very small squares and fry light brown; add one large or two small onions cut very fine, and cook about ten minutes; add two quarts water and one quart of raw potatoes, sliced; let it boil; then add one quart of clams. Mix one tablespoonful of flour with water, put it with one pint of milk, and pour into the soup, and let it boil about five minutes. Butter, pepper, salt.
Worcestershire sauce to taste.
CROUTONS.--These are simply pieces of bread fried brown and crisp, to be used in soups.
GAME SOUPS.--Cut in pieces a partridge, pheasant, or rabbit; add
slices of veal, ham, onions, carrots, etc. Add a little water, heat a
little on slow fire, as gravy is done; then add some good broth, boil
the meat gently till it is done. Strain, and stew in the liquor what
herbs you please.
GAME SOUP.--In the season for game, it is easy to have good game soup
at very little expense, and very nice. Take the meat from off the
bones of any cold game left, pound it in a mortar and break up the
bones, and pour on them a quart of any good broth, and boil for an
hour and a half. Boil and mash six turnips, and mix with the pounded
meat, and then pass them through a sieve. Strain the broth, and stir
in the mixture of meat and turnips which has been strained through the
sieve; keep the soup-pot near the fire, but do not let it boil. When
ready to dish the soup for table, beat the yolks of five eggs very
lightly, and mix with them half a pint of good cream. Set the soup on
to boil, and, as it boils, stir in the beaten eggs and cream, but be
careful that it does not boil after they are stirred in, as the egg
will curdle. Serve hot.
JULIENNE SOUP.--Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into the
soup-kettle; stir until melted. Cut three young onions small; fry
them a nice brown; add three quarts of good clear beef-stock, a little
mace, pepper and salt; let it boil an hour; add three young carrots
and three turnips cut small, a stalk of celery cut fine, a pint of
French beans, a pint of green peas; let this boil two hours; if not
a bright, clear color, add a spoonful of soy. This is a nice summer
soup.
LOBSTER SOUP.--One large lobster or two small ones; pick all the meat
from the shell and chop fine; scald one quart of milk and one pint
of water, then add the lobster, one pound of butter, a teaspoonful of
flour, and salt and red pepper to taste. Boil ten minutes and serve
hot.
MOCK TURTLE SOUP.--One soup-bone, one quart of turtle beans, one large spoonful of powdered cloves, salt and pepper. Soak the beans over
night, put them on with the soup-bone in nearly six quarts of water,
and cook five or six hours. When half done, add the cloves, salt and
pepper; when done, strain through a colander, pressing the pulp of the
beans through to make the soup the desired thickness, and serve with
a few slices of hard-boiled egg and lemon sliced very thin. The turtle
beans are black and can only be obtained from large grocers.
OYSTER SOUP.--Take one quart of water, one teacup of butter, one pint
of milk, two teaspoons of salt, four crackers rolled fine, and one
teaspoon of pepper; bring to full boiling heat as soon as possible,
then add one quart of oysters; let the whole come to boiling heat
quickly and remove from the fire.
OYSTER SOUP.--Pour one quart of boiling water into a skillet; then one
quart of good rich milk; stir in one teacup of rolled cracker crumbs;
season with pepper and salt to taste. When all come to boil, add one
quart of good fresh oysters; stir well, so as to keep from scorching;
then add a piece of good sweet butter about the size of an egg; let it
boil up once, then remove from the fire immediately; dish up and send
to table.
OX TAIL SOUP.--Take two ox tails and two whole onions, two carrots, a
small turnip, two tablespoonfuls of flour, and a little white pepper;
add a gallon of water, let all boil for two hours; then take out the
tails and cut the meat into small pieces, return the bones to the pot
for a short time, boil for another hour, then strain the soup, and
rinse two spoonfuls of arrow-root to add to it with the meat cut from
the bones, and let all boil for a quarter of an hour.
SCOTCH BROTH.--Take one-half teacup barley, four quarts cold water;
bring this to the boil and skim; now put in a neck of mutton and boil
again for half an hour, skim well the sides of the pot also; have
ready two carrots, one large onion, a small head of cabbage, one
bunch parsley, one sprig of celery top; chop all these fine, add your
chopped vegetables, pepper and salt to taste. This soup takes two
hours to cook.
SOUP AND BOUILLE.--Stew a brisket of beef with some turnips, celery,
leeks and onions, all finely cut. Put the pieces of beef into the
pot first, then the roots, and half a pint of beef gravy, with a few
cloves. Simmer for an hour. Add more beef gravy, and boil gently for
half an hour.
ROYAL SOUP.--Take a knuckle of veal, slices of undressed
gammon of bacon, onions, mace, and a small quantity of water; simmer till very strong, and lower it with a good beef broth made the day before, and stewed till the meat is done to rags. Add cream, vermicelli, almonds and a roll.
VARIOUS SOUPS.--Good soups may be made from fried meats, where the fat and gravy are added to the boiled barley; and for that purpose, fat beef steaks, pork steaks, mutton chops, etc. should be preferred, as containing more of the nutritious principle. When nearly done frying, add a little water, which will produce a gravy to be added to the
barley broth; a little wheat flour should be dredged in also; a
quantity of onions, cut small, should also be fried with the fat,
which gives the soup a fine flavor, assisted by seasoning, etc.
Soups may be made from broiled meats. While the fat beef steak is
doing before the fire, or mutton chop, etc., save the drippings on
a dish, in which a little flour, oatmeal, with cut onions, etc., are
put.
GRAND CONSOMME SOUP.--Put into a pot two knuckles of veal, a piece
of a leg of beef, a fowl, or an old cock, a rabbit, or two old
partridges; add a ladleful of soup, and stir it well; when it comes
to a jelly, put in a sufficient quantity of stock, and see that it is
clear; let it boil, skimming and refreshing it with water; season it
as the above; you may add, if you like, a clove of garlic; let it then
boil slowly or simmer four or five hours; put it through a towel, and
use it for mixing in sauces or clear soups.
JULIENNE SOUP.--Take some carrots and turnips, and turn them
ribald-like; a few heads of celery, some leeks and onions, and cut
them in lozenges, boil them till they are cooked, then put them into
clear gravy soup. Brown thickening.
You may, in summer time, add green peas, asparagus tops, French beans,
some lettuce or sorrel.
SOUP AND SOUPS.--It is not at all necessary to keep a special fire for
five hours every day in order to have at dinner a first course of
soup. Nor need a good, savory, nutritious soup for a family of five
cost more than 10 cents. There is no use hurling any remarks about
"swill-pails." Every housekeeper who knows anything of her kitchen and
dining-room affairs, knows there are usually nice clean fragments of
roasts and broils left over, and that broth in which lamb, mutton,
beef, and fowls have been boiled is in existence, and that twice a week or so there is a bowl of drippings from roasted meats.
All these when simmered with rice, macaroni, or well-chosen vegetables,
And judiciously seasoned, make good soups, and can be had without a
special fire, and without sending to the butcher's for special meats.
We name a few of the soups we make, and beg leave to add that they
are pretty well received. We make them in small quantities, for nobody
with three additional courses before him wants to eat a quart of
soup, you know!
1.--One pint of good gravy, three cups boiling water, a slice of
turnip, and half an onion cut in small bits, two grated crackers.
Simmer half an hour.
2.--On ironing day cut off the narrow ends from two or three sirloin
steaks, chop them into morsels and put in a stew pan with a little
salt, a tablespoonful of rice and a pint of cold water, and simmer
slowly for three hours. Then add water enough to make a quart of soup,
a tablespoonful of tomato catsup, and a little browned flour mixed
with the yolk of an egg.
3.--Pare and slice very thin four good sized potatoes, pour over them
two cups of boiling water, and simmer gently until the potatoes are
dissolved. Add salt, a lump of nice butter, and a pint of sweet milk
with a dust of pepper. Let it boil up once, and serve. You wouldn't
think it, but it is real good, and children cry for it.
4.--One pint meat broth, one pint boiling water, slice in an onion,
or a parsnip, or half a turnip--or all three if liked--boil until the
vegetables are soft, add a little salt if needed, and a tablespoonful
of Halford sauce.
5.--Let green corn, in the time of green corn, be grated, and to a
pint of it put a pint of rich milk, a pint of water, a little butter,
salt and pepper. Boil gently for fifteen or twenty minutes.
SPLIT PEA SOUP.--Take beef bones or any cold meats, and two pounds of
corned pork; pour on them a gallon of hot water, and let them simmer
three hours, removing all the scum. Boil one quart of split peas two
hours, having been previously soaked, as they require much cooking:
strain off the meat and mash the peas into the soup; season with black
pepper, and let it simmer one hour; fry two or three slices of bread a
nice brown, cut into slices and put into the bottom of the tureen, and
on them pour the soup.
TOMATO SOUP.--Boil chicken or beef four hours; then strain; add to the
soup one can of tomatoes and boil one hour. This will make four quarts
of soup.
TOMATO SOUP WITHOUT MEAT.--One quart of tomatoes, one quart of water,
one quart of milk. Butter, salt and pepper to taste. Cook the tomatoes
thoroughly in the water, have the milk scalding (over water to prevent
scorching). When the tomatoes are done add a large teaspoonful of
salaratus, which will cause a violent effervescence. It is best to
set the vessel in a pan before adding it to prevent waste. When the
commotion has ceased add the milk and seasoning. When it is possible
it is best to use more milk than water, and cream instead of butter.
The soup is eaten with crackers and is by some preferred to oyster
soup. This recipe is very valuable for those who keep abstinence days.
TURKEY SOUP.--Take the turkey bones and cook for one hour in water
enough to cover them; then stir in a little dressing and a beaten egg.
Take from the fire, and when the water has ceased boiling add a little
butter with pepper and salt.
VEAL GRAVY.--Put in the stew pan bits of lard, then a few thin slices
of ham, a few bits of butter, then slices of fillet of veal, sliced
onions, carrots, parsnips, celery, a few cloves upon the meat, and two
spoonfuls of broth; set it on the fire till the veal throws out its
juices; then put it on a stronger fire till the meat catches to
the bottom of the pan, and is brought to a proper color; then add a
sufficient quantity of light broth, and simmer it upon a slow fire
till the meat is well done. A little thyme and mushrooms may be added.
Skim and sift it clear for use.
VEAL SOUP.--To a knuckle of veal of 6 pounds, put 7 or 9 quarts of
water; boil down one-half; skim it well. This is better to do the day
before you prepare the soup for the table. Thicken it by rubbing flour,
butter, and water together. Season with salt and mace. When done
add one pint new milk; let it just come to a boil; then pour into a soup
dish, lined with macaroni well cooked.
VEGETABLE SOUP.--Pare and slice five or six cucumbers; and add to these as many cos lettuces, a sprig or two of mint, two or three
onions, some pepper and salt, a pint and a half of young peas and a
little parsley. Put these, with half a pound of fresh butter, into
a saucepan, to stew in their own liquor, near a gentle fire, half an
hour, then pour two quarts of boiling water to the vegetables, and
stew them two hours; rub down a little flour into a teacupful of
water, boil it with the rest twenty minutes, and serve it.
VERMICELLI SOUP.--Boil tender 1/2 lb. of vermicelli in a quart of rich
gravy; take half of it out, and add to it more gravy; boil till
the vermicelli can be pulped through a sieve. To both put a pint of
boiling cream, a little salt, and 1/4 lb. of Parmesan cheese. Serve
with rasped bread. Add two or three eggs, if you like.
BROWN VERMICELLI SOUP.--Is made in the same manner, leaving out the
eggs and cream, and adding one quart of strong beef gravy.
I hope you have found the recipe that you were looking for and the solution is favorable
ARTICHOKE SOUP.--Take Jerusalem artichokes according to the quantity
of soup required to be made, cut them in slices, with a quarter of
a pound of butter, two or three onions and turnips, sliced into a
Stew pan, and stew over a very slow fire till done enough, and thin it
with good veal stock.
Just before you serve, at the last boil, add a quarter of a pint of good cream.
This is an excellent soup. Season to taste with a little salt and cayenne.
As it is necessary to vary soups, we shall give you a few to choose from
according to season and taste. All brown soups must be clear and thin,
with the exception of mock turtle, which must be thickened with flour first
browned with butter in a stew pan. If the flour is added without previous browning,
it preserves a raw taste that by no means improves the flavor.
ASPARAGUS SOUP.--Three or four pounds of veal cut fine, a little salt pork, two or three bunches of asparagus and three quarts of water.
Boil one-half of the asparagus with the meat, leaving the rest in
water until about twenty minutes before serving; then add the rest of the asparagus and boil just before serving; add one pint of milk; thicken with a little flour, and season. The soup should boil about three hours before adding the last half of the asparagus.
BEEF BROTH.--Put two pounds of lean beef, one pound of veal,
one pound of mutton, sweet herbs, and ten peppercorns, into a
nice tin saucepan, with five quarts of water; simmer to three quarts,
and clear from the fat when cold. Add one onion, if approved.
Soup and broth made of different meats are more supporting, as well as
better flavored.
To remove the fat, take it off, when cold, as clean as possible; and
if there be still any remaining, lay a bit of clean blotting or
cap paper on the broth when in the basin, and it will take up every
particle.
BEEF SOUP.--Cut all the lean off the shank, and with a little beef
suet in the bottom of the kettle, fry it to a nice brown; put in the
bones and cover with water; cover the kettle closely; let it cook
slowly until the meat drops from the bones; strain through a colander
and leave it in the dish during the night, which is the only way to
get off all the fat.
The day it is wanted for the table, fry as brown as possible a carrot,
an onion, and a very small turnip sliced thin.
Just before taking up, put in half a tablespoonful of sugar, a
blade of mace, six cloves, a dozen kernels of allspice, a small
tablespoonful of celery seed. With the vegetables this must cook
slowly in the soup an hour; then strain again for the table. If you
use vermicelli or pearl barley, soak in water.
DR. LIEBIG'S BEEF TEA.--When one pound of lean beef, free from fat,
and separated from the bones, in a finely-chopped state in which it is
used for mince-meat, or beef-sausages, is uniformly mixed with its
own weight of cold water, slowly heated till boiling, and the liquid,
after boiling briskly for a minute or two, is strained through the
towel from the coagulated albumen and the fiber, now become hard and
horny, we obtain an equal weight of the most aromatic soup, of such
strength as cannot be obtained even by boiling for hours from a piece
of flesh.
When mixed with salt and the other additions by which soup is usually seasoned, and tinged somewhat darker by means of roasted onions, or burnt bread, it forms the very best soup which can, in any way, be prepared from one pound of flesh.
BROWN GRAVY SOUP.--Shred a small plate of onions, put some dripping into a frying-pan and fry the onions till they are of a dark brown; then, having about three pounds of beef cut up in dice, without fat or bone, brown that in a frying-pan. Now get a sauce-pan to contain about a gallon, and put in the onions and meat, with a carrot and a turnip cut small, and a little celery, if you have it; if not, add two seeds of celery; put three quarts, or three and a half quarts of water to this, and stir all together with a little pepper and salt; simmer very slowly, and skim off what rises; in three or four hours the soup will
be clear.
When served, add a little vermicelli, which should have previously been
boiled in water; the liquid should be carefully poured off through a sieve.
A large quantity may be made in the same proportions. Of course, the meat
and onions must be stirred whilst frying, and constantly turned; they should
be of a fine brown, not black, and celery-seed will give a flavor, it is so strong.
CARROT SOUP.--Put some beef bones, with four quarts of the liquor in
which a leg of mutton or beef has been boiled, two large onions, a
turnip, pepper and salt into a sauce-pan, and stew for three hours. Have
ready six large carrots, scraped and cut thin, strain the soup on them,
and stew them till soft enough to pulp through a hair sieve or coarse
cloth, then boil the pulp with the soup, which is to be as thick as
pea-soup.
Use two wooden spoons to rub the carrots through. Make the soup the day
before it is to be used. Add cayenne. Pulp only the red part of the carrot, and
not the yellow.
CLAM SOUP.--Cut salt pork in very small squares and fry light brown; add one large or two small onions cut very fine, and cook about ten minutes; add two quarts water and one quart of raw potatoes, sliced; let it boil; then add one quart of clams. Mix one tablespoonful of flour with water, put it with one pint of milk, and pour into the soup, and let it boil about five minutes. Butter, pepper, salt.
Worcestershire sauce to taste.
CROUTONS.--These are simply pieces of bread fried brown and crisp, to be used in soups.
GAME SOUPS.--Cut in pieces a partridge, pheasant, or rabbit; add
slices of veal, ham, onions, carrots, etc. Add a little water, heat a
little on slow fire, as gravy is done; then add some good broth, boil
the meat gently till it is done. Strain, and stew in the liquor what
herbs you please.
GAME SOUP.--In the season for game, it is easy to have good game soup
at very little expense, and very nice. Take the meat from off the
bones of any cold game left, pound it in a mortar and break up the
bones, and pour on them a quart of any good broth, and boil for an
hour and a half. Boil and mash six turnips, and mix with the pounded
meat, and then pass them through a sieve. Strain the broth, and stir
in the mixture of meat and turnips which has been strained through the
sieve; keep the soup-pot near the fire, but do not let it boil. When
ready to dish the soup for table, beat the yolks of five eggs very
lightly, and mix with them half a pint of good cream. Set the soup on
to boil, and, as it boils, stir in the beaten eggs and cream, but be
careful that it does not boil after they are stirred in, as the egg
will curdle. Serve hot.
JULIENNE SOUP.--Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into the
soup-kettle; stir until melted. Cut three young onions small; fry
them a nice brown; add three quarts of good clear beef-stock, a little
mace, pepper and salt; let it boil an hour; add three young carrots
and three turnips cut small, a stalk of celery cut fine, a pint of
French beans, a pint of green peas; let this boil two hours; if not
a bright, clear color, add a spoonful of soy. This is a nice summer
soup.
LOBSTER SOUP.--One large lobster or two small ones; pick all the meat
from the shell and chop fine; scald one quart of milk and one pint
of water, then add the lobster, one pound of butter, a teaspoonful of
flour, and salt and red pepper to taste. Boil ten minutes and serve
hot.
MOCK TURTLE SOUP.--One soup-bone, one quart of turtle beans, one large spoonful of powdered cloves, salt and pepper. Soak the beans over
night, put them on with the soup-bone in nearly six quarts of water,
and cook five or six hours. When half done, add the cloves, salt and
pepper; when done, strain through a colander, pressing the pulp of the
beans through to make the soup the desired thickness, and serve with
a few slices of hard-boiled egg and lemon sliced very thin. The turtle
beans are black and can only be obtained from large grocers.
OYSTER SOUP.--Take one quart of water, one teacup of butter, one pint
of milk, two teaspoons of salt, four crackers rolled fine, and one
teaspoon of pepper; bring to full boiling heat as soon as possible,
then add one quart of oysters; let the whole come to boiling heat
quickly and remove from the fire.
OYSTER SOUP.--Pour one quart of boiling water into a skillet; then one
quart of good rich milk; stir in one teacup of rolled cracker crumbs;
season with pepper and salt to taste. When all come to boil, add one
quart of good fresh oysters; stir well, so as to keep from scorching;
then add a piece of good sweet butter about the size of an egg; let it
boil up once, then remove from the fire immediately; dish up and send
to table.
OX TAIL SOUP.--Take two ox tails and two whole onions, two carrots, a
small turnip, two tablespoonfuls of flour, and a little white pepper;
add a gallon of water, let all boil for two hours; then take out the
tails and cut the meat into small pieces, return the bones to the pot
for a short time, boil for another hour, then strain the soup, and
rinse two spoonfuls of arrow-root to add to it with the meat cut from
the bones, and let all boil for a quarter of an hour.
SCOTCH BROTH.--Take one-half teacup barley, four quarts cold water;
bring this to the boil and skim; now put in a neck of mutton and boil
again for half an hour, skim well the sides of the pot also; have
ready two carrots, one large onion, a small head of cabbage, one
bunch parsley, one sprig of celery top; chop all these fine, add your
chopped vegetables, pepper and salt to taste. This soup takes two
hours to cook.
SOUP AND BOUILLE.--Stew a brisket of beef with some turnips, celery,
leeks and onions, all finely cut. Put the pieces of beef into the
pot first, then the roots, and half a pint of beef gravy, with a few
cloves. Simmer for an hour. Add more beef gravy, and boil gently for
half an hour.
ROYAL SOUP.--Take a knuckle of veal, slices of undressed
gammon of bacon, onions, mace, and a small quantity of water; simmer till very strong, and lower it with a good beef broth made the day before, and stewed till the meat is done to rags. Add cream, vermicelli, almonds and a roll.
VARIOUS SOUPS.--Good soups may be made from fried meats, where the fat and gravy are added to the boiled barley; and for that purpose, fat beef steaks, pork steaks, mutton chops, etc. should be preferred, as containing more of the nutritious principle. When nearly done frying, add a little water, which will produce a gravy to be added to the
barley broth; a little wheat flour should be dredged in also; a
quantity of onions, cut small, should also be fried with the fat,
which gives the soup a fine flavor, assisted by seasoning, etc.
Soups may be made from broiled meats. While the fat beef steak is
doing before the fire, or mutton chop, etc., save the drippings on
a dish, in which a little flour, oatmeal, with cut onions, etc., are
put.
GRAND CONSOMME SOUP.--Put into a pot two knuckles of veal, a piece
of a leg of beef, a fowl, or an old cock, a rabbit, or two old
partridges; add a ladleful of soup, and stir it well; when it comes
to a jelly, put in a sufficient quantity of stock, and see that it is
clear; let it boil, skimming and refreshing it with water; season it
as the above; you may add, if you like, a clove of garlic; let it then
boil slowly or simmer four or five hours; put it through a towel, and
use it for mixing in sauces or clear soups.
JULIENNE SOUP.--Take some carrots and turnips, and turn them
ribald-like; a few heads of celery, some leeks and onions, and cut
them in lozenges, boil them till they are cooked, then put them into
clear gravy soup. Brown thickening.
You may, in summer time, add green peas, asparagus tops, French beans,
some lettuce or sorrel.
SOUP AND SOUPS.--It is not at all necessary to keep a special fire for
five hours every day in order to have at dinner a first course of
soup. Nor need a good, savory, nutritious soup for a family of five
cost more than 10 cents. There is no use hurling any remarks about
"swill-pails." Every housekeeper who knows anything of her kitchen and
dining-room affairs, knows there are usually nice clean fragments of
roasts and broils left over, and that broth in which lamb, mutton,
beef, and fowls have been boiled is in existence, and that twice a week or so there is a bowl of drippings from roasted meats.
All these when simmered with rice, macaroni, or well-chosen vegetables,
And judiciously seasoned, make good soups, and can be had without a
special fire, and without sending to the butcher's for special meats.
We name a few of the soups we make, and beg leave to add that they
are pretty well received. We make them in small quantities, for nobody
with three additional courses before him wants to eat a quart of
soup, you know!
1.--One pint of good gravy, three cups boiling water, a slice of
turnip, and half an onion cut in small bits, two grated crackers.
Simmer half an hour.
2.--On ironing day cut off the narrow ends from two or three sirloin
steaks, chop them into morsels and put in a stew pan with a little
salt, a tablespoonful of rice and a pint of cold water, and simmer
slowly for three hours. Then add water enough to make a quart of soup,
a tablespoonful of tomato catsup, and a little browned flour mixed
with the yolk of an egg.
3.--Pare and slice very thin four good sized potatoes, pour over them
two cups of boiling water, and simmer gently until the potatoes are
dissolved. Add salt, a lump of nice butter, and a pint of sweet milk
with a dust of pepper. Let it boil up once, and serve. You wouldn't
think it, but it is real good, and children cry for it.
4.--One pint meat broth, one pint boiling water, slice in an onion,
or a parsnip, or half a turnip--or all three if liked--boil until the
vegetables are soft, add a little salt if needed, and a tablespoonful
of Halford sauce.
5.--Let green corn, in the time of green corn, be grated, and to a
pint of it put a pint of rich milk, a pint of water, a little butter,
salt and pepper. Boil gently for fifteen or twenty minutes.
SPLIT PEA SOUP.--Take beef bones or any cold meats, and two pounds of
corned pork; pour on them a gallon of hot water, and let them simmer
three hours, removing all the scum. Boil one quart of split peas two
hours, having been previously soaked, as they require much cooking:
strain off the meat and mash the peas into the soup; season with black
pepper, and let it simmer one hour; fry two or three slices of bread a
nice brown, cut into slices and put into the bottom of the tureen, and
on them pour the soup.
TOMATO SOUP.--Boil chicken or beef four hours; then strain; add to the
soup one can of tomatoes and boil one hour. This will make four quarts
of soup.
TOMATO SOUP WITHOUT MEAT.--One quart of tomatoes, one quart of water,
one quart of milk. Butter, salt and pepper to taste. Cook the tomatoes
thoroughly in the water, have the milk scalding (over water to prevent
scorching). When the tomatoes are done add a large teaspoonful of
salaratus, which will cause a violent effervescence. It is best to
set the vessel in a pan before adding it to prevent waste. When the
commotion has ceased add the milk and seasoning. When it is possible
it is best to use more milk than water, and cream instead of butter.
The soup is eaten with crackers and is by some preferred to oyster
soup. This recipe is very valuable for those who keep abstinence days.
TURKEY SOUP.--Take the turkey bones and cook for one hour in water
enough to cover them; then stir in a little dressing and a beaten egg.
Take from the fire, and when the water has ceased boiling add a little
butter with pepper and salt.
VEAL GRAVY.--Put in the stew pan bits of lard, then a few thin slices
of ham, a few bits of butter, then slices of fillet of veal, sliced
onions, carrots, parsnips, celery, a few cloves upon the meat, and two
spoonfuls of broth; set it on the fire till the veal throws out its
juices; then put it on a stronger fire till the meat catches to
the bottom of the pan, and is brought to a proper color; then add a
sufficient quantity of light broth, and simmer it upon a slow fire
till the meat is well done. A little thyme and mushrooms may be added.
Skim and sift it clear for use.
VEAL SOUP.--To a knuckle of veal of 6 pounds, put 7 or 9 quarts of
water; boil down one-half; skim it well. This is better to do the day
before you prepare the soup for the table. Thicken it by rubbing flour,
butter, and water together. Season with salt and mace. When done
add one pint new milk; let it just come to a boil; then pour into a soup
dish, lined with macaroni well cooked.
VEGETABLE SOUP.--Pare and slice five or six cucumbers; and add to these as many cos lettuces, a sprig or two of mint, two or three
onions, some pepper and salt, a pint and a half of young peas and a
little parsley. Put these, with half a pound of fresh butter, into
a saucepan, to stew in their own liquor, near a gentle fire, half an
hour, then pour two quarts of boiling water to the vegetables, and
stew them two hours; rub down a little flour into a teacupful of
water, boil it with the rest twenty minutes, and serve it.
VERMICELLI SOUP.--Boil tender 1/2 lb. of vermicelli in a quart of rich
gravy; take half of it out, and add to it more gravy; boil till
the vermicelli can be pulped through a sieve. To both put a pint of
boiling cream, a little salt, and 1/4 lb. of Parmesan cheese. Serve
with rasped bread. Add two or three eggs, if you like.
BROWN VERMICELLI SOUP.--Is made in the same manner, leaving out the
eggs and cream, and adding one quart of strong beef gravy.
I hope you have found the recipe that you were looking for and the solution is favorable
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)