Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise. Bernarr Macfadden
morning hours? It is only partly due to a difference of temperature, for indoor-workers, too, experience its benefits, and it would be a mistake to suppose that the invigorating effects of a good night's rest are limited to the early forenoon. At least half the morning energy is due to the fact that exemption from the task of digestion makes the reserve stores of vital vigor available for other work. The first meal forfeits that advantage, and by the simple plan of postponing breakfast the buoyancy of the early morning hours can be enjoyed all day.
"My body is all forehead," said the naked Indian, when his Caucasian hunting companion wondered that he did not shiver in a snow-storm; and the faster's day is all morning.
If you cannot adopt the one-meal plan at once at least avoid breakfast. Here is how Dr. Dewey describes his first forenoon without breakfast:
"I had a forenoon of such lofty mental cheer, such energy of soul and body, such a sense of physical ease as I had not known since a young man in my later teens. When the dinner-hour came there was an added relish that was a new experience, and I left the table with a stomach so supplied that there was no need of apprehension as to an attack of faintness during the afternoon. There is no natural hunger in the morning after a night of restful sleep, because there has been no such degree of cell destruction as to create a demand for food at the ordinary hour of the American breakfast. Sleep is not a hunger-causing process. To reinforce this statement and the reasons behind it, is the experience of thousands who have abandoned the morning meal, and in a short time lost all hint of a need of it. This could not have been had there been a need, for Nature is imperious, exacting; and it is not in the line of possibility that she will permit any getting used to less food than she requires to preserve her physiological balance. She easily permits you to skip that meal you do not need so soon after the refreshing sleep and which you always eat from habit; but later she will call you to account if you give less than her demands.
"Now you are to abolish your breakfast, and not to presume to eat again without keen hunger; this hunger you may have if you wait for it, even while sitting in an arm chair, or lying in bed, and it will be for food as nourishing as the axman requires. What shall be eaten at each meal will be a law for self to determine. No food is good or healthful, and therefore typical, without a special demand for it. Keen hunger, the most relishing of foods, thoroughly masticated, a recreative state of mind during digestion, these are the easily acquired conditions behind sustained health.
"But how sudden the revelation to me! Go without your breakfast and you will be hungry for your dinner! And so hungry that you will forget to take your cod-liver dose! And the dinner is so well relished, and you feel so much better after it that you conclude to omit the dosing altogether! How simple! Only to fast, no matter if it costs a whole day, a whole week, or a whole month, and with absolute safety; why, do you not recall how energetically the digestive organs will work over the keenly relished food after the long fast due to fevers? How much more, then, may be expected from fasts that are to be no tax on vital power? Safe? Yes, beyond any question. As soon as the stomach and appendages have disposed of the decomposing, unbidden meals that are still a tax on vital power, there will be a positive increase of mental and physical power, so that when Nature's own signal for food is given, there is none of the exhausted feeling that is more or less realized before the needless morning meal.
"Appetite will always come where death is not inevitable, no less in the ordinary conditions of low health than in cases of acute sickness, and fasting is the swiftest, the most effectual and the most unfailing of all devices ever conceived for inviting natural hunger. Keen hunger, hunger only, makes known the individual need."
CHAPTER III.
DIETETIC RESTRICTIONS.
A "fast," in the language of the medieval churchmen, generally implied the interdition of special kinds of food, and, in that sense of the word, almost every creed of ancient and modern times prescribes periods of total abstinence. The Rhamadan, or Lenten season, of the Mohammedans, has to be observed for a couple of months, though the casuists of the Koran allow travelers and busy laborers to shorten the term by lengthening the list of forbidden viands. The successors of Joe Smith prohibit alcoholic stimulants to all but invalids, and Zoroaster interdicts wine and "soma-juice"—probably some opiate—to those who can procure more wholesome tonics.
The Pythagoreans went further and tabooed wine altogether. Strict followers of the sect (whose "philosophy" was to all purposes a religion) abstained also from flesh food and, for some never wholly explained reason, from beans. Peter Bayle surmised some figurative significance of that tenet—beans of various colors being used for political ballots, but Pliny distinctly states that the mere touch of the plant was considered a defilement, and that in the war against Sybaris a squad of orthodox Pythagoreans allowed themselves to be cut to pieces, rather than seek safety in a bean-field.
That doctrine would not have flourished in Boston, though its apostle enjoyed the reputation of a Trismegistus—a past-master of wisdom, and was supposed to have entered Olympus by some gate closed to mortals of ordinary intelligence.
Both the Buddhists and Brahmans enjoin total abstinence from flesh-food, and Sir William Jones attests the fact that starving Hindus "declined to save their lives by sacrificing those of their dumb fellow-creatures."
In all those cases the interdict had a moral significance. Wine clouds the mind that should seek to obtain glimpses of a brighter world. Flesh food stimulates the animal passions, and certainly excites combativeness. A diet of bull beef imbued our North American Redskins with the ferocity of carnivorous beasts, while their banana-eating kinsmen of Southern Mexico are as placid as Hindus.
But a large number of dietetic restrictions might be recommended from a purely physical point of view. Alcohol is a liver-poison and aggravates the virulence of many diseases so unmistakably that its victims have hardly a right to complain of chronic disorders. Theirs are ailments perpetuated by a chronic provocation of the cause, and not apt to appeal to the sympathy of total abstainers any more than the afflictions of trichinosis could evoke the fears of a pork-abhoring Jew.
Drunkards, it is true, plead their "willingness to reform if the flesh were not stronger than the spirit." Temperance preachers descant on the dangers of worldly temptations and selfish indulgences, or the lusts of unregenerate hearts as if our natural appetites were tempting us to our ruin. Nay, the stimulant vice has found learned defenders; the followers of Paracelsus have worshiped the man-devouring fire as a sacred flame; for thousands of honest truth-seekers the disagreement of doctors makes it doubtful if alcohol is a friend or a foe, a health-giving tonic or a death-dealing poison. Is that uncertainty not a proof that in one most important respect Nature has failed to insure the welfare of her creatures?
What it really proves is this: That habitual sin has blunted our physical conscience till we have not only ceased to heed, but ceased to understand, the protests of our inner monitor. It proves that the victims of vice have so utterly forgotten the language of their instincts that they are no longer able to distinguish a natural appetite from a morbid appetency.
For it might be questioned if the instinctive horror of carrion is stronger than a normal man's aversion to the first taste of alcohol. To the palate of an unseduced youngster brandy is intensely repulsive, lager beer as nauseous as sewer swill; wine is simply spoiled musk, as unattractive as acidulated sugar-water. Is it Nature's fault that these health-protecting instincts can be perverted by a deliberate and ever-repeated disregard of their warning? Or can flesh-gluttons ("corpse-eaters" the editor of the Vegetarian calls them) plead the weakness of Nature, the lures of the flesh and the devil?"
Without spices and kitchen tricks animal food would not tempt the progeny of Adam to any damaging extent. "If I didn't want people to eat my apples I wouldn't lock them up in my orchard," says an irreverent critic of Genesis; but I do believe that an unperverted child could be locked up with a couple of helpless lambs, and that, like Sir William's Hindus, it would lie down and die, sooner than