Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise. Bernarr Macfadden
And cooking cannot destroy all the disease-germs which the "corpse-eater" transfers to his own body. The task of assimilating wolf-food is an affront to our digestive organs. Our stomachs, bowels, and teeth are those of a fruit-eating creature.
"Don't you think there is something objectionable about a draughty bedroom window in this changeable climate of ours?" a Connecticut foggy asked Dio Lewis.
"That's just my opinion," said the facetious doctor; "in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases the draught isn't near strong enough."
And the main objection to ecclesiastic fasts is the circumstance that they were rarely persistent enough. "Fasting," i.e., abstaining from meat on Friday and for a few weeks in early spring can hardly be expected to undo the mischief of two hundred and seventy-five carnivorous days.
Our instinct-guided Darwinian kinsmen are frugal in the original sense of the word; i.e., subsist chiefly on tree-fruit, but have no objection to eggs, and vegetarians of the Alcott school may have prejudiced their cause by prohibiting eggs, milk, and all kinds of fat, as well as meat.
But in midsummer it would certainly often be a good plan to stick to an Alcott menu for a few weeks. Faire maigre (literally, "make lean") the French call fasting, but adopt their Lenten fare at the wrong time of the year. The idea of insisting on three daily meals of greasy, apopleptic, heat-aggravating viands is preposterous at a season that makes the struggle for existence a fight against a fever-heat atmosphere; nor is there any real need for "something warm" three times a day. We might as well aggravate the grievance of a blizzard with artificial refrigerants, or swallow opiates while imploring heaven for strength to watch and pray. Perpetual Lents, modified by an occasional omelette, are not incompatible with perfect comfort, and total abstainer from stimulants should sign a pledge against tea and coffee, while they are about it.
Only unnatural appetencies have no natural limits, and a combination of dietetic restrictions with the one-meal plan would enable us to dispense with the sickening cant of the saints who ask us to make our dinners as many ordeals for the exercise of self-denial. "It would justify suicide," says an educational reformer, "if this world of ours were really arranged on the diabolic plan of making every gratification of our natural instincts injurious."
"Stop eating whenever the taste of a special dish tempts you to unusual indulgence." … "In saying grace, add in silence a pledge to prove your self-control;" "test the superiority of moral principles to physical appetites," and similar apothegms recall the time when moralists tried to earn heaven by trampling the strawberry patches of earth and obtain forgiveness for eating at all by mixing their food with a decoction of wormwood. "Stop eating when you relish your food more than usually?" Nego et pernego! We might as well tell a health-seeker to refrain from sleep when he feels specially drowsy.
"Regulate the quality of your meals and let the quantity take care of itself," is a far more sensible rule. Wholesome food rarely tempts us to indulge to excess. We do not often hear of milk topers or baked-apple gluttons.
"Do not eat till you have leisure to digest," but after a fast-day, and with all night for digestion and assimilation, do not insult Nature by being afraid to eat your fill of wholesome food. If a combination of exceptional circumstances should, nevertheless, result in a surfeit, do not rush to the shop of the bluepill vender, but try the effect of a longer fast.
"Every disease that afflicts mankind is a constitutional possibility developed into disease by more or less habitual eating in excess of the supply of gastric juices!
"The sense of taste then, you see, as you have not quite realized before, exists for a two-fold purpose. (1.) To indicate the precise food needed to restore the wastes of muscle energy, and (2.) that there shall be no mistakes made, the needed food is to be the most keenly relished. Now with this to guide you hereafter you will not need to study the science of food analysis, if you so allow your appetite to develop that Nature can order the bill of fare out loud with the clearest enunciation."—E. H. Dewey, M.D.
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