limbs. Indeed, a brisk walk now is a pleasure which I seek to gratify,
whereas before the prescribed walk for the sake of exercise was a
horrible bore to me.
"6. I go to my study and to my pulpit on an empty stomach without any
sense of loss of strength mentally or physically--on the other hand,
with freshness and vigor which is delightful. In this respect I am quite
sure that I am in every way advantaged."
Rev. George Sherman Richards, after more than fifteen years of frequent
severe headaches that were supposed to be due to heredity, has had
entire freedom during the five years of the No-breakfast Plan. He can
hardly be surpassed as a picture of perfect health.
One of the first prominent converts who finally surrendered to Mr.
Haskell, whose persistence was beyond fatigue, was the editor of the
Norwich, Conn., _Bulletin_, a special friend. There was no want of
conviction on his part, but the evil day to begin the morning fast was
continually postponed. Finally, one morning when he was specially busy
and charged with impatience, the beaming and hopeful face of Mr. Haskell
appeared. Said the busy man, "Mr. Haskell, if you will walk right out
of that door, I will promise you to begin tomorrow morning to do without
breakfasts." Mr. Haskell walked out--the breakfasts were given up, and
some years later I was personally informed that he believed that his
life had been saved thereby.
[Illustration: REV. GEORGE SHERMAN RICHARDS,
Rector of Christ Church, Meadville, Pa.]
One of the expedients was to send a circular about the book to every
foreign missionary of every denomination, and as a result one of these
fell into the hands of Rev. W. E. Rambo, in India. He had become a mere
shadow of his former self from ulcerated bowels, the sequel of a badly
treated case of typhoid fever. For seven months there had been daily
movements tinged with blood; the appetite was ravenous, and large meals
were taken without any complainings from the stomach. Before a
well-spread table his desire to eat would become simply furious, and it
was indulged regardless of quality and quantity. His brain system had
become so exhausted that reason and judgment had no part in this
hurricane of hunger.
There were seven successive physicians in this case, some of them with
many titles. The first one he called on reaching New England cut his
food down to _six bland meals daily_. All of them had tried to cure the
offending ulcers by dosings. Think whether bleeding ulcers on the body
would get well with their tender surfaces subjected to the same
grinding, scratching process from bowel rubbish!
He was in condition on his arrival to lose six pounds during the first
week of six "bland" daily meals. After reading the _True Science of
Living_ he discharged his physician and came under my personal care.
These ulcers were treated with the idea of giving them the same rest as
if each had been the end of a fractured bone. To relieve pain, to hold
the bowel still, and to abolish the morbid hunger, a few doses with the
hypodermic needle were a seeming necessity.
In less than two weeks this starving man of skin and bones was relieved
of all symptoms of disease, and there seemed a moderate desire for food
of the nourishing kind. Less than two weeks were required for all those
ulcers to become covered with a new membrane: but for full three weeks
only those liquid foods were given that had no rubbish in them to prove
an irritant to the new, delicate membrane covering the ulcers. For a
time after the third week there was only one light daily meal, with a
second added when it seemed safe to take it.
In a little more than three months there was a gain of forty-two and a
half pounds of flesh, as instinct with new, vigorous life as if freshly
formed by the divine hand. My last word from this restored man was after
he, his wife, and four children had been back in India for a year and a
half, where they were all living on the two-meal plan without any
sicknesses, and he had a class of one hundred and sixty native boys on
the same plan.
Who can fail to see the science and the sense to relieve all diseases
of the digestive tract? There are no cases of hemorrhoids not malignant
in character, in which total relief will not be the result if fasts are
long enough; no cases of anal fistula that will not finally close if
they can have that rest from violence that is their only need; and
equally all ulcers and fissures that make life a history of torture.
No case with structural disease of any part of the digestive tract not
malignant has yet come under my care in which there has not been a cure,
or in which there has not been a cure in sight. Through a fast we may
let the diseased parts in the digestive tract rest as we would a broken
bone or wound on the body.
Several missionaries have regained health on these new lines, who have
returned to preach and practise a larger gospel than before. One
returned from the Congo region of Africa with such wreckage of health as
to make any active service impossible. Mr. Haskell met him in New York,
and in time he returned with twenty-four missionaries, all as converts
to the new gospel of health, and to have that sustained health only
possible through a larger obedience to the laws of God "manifest in the
flesh"--obedience that takes into account the moral science, the physics
and the chemistry of digestion.
These and those others who have had their lives redeemed from lingering
death through the simple, easy ways of Nature never suffer their
enthusiasm to wane. Not to volunteer aid when unintentional suicide is
going on seems nothing less than criminal.
As a means to better health the utility of the morning fast is beyond
estimate. In all other modes of health culture there is a great deal of
time consumed in certain exercises that are certain to be given up in
time. What the busy world requires is a mode to gain and maintain the
health that requires neither time nor thought--one that is really
automatic.
We arise in the morning with our brain recharged by sleep, and we go at
once about our business. If we take a walk or go to the gymnasium, we
simply waste that much time, and we also lessen the stored-up energy by
whatever of effort is called out. We can skip the dumb-bells and perform
any other kind of exercise that is good for the health; and always with
the certainty that we shall have more strength for the first half of the
day if none is wasted in this way. As a matter of mere enjoyment, walks
in fresh air are beneficial, but not as an enforced exercise for the
reason of health.
For the highest possibilities for a day of human service there must be a
night of sound sleep; and then one may work with muscle or with mind
much longer without fatigue if no strength is wasted over untimely food
in the stomach, no enforced means to develop health and strength. When
one has worked long enough to become generally tired there should be a
period of rest, in order to regain power to digest what shall be so
eaten as to cause the brain the least waste of its powers through
failure to masticate.
One need not always wait until noon to eat the first meal. Those in good
health have found that they can easily go till noon before breaking the
fast; but in proportion as one is weak or ailing the rule should be to
stop all work as soon as fatigue becomes marked, and then rest until
power to digest is restored. To eat when one is tired is to add a burden
of labor to all the energies of life, and with the certainty that no
wastes will be restored thereby.
For the highest efforts of genius, of art, of the simplest labors of the
hands, the forenoon with empty stomach and larger measure of stored-up
energy of the brain is by far the better half of the day; and, more than
this, it is equally the better for the display of all the finer senses
of the tastes, the finer emotions of soul life. In addition to
these--and what is vastly more important--it is by far the better half
of the day for the display of that energy whereby disease is cured. All
this with no power lost in any special exercise for the health!
The time to stop the forenoon labor is when the need to rest has become
clearly apparent; and there must be rest before eating, to restore the
energy for digestion. This always determines Nature's time when the
first meal shall be taken, and not the hour of the day.
This is especially important to all who are constitutionally weak or
have become disabled through ailings or disease. Disappointments have
come to hundreds who have given up breakfasts, because of the mistaken
idea that they must wait till noon before breaking the fast, and hence
had become too tired to digest; and therefore experienced a loss rather
than a gain from the untimely noon meals.
The desire for morning food is a matter of habit only. Morning hunger is
a disease under culture, and they who feel the most need have the most
reason to fast into higher health. They who claim that their breakfasts
are their best meals; that they simply "cannot do one thing" until they
have eaten, are practically in line with those who must have their
alcoholics before the wheels can be started.
Now it has been found by the experience of thousands that by wholly
giving up the morning meal all desire for it in time disappears, which
could hardly be the case if the laws of life were thereby violated; and
the habit once fully eradicated is rarely resumed.
To give up suddenly the use of alcoholics or of tobacco in any of its
forms is to call out loudest protests from the morbid voices that have
been kept silent by those soothing powers; and yet no one would accept
those loud cries as indicating an actual physiological need. The
difficulties arising from giving up the morning meals--even as those
from giving up the morning grog--are an exact measure of the need that
they shall be given up in order that health, and not disease, shall be
under culture.
I once heard a Rev. Mrs. tell a large audience of ministers that for
more than a week she spent most of her forenoons in bed to endure better
the headaches and other angry, protesting voices that were averse to the
no-breakfast plan. She won her case, and thence on a hint of headache or
other morbid symptoms was a matter of humiliation and fasting, with
prayer for forgiveness and for greater moral strength against the
temptations of relish.
With many people the breaking of the breakfast habit costs only less of
will-power than is called out by attempts to break the alcoholic or
tobacco habit; but by persistence a complete victory is certain for all,
and the forenoons become a luxury of power in reserve.
Now, I must warn all that very many persons who adopt the No-breakfast
Plan are disappointed, because they have become chronic in the ways of
unwitting sin: they are like thin-soiled farms long-cropped without soil
culture. Harvests in either case can only come by the study and practice
of the laws of nutrition.
The besetting sin against all such ailing mortals, the lines of whose
lives are frequently of the hardest, is that the friends all oppose
cutting down the daily food from the dreadfully mistaken impression that
weakness and debility from disease are the measure of the need to eat,
not the measure of the inability to digest.
Scores of times I have been written to by this class of patients as to
their troubles from friends in this way. Scores of times I have been
consulted as to the safety of this method in daily living for the old,
as if it were a tax upon the constitutional powers to stop sinning
against them! As well ask whether one may get too old as to make it
dangerous to cut down daily whiskey or daily labor that is clearly
beyond the reasonable use of the powers.
Those who are the victims of chronic diseases and have become greatly
enfeebled by overwork of body, mind, or stomach, will have to work out
their salvation with most discouragingly slow progress; but not to work,
not to try, is to invite the processes of disease culture.
Now, as to the time when that first meal of the day shall be taken.
Since the best meal of the day in all America with the great majority of
the people is at noon, this time may well be selected as the most
fitting. Since the man of muscle loses no time in taking his breakfast,
he should be able with good sense to rest an hour before this noon meal.
Those whose general energies give out earlier in the morning and do not
care to have general meals prepared in advance of the usual hour, can
put in the time in the best possible way by resting into power of relish
and digestion, the evil of eating when tired being that the exhausted
feeling is only increased.
Now think what forenoons may be had with no time lost over breakfasts,
none in thinking about the health or in doing anything for it, and not
only to have the best and strongest use of the reason, judgment, and
muscles, but also to have the best possible conditions for the cure of
ailings! Think, too, what it would be to the mothers of the land not to
have any need to go into their kitchens until the time to prepare the
noon meal arrived!
Can children while growing rapidly do without breakfasts? They certainly
can without a hint of discomfort, and be all the better for it in every
way.
A few months ago I spent some hours in Illinois, where the no-breakfast
plan had been practised for two years. When the plan was begun there was
a pale, delicate mother of four children, who was enduring a life that
had no cheer. During the first year the battle was a severe one, not a
little aggravated by the assurance of all sympathetic friends that
resulting evil was making its mark on all the lines of expression; but
health with its life and color finally came to silence the uttered
disapproval.
There was a boy in the home who was subject to the severest headaches
every week, and who was much wasted in his body when he began: he had
become robust and wholly relieved of all his ailings. There was a plump,
rosy-cheeked girl of fourteen who for a year had taken only one daily
meal, and yet a better nourished body I never saw.
Now in this family the only warm, general meal, and this a plain one,
was at noon. The evening meal was entirely of bread and butter taken
without even a sitting at the table. What happy, healthy children they
were! And the mother was in a great deal better health to do all the
work of the kitchen: work, she strongly asserted, which was not nearly
half of what it formerly was. For her there was a cure, a great increase
of strength, and a great reduction of the most taxing of all the duties
of the home-life.
If there is such a thing as an attack of disease, it cannot occur in the
forenoon when there is an empty stomach and all the powers are at their
best for resisting disease; and where children are fed as these are,
disease, acute or chronic, is only a remote possibility.
I belong to a family of seven; the oldest is beyond seventy, the
youngest beyond fifty. This No-breakfast Plan has been very closely
adhered to with all for not less than twelve years, and during this time
not one of us has had any acute sickness; and I am not aware that any
have diseases of the chronic kind.
The accompanying illustration is that of Mrs. E. A. Quiggle,
sister of the Author, after twelve years' trial of The
No-breakfast Plan.
[Illustration: MRS. E. A. QUIGGLE,
Chicago, Ill.]
IX.
The utility of eating with thoroughness is strongly illustrated in the
following cases:
Mr. Horace Fletcher, the author and traveller, took to the
one-daily-meal plan to cut down his abnormal weight, having the patience
to masticate all sense of taste from each mouthful before swallowing. I
saw him after he had been on this plan for some months: there had been a
weight loss of some forty pounds; a nasal catarrh of many years had been
cured, and he strongly asserted that in every way he felt himself
twenty-five years younger.
He had been living a week on baked potatoes for experimental reasons
when I met him, and without experiencing any morbid sensations: a more
perfect specimen of physical health I never gazed upon. To all
dyspeptics who are willing to work for their health through pains and
patience, his little work, _Glutton or Epicure_, is strongly
recommended.
A dyspeptic from Vermont came to me who for ten years had eaten three
hearty meals daily, none of which had ever satisfied his hunger. He was
in a very low mental state when he came, and feeble in body: for fully
ten years both himself and physician had held the stomach accountable
for all its complainings, and with no thought of avoidable cause.
I put him on one meal a day, as there was still some power of digestion,
and with the following list for the daily bill of fare: baked potatoes
well buttered, bread and butter, beans dressed with butter, fish or lamb
chops, and rice or oatmeal only if strongly desired; all sugar foods
debarred, and no drinks except water as thirst called for it between the
meals. The constipated bowels were permitted their own times for action.
The mouthfuls were small and far apart--like dashes between words--not
less than forty-five minutes were spent in masticating. Very soon there
was a general rousement of new life in every way. His first surprise was
in an unwonted sense of relish and a complete sating of hunger long
before he had eaten the old-time amounts.
There was a fresh revelation to me in this, as I had not before been so
impressed that by slow eating the hunger-spell is also dissipated in
part by time, and hence there is much less danger of eating to excess.
Hunger comes in part from habit, and it is appeased, with or without
eating, with equal completeness. The hunger-habit can be trained to come
at almost any fixed time.
Not long since I read of a farmer who kept his horses in apparently
perfect condition on one feeding, and only at night: they had become so
trained that they had no desire for food until their labors were over.
At night they both ate and rested, and made good the waste of the day;
they were fully nourished and rested by morning, and could labor all the
forenoon without loss of energy diverted to digestion: at noon they
would rest--become strong for the labors of the day.
There can be no doubt, I think, that the strongest sense of hunger at
the regular eating-time could be dissipated by a fast not longer in
duration than that of an ordinary meal-time.
My patient's bowels gave no hint of their locality until the eighteenth
day, when they acted with little effort; on the twenty-fourth day again
in a perfect way, and thereafter daily. The mind became ecstatic through
perfect relief from mental and physical depression; there were no wants
for other than those simple foods, and at the end of a month he left me
with new views as to Nature's power of selection to meet her needs and
of the vast utility of using both time and food to dissipate hunger.
The waste with most people is so small that the cost of the food, the
cost of time in preparation, could be reduced to a startling fraction if
the need could be actually known, and the pleasures of the palate
increased by an inverse ratio. There is no redemption for women on the
earth who have the care of kitchens except through simpler, smaller
meals--meals so very far apart that there shall be a maximum of the
hunger-sense of relish and the resulting maximum of power to convert
them into tissues instinct with life.
It may be that the waste is so very trifling, especially with
brain-workers, that one may be a vegetarian, fruitarian, or even an
eater of pork, without positive violence to practical physiology. There
is this further very practical consideration, that when Nature is so
fairly dealt with that she can speak in natural tones she will call only
for those foods easily available along geographical lines.
There is this to be said about fruits, that all those containing acids
decompose the gastric juice, as they all contain potash salts in union
with fruit acids. As soon as they reach the stomach the free
hydrochloric acid of the gastric juice unites with the potash, setting
the fruit acid free to irritate the stomach. There is never any desire
for acid fruits through real hunger, especially those of the hyperacid
kinds: they are simply taken to gratify that lower sense--relish.
The tropical fruits are without acids, and therefore are well adapted to
a class of people who have only the least use for muscle and brains.
Acid fruits can only be taken with apparent impunity by the young and
old, who can generate gastric juice copiously. Because of the general
impression that they are healthful and no tax, human stomachs are
converted into cider-mills at will, regardless of between meal-times. By
their ravishing flavor and apparent ease of digestion apples still play
an important part in the "fall of man" from that higher estate, the
Eden without its dyspepsia.
What shall we eat? The fig-leaved savage under his bread-fruit tree, the
fur-clad Eskimo in his ice-hut, need not be asked: the needed food is in
all due supply with little cost of muscle and less of mind--and he has
no mental condition that can disturb the digestion.
The simpler waste-restoring foods have a flavor of their own that needs
little reinforcement if developed by due mastication and with adequate
hunger. In my own case butter duly salted seems to be my only natural
appetizer aside from hunger; and yet I must own that at times new honey
has a wonderful effect on the mouth-glands.
The difference between eating from hunger and mere relish, as fruits and
the various sweetened foods are eaten, is a new study in dietetics, and
one more important can scarcely be conceived. It can hardly be
intelligently studied without taking into due account this new
physiology. With rarest exceptions the need of food is estimated by the
mere pleasure that comes from relish--that kind of relish that is
evolved from the pies, puddings, ice creams, the last course in Sunday
dinners, never taken until the limits of stomach expansion are nearly
reached.
X.
Some of the external evidences of that general regeneration which comes
through Nature will now be given. We will study the human face as we
study the earth when the favoring conditions of Spring rouse all Nature
to newness of life. The face shall be our human landscape.
I select a face in which the eyes are dull from debility, in which there
is no sparkle of soul, and beneath are the dark venus-hanging clouds.
The face has a dull, lifeless cast; the veins are all enlarged from
debility, and cover the larger arteries as with a mourner's pall, save
where there are patches as of clouds on fire, where disease of the skin
enlivens the drear landscape. There are pimples large and small, some
with overflowing volcanoes; there are no lines of expression: these are
changed to lines of morbid anatomy. We listen, and there are no echoes
of departed joys; look as we will, and we see no evidence of the
existence of a soul.
The ultimate of this picture is death from unrecognized suicide; death,
a slow dying to every sense that made life worth living. There is this
about these deaths that go on through the months and years: they
exaggerate the worst instincts of the soul as it is dragged down--down
through brain-wasting largely avoidable if only understood.
The instant result of a total suspension of the use of the brain power
in the digestive tract is the evolution of life: new life is sent to the
remotest cell as by an electric charge. The nutrient vessels of the eye
tone down in size, and there is polish, sparkle where there was only
dimness; and on the face the venus clouds, black and red, begin to
disappear; the toning of the veins condenses the skin, and thereby the
ruddy arteries are uncovered, and a color that has life appears; the
pimples, the hillocks, even have a brighter look as they slowly shrink
from sight. Finally, the skin becomes of a plush-like texture, soft,
condensed, and with tints that compare as the tints of flowers with the
faded colors of the house-painter, or as the matchless tint and plush of
the perfect peach to the spotted, colorless, wilted, degenerated
representative awaiting the garbage-barrel; and the cherry lips, the
cherry gums, and the whiter teeth--Nature does not match them
otherwheres.