Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/55

 diminished to the lowest degree consistent with comfort. The articles of food which should be most sedulously avoided are these:—

Bread, butter, milk, sugar, potatoes sweet and white, molasses, fat meat, Indian corn, pastry, beer.

The more nearly every one of these is absolutely cut off, the more rapid will be the reduction in the weight.

One about to undertake this diet should be weighed the day she commences and once a week for several months. The obvious decrease in rotundity will cheer her in her self-denials. This happy result should be quite evident in a week's time. We promise her with the most confident air in the world, that if she will rigidly and faithfully follow out these precepts and abstain from the forbidden fruits (if we may ask so much from a daughter of Eve), she will most certainly see a cheering diminution in that period, which will regularly continue until she is no longer, with Falstaff, "out of all reasonable compass."

This bill of fare must, we repeat, be enjoyed in moderation. It is well to eat enough, for the idea so often entertained of starving one's self thin is foolish. Such a course cannot possibly succeed unless the health too is ruined. But it is better to eat too little than too much. If this causes a feeling of emptiness at the pit of the stomach, it can be relieved by chewing a grain or two of coffee. Like Epictetus' philosophers the corpulent "must guard and plot against themselves."