Fletcherism. Fletcher Horace

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СКАЧАТЬ be done sooner, giving physical relief and more time for healthful recreation.

      Diminution of the demand for meat-foods has much to do with both the ease of house-work, and the modification of cost. But this is not the most important saving. The saving of liability to intestinal toxication (poisoning) is the great economy of the method.

THE FINANCIAL ECONOMY OF FLETCHERISM

      It has been stated by writers who have correctly reported results that more than two hundred thousand families in America live according to Fletcherism and save as much as a dollar a day on their living expenses. This has led many to ask: "How are one's living expenses reduced by your principles?"

      The estimate, arrived at a few years ago, that some two hundred thousand families in America were saving an average of a dollar a day through Fletcherizing, was made, I believe, by Doctor Kellog, of Battle Creek, Michigan. Through the thousands of patients who pass under his observation, and through a comprehensive touch with the sale of different kinds of food throughout the country, Doctor Kellog has his finger on the pulse of the nation in relation to its dietetic circulation. Fletcherism first affected families of sumptuous tastes, and the economy of it easily effected a saving of an average of a dollar a day, largely in the diminution of meat requirements and complex dishes.

      The spread of the movement has now begun to encompass families of lesser luxury of habits; and here it is found that an average saving of ten cents a day for each person is easily accomplished. In the Christian Endeavour Society alone, the leaders of the movement, as the result of their own practical experience, hoped to effect a saving of hundreds of thousands of dollars a day through the spread of this economic nutritive teaching. This was likewise the aspiration of the Roman Catholic benevolent organisations. A circular letter signed by the Reverend Father Higgins, of Germantown, Pennsylvania, which was distributed widely, declared that, in addition to the food economy sought to be obtained, a condition which makes for poverty – that is, intemperance – was overcome by Fletcherism.

      Father Higgins declared that "No Fletcherite can be intemperate in the use of alcoholic stimulants," and he was right in his assertion.

BUSINESS PEOPLE AND FLETCHERISM

      What would be the best way for business people to adopt Fletcherism? is often asked. The case is frequently cited to me of a young man or woman who isn't hungry for breakfast at seven o'clock, does not eat at that time because the appetite doesn't demand it; and then gets ravenously hungry at eleven o'clock. It may be impossible to get any food until one-thirty – by which time the feeling comes that one has "waited too long," and a headache and no desire for food are the results. Or, the case of working-girls who live in boarding-houses, eat no breakfast, and at noon cannot afford the wholesome and hearty food Nature would then crave. Later, at dinner, they have to eat what is put before them, whether they want it or not, or else go without. Will a hearty luncheon, rightly eaten, interfere with a good afternoon's work? I am reminded also that leisure, money, and easily-accessible cafés are not always available for business women.

      My answer to such questions is: – Any change of habit is apt to excite a protest on behalf of the body, especially when the body is not properly nourished, and is in a state of more or less disease. When the habit-hunger comes on a few sips of water will quiet the discomfort for the time being and, very likely, until it is convenient to take food comfortably and with the calm and relish necessary to good digestion. Headache, faintness, "all-goneness" and like discomforts, are symptoms, not of hunger, but of the reverse – that is, fermentation of undigested excess of food which the body cannot use.

      A person, thus troubled, should brave discomfort for a week, and even go without food entirely for a few meals, in order to give the body a chance to "clean house": then the real sensation of hunger will be expressed by "watering of the mouth" and a keen desire for some simple food such as bread and butter, or dry bread alone. But this healthy appetite will "keep" and accumulate until it is convenient to take food.

THE TRUE EPICURE

      I am, personally, a hearty man in full activity, both mental and physical. I can work six hours and then satisfy the keenest of appetites on a meal of wheat griddle-cakes with maple syrup and a glass or two of milk. A young working woman should be able to do the same. If I eat such a meal with "gusto," deliberation (so as to enjoy the maximum of taste), taking not more than fifteen minutes over it, I can then go to work, or play, or to mountain climbing, or to riding a bicycle, and keep it up until I am sleepy, with no sense of repletion or discomfort.

      "Money, leisure and easily-accessible cafés" are the menace of right nutrition, unless one is proof against temptation to kill time in this dangerous manner.

      Steady work to earn a true appetite, small means to spend on food, the necessity of going to seek it, with the appreciation which comes from rarity, are the very best safeguards to right nutrition.

      I am an epicure. Yet I have never seen a boarding-house, nor a restaurant, nor a camp where I could not find something to satisfy a true (earned) appetite. During more than a year in the Far East – Ceylon, Java, the Philippines, China, Burma, India, Kashmir – and at many steamer and railway lunch tables, I always found something good to satisfy a keen appetite. If you are all right inside, and will only conquer your habit-hungers, I believe you can live sumptuously, anywhere, on less than two shillings a day. I can, and often do; and do it, too, at one hundred and seventy pounds weight and "awfully busy" all the time. It may be difficult, and perhaps painful, at first, to get the best of bad habit-cravings, but it is worth while. A week should accomplish the reformation.

      A number of men ask me: "Do you honestly believe that in your theories lies the secret of long life?" I do, and I may give one example of a "lived model" of longevity as the result of Fletcherism in all its ramifications of temperance of eating, careful mastication, radiant optimism, practical altruism, superabundant activity, etc. The Honourable Albert Gallatin Dow, of Randolph, New York, passed away in May, 1908, lacking less than three months of a hundred years of age. Up to the last moment of his century of life there was no encroachment of senility, and he fell, ripe fruit, into the lap of Mother Nature, without a blemish of decay. Shortly before he passed away, Mr. Dow invited me to see him, and told me that he had received a shock of warning early in life as I had done late in life, and had made the same discovery that had reformed me. He believed that he owed his health and vigour to following the simple requirements of Nature, as I was teaching; but he had his career to make at the time, and had not had the leisure and means to preach dietetic righteousness as I was doing. He wished me Godspeed on my mission. All inquiry in all directions, wherever longevity has been accomplished, reveals the same simplicity of habits of living, which are the natural points of Fletcherizing.

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      Note: – Some of these same friends, fifteen years later, when I was sixty-four СКАЧАТЬ