Part 5

Neither, alas! did it stop here. As week by week, under a scientifically ordered regime which I partially defeated by overdoing my doctor’s dietary orders, the coverage began to diminish too rapidly to please him, and the strange psychology of a lady in the throes of a too rigid diet continued its baffling manifestations.

* * * * *

About the time that my slimming success began to be apparent to the appraising eyes of the sisterhood, my entrance into a room was the occasion for a gust of Oh’s and Ah’s, How-did-you-do-it? Why, I wouldn’t have known you! My dear, you’re marvelous! The heady wine of my success (on an empty stomach) began to induce giddiness.

Hollow-eyed and a bit necky, I began to indulge in the private procedure of posing before my mirror, pinning in my loose waistband and twisting about a slightly loose-fleshed neck for the Jean Harlow angle or the Hepburn line of jaw. The first faint knob pushing out through my neck was something on which to hang high hope.

It was during this period that, after having goaded her with food, I would remark maliciously to a friend: “Look over there at that spectacle! It is enough to cause a scientist to faint! A stout woman eating a potato!”

Oh, I was the subject for inclusion in the rows of introspective ladies waiting in the outer rooms of smart Park Avenue psychoanalysts, I can tell you!

It enraged me to see my friends eat, or, for that matter, drink, although a taste for alcohol or spirituous liquors had never made them part of my problem. It enraged me to see them eat; I could not bear not to see them overstuff.

I now pitied obesity in others, and did all in my power to either induce or encourage it.

Smoldering rage began within me if my entrance into a group of friends failed to elicit pæans of surprised admiration. In the twelvemonth of fanatical defiance of my doctor’s admonitions for temperance, I became a narrow-looking, bony individual with a disproportionately large head, wide, uninhabited-looking shoulders, old-looking hands, and a cold kind of chic.

There was not a laugh in a carload of me.

I had been through a grim, hungry, cold, and lonely fight, and always to that insistent tom-tom of rhythm, relentless as a drum-beat: What-of-it-what-of-it-what-of-it.

I had won my spurs and they stuck out all over me.

People with two chins and plenty of laughter above and below them said, without rue, that I had character. Friends, to my face at least, said I had “looks,” although toward the end even some of them began to admit that they had liked me better “before.”

I had lost pounds and my sense of humor.

* * * * *

The miracle of it, cheating my doctor as I did, was that I had not lost my health. Perhaps the funniness of me came rushing over me just in time to avert that. Perhaps the spectacle on all sides of women almost deliberately throwing the incomparable asset of their health away upon the absurd altar of slimming, for no other reason than the desire to be slim, helped, Reader, to snatch me from the jaws of a dieting lady novelist’s more or less untimely death.

Not that I have come far enough along the line of mental readjustment to relinquish my diet. Slimming is a battle that is never won. But at least I am on to myself. I can laugh it off. And the spectacle of me to myself in the mirror is really nothing to leave home about, nor, so far as I can see, has there been the impulse on anyone’s part to indulge in that drastic measure in my behalf. I have not observed that those nearest and dearest, or that friends in general, like me any the more or less. If anything, you may deduce, less.

Now this is not to convey that all diets for æsthetic ends are pernicious and that all slimming is vicious.

On the contrary, excess baggage of flesh is not only unwieldy and unbeautiful, but it is more usually a health liability than an asset (see life-insurance-risk charts).

As a matter of fact, undereating may generally be counted as a cardinal virtue. A wise and disturbing man it was who first passed out the golden advice to always leave the dinner table a little unsatisfied. Particularly since nature has seen fit to pester the human race with various appetites which are so far and away beyond requirements, are food and drink restraints to be regarded on the benign side.

Moderation is one of the nicer practices.

It is upon the widespread perils of the abuses of moderation in reduction diets that I would dwell.

My average daily allotment of food allowed by a careful dietitian might not have always been to my liking, but it was ample to accomplish the slimming desire and at the same time maintain and nourish.

Here is an average day’s menu; a menu which I advise no one to emulate without first consulting a physician. It is simple to understand its component parts. Proteins and minerals are emphasized; carbohydrates, fats, minimized:

Breakfast

1/2 small grapefruit 2 eggs (boiled poached) 1 tablespoon milk for coffee.

Lunch

1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.) 5 per cent vegetables (the wrong-side-of-the-railroad-track ones).