Part 6

Dinner

Same as lunch.

Six to eight glasses of water per day.

Do not take additional foods unless otherwise specified.

“Not so bad,” you observe, “more than I usually consume during an average day.”

Perhaps more food, but not more nourishment. But the point is that on this prescribed diet, with certain highly conservative expeditions after appreciable reduction had taken place, over into carbohydrates and fats, results would almost undoubtedly have been achieved. In time! But as the poundage begins shyly to retreat, the frantic psychology, characteristic of the thousands of the slimming women, present company included, sets in.

Ours not to reason why. Ours but to diet and sometimes die.

Despite physician’s admonitions to the contrary, fascinated by the gradual retreat of a hitherto more or less immutable, excess poundage; egged on by the appraising women; goaded by the diminishing story of the bathroom scales--the fascination for speed began to cause this eye to glitter.

More pounds per week. Faster. Quicker. Slimmer!

* * * * *

The daily menu, about which I not infrequently lied to my doctor, began to read something like this:

Breakfast

Black unsweetened coffee 1/2 small orange.

Eleven A. M.

Black unsweetened coffee.

Lunch

1 head lettuce or 1/2 head cabbage-slaw, mineral-oil dressing.

Three P. M.

Black unsweetened coffee.

Dinner

1 portion lean meat, fish, or fowl (3 oz.) 5 per cent vegetables.

Lean pallid days had arrived along about now; days when I went about with the strained face of a plucked fowl, brittle-looking skin sagging for want of some place to go.

No conversation survived my entrance into a room. The men might struggle a bit to carry forward with a bit of technocracy, Muscle Shoals or World Series, but the following two or three minutes carried a guarantee that one subject alone would predominate.

How did you do it? Tell me what you eat. Are you taking medicine? Awfully dangerous, you know. Now tell me what you had for breakfast. Do you mix your starches and proteins? Awfully bad for you! Now isn’t that curious, somebody told me you were living on some sort of a reduction tea made by an East Indian and had not touched solid food for two months. But my dear, you mustn’t let yourself get haggard. Not that you are!

Oh no, not that I was.

Sometimes dragging myself to bed, triumphant, faint, cold, tired, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, with not quite the energy to do either, I dared not glance at the white rattletrap my mirror would have revealed to me.

Instead I crept to rest, gladly, exhaustedly, and, to keep from laughing or crying or both, fell to contemplating the slight ridge my body made beneath the coverings, or trying to crowd back across my darkness not, “fancies freed, transient and exploring,” but fancies of a froth of café parfait foaming down the flank of a long slim goblet or of a slice of four-layer cream cake in which to sink teeth was denied, in order to remove taste and memory of liver fried in mineral oil and lettuce with its cutting dash of lemon juice.

I must have been as easy to live with, during that period before I lost both appetite and desire for the foods that used to haunt me, as a lady in a padded cell.