Bernarr Macfadden

“ Climbing trees is an exercise that brings in action nearly every muscle of the human body, and, like the mal de monte, the shudder that seizes the traveler at the brink of Alpine precipices, the dizziness that takes away the breath returns it with interest and is a mechanical asthma-cure. ”

“ When the dinner-hour came there was an added relish that was a new experience, and I left the table with a stomach so supplied that there was no need of apprehension as to an attack of faintness during the afternoon. There is no natural hunger in the morning after a night of restful sleep, because there has been no such degree of cell destruction as to create a demand for food at the ordinary hour of the American breakfast. Sleep is not a hunger-causing process. ”

“ A bicyclist may work his pedals till his spine is twisted by cramps and his fingers threaten to relax their grip; his lungs may heave and gasp without betraying any other symptoms of distress, a pedestrian may trudge along till his knee-joints stagger and sleep tries to enforce its rights in the middle of the track, but no trace of asthma, while a shouldered weight of perhaps less than a hundred pounds suddenly "cuts the breath," as if the valves of the respiratory apparatus had closed with a snap. ”

“ The night's rest following the first appetite-sanctioned meal will not be disturbed by nightmares. Fasting, like exercise and refrigeration, makes repose sweet. The dull, unheeded, but ever-gnawing reproaches of the physical conscience have been silenced.
One great aid to the successful accomplishment of a fasting-cure is the rule to keep the mind as much as possible occupied, so as to prevent its brooding over the topic of alimentary deprivations; create some diversion by exciting pastimes or interest-absorbing work. ”

“ Now in wasting or famishing from the want of food, this process of elimination goes on in a much more rapid manner than ordinarily, and the vital force, which would otherwise be expended in digesting the food taken, acts now in expelling from the vital domain, whatever morbid matters it may contain. This, then, is a beautiful idea in regard to the fasting-cure—that whenever a meal of food is omitted, the body purifies itself thus much from its disease, and this becomes apparent in the subsequent amendment, both as regards bodily feeling and strength. ”

“ Now you are to abolish your breakfast, and not to presume to eat again without keen hunger; this hunger you may have if you wait for it, even while sitting in an arm chair, or lying in bed, and it will be for food as nourishing as the axman requires. What shall be eaten at each meal will be a law for self to determine. No food is good or healthful, and therefore typical, without a special demand for it. Keen hunger, the most relishing of foods, thoroughly masticated, a recreative state of mind during digestion, these are the easily acquired conditions behind sustained health. ”

“ Nay, the stimulant vice has found learned defenders; the followers of Paracelsus have worshiped the man-devouring fire as a sacred flame; for thousands of honest truth-seekers the disagreement of doctors makes it doubtful if alcohol is a friend or a foe, a health-giving tonic or a death-dealing poison. Is that uncertainty not a proof that in one most important respect Nature has failed to insure the welfare of her creatures? ”

“ THE ONE MEAL PLAN.
The progress of culture often resembles the undulating rise of the tide, rather than the steady advance of a river current; the rippling waves surge in capricious eddies and for a time may even seem to recede. Scientific tenets familiar to the philosophers of pagan antiquity were lost sight of during the night of the Middle Ages, and in the dawn of modern civilization are apt to be viewed with doubt or accepted as novel discoveries. ”

“ The civilization of Greece and Moorish Spain sprang from barbarism like water from the rock in the desert of Sinai, while physical indolence is the torpor that precedes the collapse of moribund nations, and heralds a moral night that knows no morning. ”

“ But what the self-torturers are really afraid of is a "draught;" in other words, air in motion. Perceptible currents of air, no matter how pure, no matter how passionately welcomed by the miasma-clogged lungs, they dread as messengers of death. Their fear of night-air is founded chiefly on the circumstance that the cooling of the atmosphere generates air-currents within a few hours after the sunset even of the sultriest day. So they close their bedroom windows or nail them down; they invent double window-sashes and "weather-strips," to exclude the slightest breath of life-air. ”

“ For more than a thousand years the one meal plan was the established rule among the civilized nations inhabiting the coast-lands of the Mediterranean. The evening repast—call it supper or dinner—was a kind of domestic festival, the reward of the day's toil, an enjoyment which rich and poor refrained from marring by premature gratifications of their appetite. ”

“ I could stand wood-chopping in a sleet-storm and ditching in an all-day drizzle, but if the old man routed me out of my siesta nap under the canopy of a shade tree to recommence plowing in the blazing sun, I felt things that can be only summarized in the impression that the change from wigwams to modern farms was a mistake, if the attainment of happiness has anything to do with the purposes of civilization. ”

“ A time may come when patients of all sorts will hurry to a gymnasium as they now hasten to a drug store.
The power of established prejudices, it is true, has almost no limits, but now and then yields to the dictates of fashion, and by good luck physical exercise is a cosmetic. People who do not realize that weakness and disease are crimes, may consent to recover because it is also the surest way to get pretty. ”

“ It proves that the victims of vice have so utterly forgotten the language of their instincts that they are no longer able to distinguish a natural appetite from a morbid appetency.
For it might be questioned if the instinctive horror of carrion is stronger than a normal man's aversion to the first taste of alcohol. To the palate of an unseduced youngster brandy is intensely repulsive, lager beer as nauseous as sewer swill; wine is simply spoiled musk, as unattractive as acidulated sugar-water. ”

“ Nature's protest against the incipience of a health-destroying habit. Nor does instinct yield to the first disregard of its appeals: Nausea, gripes, nervous headaches and gastric spasms warn the novice again and again. But we repeat the dose, and Nature, true to her highest law of preserving existence at any price, and realizing the hopelessness of the life-endangering struggle, finally chooses the alternative of palliating an evil for which she has no remedy, and adapts herself to the abnormal condition. ”

“ We might as well tell a health-seeker to refrain from sleep when he feels specially drowsy.
"Regulate the quality of your meals and let the quantity take care of itself," is a far more sensible rule. Wholesome food rarely tempts us to indulge to excess. We do not often hear of milk topers or baked-apple gluttons.
"Do not eat till you have leisure to digest," but after a fast-day, and with all night for digestion and assimilation, do not insult Nature by being afraid to eat your fill of wholesome food. ”

“ Night and day one can thus breathe mountain airs that have not been tainted by the touch of earthly things since they left the pine forests of the Mexican Sierras. Every inspiration is a draught from the fountain-head of the atmospheric stream. ”

“ You surely cannot expect to breathe day-air after sunset; your only choice is between the life-giving, health-restoring night-air of the outdoor world and the vitiated, sickening night-air of your sweltering dormitories. ”

“ Isaac Jennings, the author of "Medical Reform," expresses the same truth in an emphatic manner of his own. "Don't aggravate the troubles of a sick fellow-man," he says, "by forcing him to swallow food against the protest of his stomach.
"No one ever thinks of eating if the appetite is abolished by a trivial ailment and plainly for the reason that it would be an unpleasant experience attended by depressing results; but if the ailment is thought dangerous, why, then the physics and chemestry of digestion are utterly ignored, and food must be enforced. ”

“ In a last resort of self-defence the organism has evolved an avenging virus, but observes the precaution to cut off the appetite for food, in order to lessen the risk of the envenomed saliva entering the circulation and its blood-poison reaching the wrong address.
More or less every disorder of the organic function involves a risk of food turning into poison, and thus suggests a secondary significance of the fasting instinct.
In other words, food, eaten in the crisis of a serious disease, would not only hamper the work of cure, but might expose the system to an added peril. ”

“ They were tree-climbers and tree-food eaters, at first, those semi-human progenitors of ours, and in their encounters with the giant-cats of the tropics developed that dread of darkness and night-hags still haunting our mental condition, with all its instinctive love of forest-life. ”

“ There are health seekers so exhausted by wasting diseases or the abuse of drugs that they are unable to participate in the exercises of a public gymnasium. Old school physicians would have consigned them to the inactivity of a sweltering sick-room. Faith curists, with their antics, would to some degree mitigate the tedium of that ordeal; but the patient would still be doomed to that most grievous trial of patience: the necessity to suffer without a chance to promote the progress of improvement by individual efforts. ”

“ In the meantime the organism suffers under a compound system of starvation; the humors are surcharged with virulent matter, the whole digestive apparatus withdraws its aid from the needs of the vital economy, and the flame of life feeds on the store of tissue; the patient wastes far more rapidly than an unpoisoned person would on an air-and-water diet.
It is not too much to say that the timely application of the fasting cure would have saved such patients nine-tenths of their time and trouble. ”

“ No doubt a good many of them do get their money's worth in improved health, but the physiological value of Father Kneipp's prescription is simply that of a refrigeration cure, and every one of his forty-odd thousands of yearly visitors—some of them from distant Canada—would have derived exactly the same amount of benefit from a sponge-bath in the woodshed of his native ranch. ”

“ But at all events get rid of the night-air superstition, and enjoy the blessings of an airy bedroom—the luxury, I may add. A natural instinct may be suppressed, but needs but little encouragement to resume its normal functions, like a river returning to its ancient channel. Thus, the fresh-air instinct. In families cursed with the air delusion children are often fuddled with miasma till they prefer it to fresh air and dislike to sleep near an open window. ”

“ The appalling, drug-defying mortality of a large city sweltering under the glare of the dog-day sun, is abated by the first spell of cooler weather. The veering of a midsummer breeze from south to northwest reduces the death-rate of infants two-thirds. ”

“ Wine clouds the mind that should seek to obtain glimpses of a brighter world. Flesh food stimulates the animal passions, and certainly excites combativeness. A diet of bull beef imbued our North American Redskins with the ferocity of carnivorous beasts, while their banana-eating kinsmen of Southern Mexico are as placid as Hindus.
But a large number of dietetic restrictions might be recommended from a purely physical point of view. Alcohol is a liver-poison and aggravates the virulence of many diseases so unmistakably that its victims have hardly a right to complain of chronic disorders. ”

“ The idea of insisting on three daily meals of greasy, apopleptic, heat-aggravating viands is preposterous at a season that makes the struggle for existence a fight against a fever-heat atmosphere; nor is there any real need for "something warm" three times a day. We might as well aggravate the grievance of a blizzard with artificial refrigerants, or swallow opiates while imploring heaven for strength to watch and pray. ”

“ And practice is almost equally unavailing to overcome the disinclination of some gymnasium pupils to special kinds of exercise—heel over head evolutions on a trapeze or horizontal bar, for instance. I have known gymnasts who complained of sick headaches whenever the routine of the educational programme obliged them to conquer that aversion, and a good rule in such cases is to accept the verdict of nature as final, if the repugnance should continue to assert itself after the tyro has mastered the technical difficulties of the exercise. ”

“ Wet feet, especially feet wetted by a walk in the chill dew of a meadow, ranked with the chief sanitary bugbears of our forefathers, and that a bugbear of that sort should now be ridden as a fashionable hobby is certainly an encouraging sign of the times. It proves at all events that hygienic prejudices are not unconquerable, but the mass-pilgrimages to the meadows of Woerishofen in Southern Germany make it evident that—well, that not all of our fellow-Caucasians have a right to poke fun at Charley Lambs' house-burning Chinamen. ”

“ Pedestrianism is, indeed, the readiest of all forms of active exercise—doubly effective to burden-carriers, though a health-seeker need not take up his whole bed to walk. A stout overcoat in winter and a market-basket in summer are enough to outweigh the influence of habit which in the course of years might otherwise modify the efficiency of the prescription. ”

“ All there is of sense in the semi-mystic circulars of the clover-patch Æsculapius is founded on the fact that the early morning may be a specially propitious time for hydropathic transactions; the patients' lungs get the benefit of the cool morning air while his body is revelling in the pond of Siloam, or his feet in the parsonage pasture.
And since cool mornings are rare in the summer season of our lowlands, the "mountain cure" has a legitimate claim to the attention of health-seekers, especially where highlands have preserved their wealth of air-filtering forests. ”

“ Youngsters of twelve years join the hunting expeditions of their tribe and think themselves lucky if the kettle can be set a-boiling to the extent of furnishing a good evening meal. In the repose of the kraal they might yield to the temptation of a noon-time lunch; but when game is scarce, think nothing of rolling themselves up in a blanket at night and trying a nap to forget the disappointment of the day, trusting to the chance of better pot-luck for the morrow. ”

“ Like a festival at the end of the week, it sustains the energy of the laborer with the prospect of an adequate reward. The gratification of a well-earned appetite is something very different from the listless compliance with a conventional custom or the attendance at a regulation meal which a sanitary intuition denounces as an aggravation of an already grievous surfeit. A twenty-two hours' fast will make a meal of bread and baked apples more palatable than all the arts of the Freres Provenceaux could make three daily banquets to a dyspeptic. ”

“ And Nature declines to ratify the contract of kid-gloved brain-workers with the inventors of labor-saving machinery. Intellectual development, to be sure, is the quintescence of all that distinguishes man from his brute fellow-creatures; but beings of our species cannot thrive on metaphysics alone, any more than on Dr. Bernard's Elixir of Life. To avoid dyspepsia, insomnia, hemorrhoids, and sick headaches the Trismegistus of Science has now and then to descend from his study and exercise his motive muscles in the playgrounds of the hirsute anthropoids. ”

“ Weight lifting in that manner is the germ of the dumb-bell cure and in more than one sense the hardiest of all health exercises. A home-made sandbag or a pail full of water will do for a beginning. In rain-weather, when the programme for pedestrian exercise has to be cancelled, dumb-bells or their substitutes are still available, even in a tenement attic, and their persistent use can be guaranteed to redeem the victims of general debility. ”

“ The benefits of the movement cure, on the other hand, are not heralded by the kettledrum methods of Quackstetter & Co.; but they can dispense with such endorsements. Outdoor sports commend themselves to the instincts of a healthy child as unmistakably as wholesome food and pure air. Exercise creates an expenditure of energy that has to be replaced by stimulating the functions of every organ; effete tissues are eliminated; the heart beats stronger and faster, the lungs, liver and kidneys respond to the spur; the whole system works as a machine under an increase of steam-pressure. ”

“ Appetite will always come where death is not inevitable, no less in the ordinary conditions of low health than in cases of acute sickness, and fasting is the swiftest, the most effectual and the most unfailing of all devices ever conceived for inviting natural hunger. Keen hunger, hunger only, makes known the individual need. ”