"At breakfast barly-bread is a necessity, and take chocolate rather than coffee. I, however, permit strong cafe au lait. One cannot breakfast too soon. When we breakfast late, dinner time comes before your digestion is complete. You eat though, and eating without appetite is often a great cause of obesity, when we do so too often."
SEQUEL OF THE REGIMEN.
So far I have, like a tender father, marked out a regimen which will prevent obesity. Let us add a few remarks about its cure.
Drink every summer thirty bottles of Seltzer water, a large glass in the morning, two before breakfast and another at bed-time. Drink light white acid wines like those of Anjon. Avoid beer as you would the plague. Eat radishes, artichokes, asparagus, etc. Eat lamb and chicken in preference to other animal food; eat only the crust of bread, and employ a doctor who follows my principles, and as soon as you begin you will find yourself fresher, prettier, and better in every respect.
Having thus placed you ashore, I must point out the shoals, lest in excess or zeal, you overleap the mark.
The shoal I wish to point out is the habitual use made by some stupid people of acids, the bad effects of which experience has demonstrated.
DANGERS OF ACIDS.
There is a current opinion among women, which every year causes the death of many young women, that acids, especially vinegar, are preventives of obesity. Beyond all doubts, acids have the effect of destroying obesity, but they also destroy health and freshness. Lemonade is of all acids the most harmless, but few stomachs can resist it long.
The truth I wish to announce cannot be too public, and almost all of my readers can bring forward some fact to sustain it.
I knew in 1776, at Dijon, a young lady of great beauty, to whom I was attached by bonds of friendship, great almost as those of love. One day when she had for some time gradually grown pale and thin (previously she had a delicious embonpoint) she told me in confidence that as her young friends had ridiculed her for being too fat, she had, to counteract the tendency, been in the habit every day of drinking a large glass of vinaigre.