The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure

by Edward Hooker Dewey

The besetting sin against all such ailing mortals, the lines of whose lives are frequently of the hardest, is that the friends all oppose cutting down the daily food from the dreadfully mistaken impression that weakness and debility from disease are the measure of the need to eat, not the measure of the inability to digest.

Scores of times I have been written to by this class of patients as to their troubles from friends in this way. Scores of times I have been consulted as to the safety of this method in daily living for the old, as if it were a tax upon the constitutional powers to stop sinning against them! As well ask whether one may get too old as to make it dangerous to cut down daily whiskey or daily labor that is clearly beyond the reasonable use of the powers.

Those who are the victims of chronic diseases and have become greatly enfeebled by overwork of body, mind, or stomach, will have to work out their salvation with most discouragingly slow progress; but not to work, not to try, is to invite the processes of disease culture.

Now, as to the time when that first meal of the day shall be taken. Since the best meal of the day in all America with the great majority of the people is at noon, this time may well be selected as the most fitting. Since the man of muscle loses no time in taking his breakfast, he should be able with good sense to rest an hour before this noon meal.

Those whose general energies give out earlier in the morning and do not care to have general meals prepared in advance of the usual hour, can put in the time in the best possible way by resting into power of relish and digestion, the evil of eating when tired being that the exhausted feeling is only increased.

Now think what forenoons may be had with no time lost over breakfasts, none in thinking about the health or in doing anything for it, and not only to have the best and strongest use of the reason, judgment, and muscles, but also to have the best possible conditions for the cure of ailings! Think, too, what it would be to the mothers of the land not to have any need to go into their kitchens until the time to prepare the noon meal arrived!

Can children while growing rapidly do without breakfasts? They certainly can without a hint of discomfort, and be all the better for it in every way.

A few months ago I spent some hours in Illinois, where the no-breakfast plan had been practised for two years. When the plan was begun there was a pale, delicate mother of four children, who was enduring a life that had no cheer. During the first year the battle was a severe one, not a little aggravated by the assurance of all sympathetic friends that resulting evil was making its mark on all the lines of expression; but health with its life and color finally came to silence the uttered disapproval.

There was a boy in the home who was subject to the severest headaches every week, and who was much wasted in his body when he began: he had become robust and wholly relieved of all his ailings. There was a plump, rosy-cheeked girl of fourteen who for a year had taken only one daily meal, and yet a better nourished body I never saw.

Now in this family the only warm, general meal, and this a plain one, was at noon. The evening meal was entirely of bread and butter taken without even a sitting at the table. What happy, healthy children they were! And the mother was in a great deal better health to do all the work of the kitchen: work, she strongly asserted, which was not nearly half of what it formerly was. For her there was a cure, a great increase of strength, and a great reduction of the most taxing of all the duties of the home-life.