The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure

by Edward Hooker Dewey

Mr. Horace Fletcher, the author and traveller, took to the one-daily-meal plan to cut down his abnormal weight, having the patience to masticate all sense of taste from each mouthful before swallowing. I saw him after he had been on this plan for some months: there had been a weight loss of some forty pounds; a nasal catarrh of many years had been cured, and he strongly asserted that in every way he felt himself twenty-five years younger.

He had been living a week on baked potatoes for experimental reasons when I met him, and without experiencing any morbid sensations: a more perfect specimen of physical health I never gazed upon. To all dyspeptics who are willing to work for their health through pains and patience, his little work, Glutton or Epicure, is strongly recommended.

A dyspeptic from Vermont came to me who for ten years had eaten three hearty meals daily, none of which had ever satisfied his hunger. He was in a very low mental state when he came, and feeble in body: for fully ten years both himself and physician had held the stomach accountable for all its complainings, and with no thought of avoidable cause.

I put him on one meal a day, as there was still some power of digestion, and with the following list for the daily bill of fare: baked potatoes well buttered, bread and butter, beans dressed with butter, fish or lamb chops, and rice or oatmeal only if strongly desired; all sugar foods debarred, and no drinks except water as thirst called for it between the meals. The constipated bowels were permitted their own times for action. The mouthfuls were small and far apart—like dashes between words—not less than forty-five minutes were spent in masticating. Very soon there was a general rousement of new life in every way. His first surprise was in an unwonted sense of relish and a complete sating of hunger long before he had eaten the old-time amounts.

There was a fresh revelation to me in this, as I had not before been so impressed that by slow eating the hunger-spell is also dissipated in part by time, and hence there is much less danger of eating to excess. Hunger comes in part from habit, and it is appeased, with or without eating, with equal completeness. The hunger-habit can be trained to come at almost any fixed time.

Not long since I read of a farmer who kept his horses in apparently perfect condition on one feeding, and only at night: they had become so trained that they had no desire for food until their labors were over. At night they both ate and rested, and made good the waste of the day; they were fully nourished and rested by morning, and could labor all the forenoon without loss of energy diverted to digestion: at noon they would rest—become strong for the labors of the day.

There can be no doubt, I think, that the strongest sense of hunger at the regular eating-time could be dissipated by a fast not longer in duration than that of an ordinary meal-time.

My patient's bowels gave no hint of their locality until the eighteenth day, when they acted with little effort; on the twenty-fourth day again in a perfect way, and thereafter daily. The mind became ecstatic through perfect relief from mental and physical depression; there were no wants for other than those simple foods, and at the end of a month he left me with new views as to Nature's power of selection to meet her needs and of the vast utility of using both time and food to dissipate hunger.

The waste with most people is so small that the cost of the food, the cost of time in preparation, could be reduced to a startling fraction if the need could be actually known, and the pleasures of the palate increased by an inverse ratio. There is no redemption for women on the earth who have the care of kitchens except through simpler, smaller meals—meals so very far apart that there shall be a maximum of the hunger-sense of relish and the resulting maximum of power to convert them into tissues instinct with life.

It may be that the waste is so very trifling, especially with brain-workers, that one may be a vegetarian, fruitarian, or even an eater of pork, without positive violence to practical physiology. There is this further very practical consideration, that when Nature is so fairly dealt with that she can speak in natural tones she will call only for those foods easily available along geographical lines.