This personal element will be found to dominate the activities, conversation and interests of the Alimentive. For him to like a thing or buy a thing it must come pretty near being something he can eat, wear, live in or otherwise personally enjoy. He confines himself to the concrete and tangible. But most of all he confines himself to things out of which he gets something for himself.
Reading
¶ The fat man is no reader but when he does read it is nearly always something funny, simple or sentimental. In newspapers he reads the "funnies." Magazine stories, if short and full of sentiment, attract him. He seldom reads an editorial and is not a book worm. The newspaper furnishes practically all of the fat man's reading. He seldom owns a library unless he is very rich, and then it is usually for "show."
Avoids Book Stores
¶ In making the investigations for this course, we interviewed many clerks in the bookstores of leading cities throughout the United States. Without exception they stated that few extremely fat people patronized them. "I have been in this store seventeen years and I have never sold a book to a two hundred and fifty pounder," one dealer told us. All this is due to the fact with which we started this chapter—that the fat man is built around his stomach—and stomachs do not read!
Naturally Realistic
¶ The fat man has the child's natural innocence and ignorance of subtle and elusive things. He has the same interest in things and people as does the child; the child's indifference to books, lectures, schools and everything abstract.
Physical Assets
¶ "I believe I could digest nails!" exclaimed a fat friend of ours recently. This perfect nutritive system constitutes the greatest physical superiority of the Alimentive. So highly developed is his whole stomach department that everything "agrees" with him. And everything tends to make him fat.
As Irvin Cobb recently said: "It isn't true that one can't have his cake and eat it, too, for the fat man eats his and keeps it—all."