"Money, leisure and easily-accessible cafés" are the menace of right nutrition, unless one is proof against temptation to kill time in this dangerous manner.
Steady work to earn a true appetite, small means to spend on food, the necessity of going to seek it, with the appreciation which comes from rarity, are the very best safeguards to right nutrition.
I am an epicure. Yet I have never seen a boarding-house, nor a restaurant, nor a camp where I could not find something to satisfy a true (earned) appetite. During more than a year in the Far East—Ceylon, Java, the Philippines, China, Burma, India, Kashmir—and at many steamer and railway lunch tables, I always found something good to satisfy a keen appetite. If you are all right inside, and will only conquer your habit-hungers, I believe you can live sumptuously, anywhere, on less than two shillings a day. I can, and often do; and do it, too, at one hundred and seventy pounds weight and "awfully busy" all the time. It may be difficult, and perhaps painful, at first, to get the best of bad habit-cravings, but it is worth while. A week should accomplish the reformation.
A number of men ask me: "Do you honestly believe that in your theories lies the secret of long life?" I do, and I may give one example of a "lived model" of longevity as the result of Fletcherism in all its ramifications of temperance of eating, careful mastication, radiant optimism, practical altruism, superabundant activity, etc. The Honourable Albert Gallatin Dow, of Randolph, New York, passed away in May, 1908, lacking less than three months of a hundred years of age. Up to the last moment of his century of life there was no encroachment of senility, and he fell, ripe fruit, into the lap of Mother Nature, without a blemish of decay. Shortly before he passed away, Mr. Dow invited me to see him, and told me that he had received a shock of warning early in life as I had done late in life, and had made the same discovery that had reformed me. He believed that he owed his health and vigour to following the simple requirements of Nature, as I was teaching; but he had his career to make at the time, and had not had the leisure and means to preach dietetic righteousness as I was doing. He wished me Godspeed on my mission. All inquiry in all directions, wherever longevity has been accomplished, reveals the same simplicity of habits of living, which are the natural points of Fletcherizing.
[CHAPTER IV]
RULES OF FLETCHERISM
Never Eat until Hungry—Mouth-Treatment of Solid and Liquid Food—When to Stop Eating—Instructions to the Medical Department of the U. S. Army
To make my ideas a little clearer, I will elaborate them a little more. Remember that the rules are exceedingly simple. That, to my mind, is the worst obstruction to the general adoption of my system: it is so simple that many find it difficult to comprehend. But take these rules and you have the idea.