It is, then, no serious deprivation to ask a person to go without what we call breakfast—the getting-up or habit-craving—and give the brain a chance to clean up the remnants of the last day's supply of food fuel, and express new desires in an earned appetite. There is available, on waking from sleep, a fresh charged brain ready to serve its proprietor with great efficiency. Incidentally it has to do some "chores," rake out the clinkers, dispose of the ashes, relieve the grate bars, attend to any little repairs, brush out the chimney and generally get ready for the work of another day.
The hunger of the morning is necessarily but a habit-hunger. The best evidence of this is that, when busily employed, we forget it without trouble; and also is that European peoples, where the disease dyspepsia is not known in the list of physical derangements, perform the chief physical or mental effort of the day before their breakfast, the morning coffee scarcely meaning anything in the way of what we call a meal.
Dr. Dewey's firm assertion is that when the stomach has had a chance to "clean up" and is ready for more fuel, it will make it known in healthy manner by a healthy appetite, and that it is rarely normal before noon; and not really before one has done what might be called a "day's work."
I can assert boldly, as the result of experience, that the time to get work out of the brain is between the morning awakening and the first meal, and it is the same relative to endurance draughts on the physical strength.
Then, in the heat or the glare of the day, having accomplished something useful and disposed of pressing duties, so as not to feel the irritation of hurry, the first meal of the day can be taken with restful ease and it will be found that the supply demanded by the appetite will not be so great as that demanded by the unhealthful, habit-inflamed early morning call.
It may not seem so, but this digression from psychics to physics is very germane to my subject and to my own experience.
Without knowing that Dr. Dewey and the other eminent physicians who endorse his theories were living in the world, I, in the summer of 1894, blundered into a personal experience of diet that produced wonderful results which I now recall with all the vividness of the high lights of extreme pleasure met in foreign travel.
I was in a Southern city for two months during an unusually hot summer, watching some developments that could not be hurried, and the fruition of which was important to my interests. I had nothing to do in connection with this business but to "watch and wait."
I had some writing to do, however, in the mean time, which could not be well or comfortably done in the heat of the day, hence I arose at daylight and began to write. At that time of the morning nothing to eat was to be had, which compelled me to start work without it. My subject was an absorbing one, so that, once under way, I would not be diverted until I had "written myself out;" or in other words, had exhausted the consideration of the morning messages which I now designate "Spiritual Cerebration."
It happened, under these circumstances, that my habit-hunger was not given a hearing and it was nearly noon before I felt the fatigue or even the heat of the burning day, for I worked in my pajamas, and had no time to look at the thermometer, to get an exaggerated suggestion of heat by which to start my blood chasing itself through my veins.