It is surprising how many of the dreads and anxiety neuroses and psycho-neurotic solicitudes and neurasthenic disquietudes and other more or less morbid mental states disappear under the influence of a brisk walk for three or [{143}] four miles or more every day. I have tried this prescription on all sorts of people, including particularly myself, and I know for certain that when troubles are accumulating the thing to do is to get outdoors more, especially for walking; then the incubus begins to lift. Clergymen, university professors, members of religious orders, school teachers, as well as bankers, clerks and business people of various kinds, have been subjected to the influence of this prescription with decided benefit. Some of them assert that they never felt so well as since they have formed the habit of walking every day. It must, however, be every day, and it must not merely be a mile or so but it must be at least three miles. That means for a good many people about an hour spent in actual walking, but it is well worth the time and effort. Above all, it repays not only in health and in better feelings but in the increased amount of work that can be done on the day itself. A whole day passed indoors will often contain many wasted hours, while if a walk of a couple of miles is planned for the morning and one for a couple of miles more in the afternoon, very satisfactory study or other work can be done in the intervals. Almost needless to say, a brisk walk in the [{144}] cooler weather will create an appetite where it did not exist before. Women often need counsel in this matter more than men, and regular walking for them is indeed a counsel of health. Very few women in these modern times walk much, and to walk more than a mile seems to them a hardship. This is responsible for more of the supersensitiveness and nervous complaints of all kinds to which women are liable than anything else that I know of. It is also one important factor in the production of the constipation to which women are so much more liable than men. We see many advertisements with regard to the jolts to which the body is subjected every time the heel is put down and of the means that should be taken to prevent them, but it must not be forgotten that men and women were meant by nature to walk erect and that this recurring jolt has a very definite effect in stimulating peristalsis and favoring the movement of the contents of the intestines. Besides, if the walking is brisk, the breathing is deeper and there is some massage of the liver, as also of the other abdominal viscera, while other organs are affected favorably. Walking for women—regular, everyday walking—would be indeed a precious habit, but now [{145}] that women have occupations more and more outside of the house, this is one of the things they must make up their minds to do, if they are to maintain health, remembering that making up the mind is really making up the will.
Over and over again I have seen a great many of the troubles of the menopause or change of life in women disappear or become ever so much less bothersome as the result of the formation of regular habits of walking out of doors every day. Unfortunately, there is a definite tendency about this time for women to withdraw more and more from public appearances and to live to a considerable extent in retirement at home. Nothing could be much worse for them. They need, above all, to get out and to have a number of interests, and if these interests can only be so arranged as to demand rather prolonged walks, so much the better. This is more particularly true for the unmarried woman who is going through this critical time, and the question of walking regularly every day for three or four miles must be proposed to her. It will require a considerable effort of the will. More than two miles at the beginning will probably be too tiring, but the amount can be gradually increased [{146}] until at least four miles on the average is covered every day. Above all, for the feelings of discomfort in the cardiac region so often noticed at this time, regular walking is the best remedy in most cases, always of course presupposing that there is no organic heart condition, for in that case only a physician can give the proper direction for each case. By the exercise of the lungs that it requires, it will probably save most people from colds and coughs which they have had to endure every winter. Lastly be it said that practically all men and women, though more particularly the men who have lived well beyond the Psalmist's limit of threescore and ten, have been regular daily walkers, or else they have taken exercise in some form in the open air which is the equivalent of walking. One of the most distinguished of English physicians, Sir Hermann Weber, who died just after the end of the war in London, was in his ninety-fifth year. He had practised medicine regularly until the age of eighty and continued in excellent health and vigor until just before his death. During the last year of life, he contributed an interesting article to the British Medical Journal on the "Influence of Muscular Exercise on Longevity." He attributed his vigor at the age of [{147}] ninety-five as well as the prolongation of his life to his practice of spending every day two or three hours in the open air. He walked, as a rule, forty to fifty miles a week. Even in the most inclement weather he rarely did less than thirty miles a week. Many another octogenarian and nonagenarian has attributed his good health and long life to the habit of regular daily exercise in the open.
Instead of using up energy, the will so used brings out latent stores of energy that would not otherwise be employed and thus adds to the available amount of vitality for the individual. Doctor Thomas Addis Emmet, only just dead, over ninety, in his younger years as a busy medical practitioner never kept a horse. It would not be difficult to cite many other examples among men who lived to advanced old age and who considered that they owed their good health and long life to daily habits of outdoor exercise.
CHAPTER X
THE WILL TO EAT
| "If your will want not, time and place will be fruitfully added." |
| King Lear |
Eating is usually supposed to be entirely a matter of appetite which instinct directs to the best possible advantage of the individual. This is quite true for those who are living the outdoor life that is normal or at least most healthy for men, and when they are getting an abundance of exercise, and may I add also have not too great a variety of food materials in tempting form presented to them. Under the artificial not to say unnatural conditions which men have to a great extent created for themselves in city life, confined at indoor sedentary occupations, some of them—and they are much more numerous than is usually imagined—eat too little, while a great many, owing to stimulation of appetite in various ways, eat too much.
Eating therefore for health's sake has to be done through the will and as a rule by the [{149}] formation of deliberate habits. It is easy to form habits either of defect or excess in the matter of eating and indeed a great deal of the ill health to which mankind is liable is due to errors in either of these directions. Having disturbed nature's instincts for food in modifying the mode of life to suit modern conveniences, we have now to learn from experience and scientific observations what we should eat and then make up our minds to eat such quantity and variety as is necessary to maintain health and strength in the particular circumstances in which we are placed.
While the greatest emphasis has been placed on the dangers to health in overeating, the number of people who, for one reason or another, eat too little is, as has been said, quite surprising. A very large proportion of those under normal weight are so merely because they have wrong habits of eating. Indeed, it may be laid down as a practical rule of health that wherever there is no organic disease the condition of being underweight is a symptom of undereating. A great many thin people insist that the reason why they are underweight is that it is a family trait and that father and mother, or at least one of them, and some of their grandparents exhibited this [{150}] peculiarity; and thus it is not surprising that they should have it. A careful analysis of the family eating in such cases has shown me in a large number of instances, indeed almost without exception, that what my patients had inherited was not a constitutional tendency to thinness, but a family habit of undereating. This accrued to them not from nature but from nurture, and was acquired in their bringing up. Most of them were eating one quite abundant meal a day and perhaps a pretty good second meal, but practically all of them were skimping at least one meal very much. In some way or other, a family habit of eating very little at this meal had become established and was now an almost inviolable custom.
A great many thin individuals, that is persons who are somewhat more than ten per cent. under the average normal weight for their height, either do not eat breakfast at all or eat a very small one. It is not unusual for the physician analyzing their day's dietary to be told that the meal consists of a cup of coffee and a piece of bread. Sometimes there is a roll, but more often only part of a roll, though occasionally in recent years there may be some fruit and some cereal; the fruit will usually be a half of one of the citrus fruits [{151}] which contains practically no nutrition and is only a pleasant appetizer, while more often than not the cereal will be one of the dry, ready-to-eat varieties which, apart from the milk or cream that may be served with them, contain in the usual small helpings very little nutriment. Such breakfasts are particularly the rule among women who are under weight. Sometimes lunch is comparatively light so that there are two daily apologies for meals. To make up for these, the third meal may be very hearty. City folk often eat at dinner more than is good for them. This may produce a sense of uncomfortable distention and overfulness followed by sleepiness which may be set down as due to indigestion, though it is just a question of overeating for the nonce.