Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise

Front matter

MACFADDEN'S

Fasting, Hydropathy AND Exercise

NATURE'S WONDERFUL REMEDIES FOR THE CURE OF ALL CHRONIC AND ACUTE DISEASES.

Preface

PREFACE.

The great truths of Nature are here ready for you, reader.

Are you ready for them?

Are you free from prejudice, and willing to read and reason without considering the opinions of so-called authorities? To a free and intelligent human being there is no authority for him higher than his own reasoning power.

If you are free from the slavery of prejudice this book will give you food for thought. It will teach you that weakness is a crime—that it is the result of plain, easily avoided causes—that if your body is weak, or diseased, there is not the slightest excuse for remaining so—that health and strength of a high degree is the natural heritage of man and woman, and if this superb condition is not possessed, this book will clearly and concisely furnish the knowledge necessary to acquire it.

Refuse to be an invalid, reader!

Refuse to be a physical nonenity!

Are you depending upon drugs?—that gorgon horror that is torturing more human lives into misery, weakness and death than all the combined cruelties and barbarism of past ages.

Drugs! Drugs! ! Great heavens, will this crime of the century never end?

Drugs never did and never will cure disease. The body cures itself if it can secure an opportunity, but with the poisonous drugs always at hand, and with their authorities standing at your side, I know it is difficult to refuse. But, friends, strengthen your minds and strike for freedom. You must be free from the drug delusion mentally before you can ever be free physically.

Years ago when my own soul was rent by the torturous belief that the health of a fully developed man was never to be mine, I tried drugs. Nauseating and disgusting pills, powders and liquids were swallowed. The pain of my disappointment, as remedy after remedy was tried without benefit, can never be described. If I live to be a thousand years of age, there could be no experience in my life that would be stamped upon my brain quite so vividily as this.

And when freedom came at last—when the truths of Nature were revealed to me one by one, a great joy overcame me.

For I was free!

Free, friends! Free from pain, free from misery; free from weakness.

Think of it! ! A freedom as glorious as the most happy moment of life!

And with this freedom came an intense desire for others to share my freedom; and drugs, the humbug, the delusion that saps your strength while they pretend to cure, will find in me a life-long enemy. As long as I have the power to think, as long as I have the power to utter a sound, my voice, my pen, my utmost energies will be expended in fighting and exposing the horrible crimes to modern humanity committed by drugs.

Read this book! !

Act upon its suggestions. Secure health with all its joy.

Be a man, complete, superb.

Or a woman, beautiful and strong.

And help me in this glorious work of stamping out the curse of weakness and disease, and the drugs that often cause this unnatural condition.

CHAPTER I

I.— FASTING.

CHAPTER I.

PHYSIOLOGICAL DATA.

"What shall we do to be saved?" is a question which, from a physical point of view, can be answered in less than ten words: "Learn to interpret the language of your sanitary instincts." To him who has mastered that task, the science of health is not a sealed book.

"And let me assure you, in measured words alive with conviction, that long series of cases running through seventeen years of attendance has been a line of evidence, line upon line, of the self-sufficiency of Nature to right herself in attacks of disease, no matter what the disease, or how severe its character."—E. H. Dewey, M.D.

Every living organism is a self-regulating apparatus. Our nervous system performs its functions by a combination of alarm signals that apprise us of an infinite variety of external dangers and internal needs, in a language that has a distinct expression for every want of our alimentary and respiratory organs, for every distress of our tissues, sinews and muscles, for every needed reaction against the influence of abnormal circumstances. Our skin protests against injurious degrees of heat or cold; our lungs against atmospheric impurities; our eyes against the intrusion of the smallest insect. The human body is a house that cleanses its own chambers and heats its own stoves, opens and shuts its windows at proper intervals, expels mischievous intruders and promptly informs its tenant of every external peril and internal disorder.

If it were not for the perverting influence of baneful sanitary superstitions we should run no risk of mistaking poison for food, nor of substituting unnatural for natural stimulants. We should never have conceived the idea that the sick must be forced to swallow virulent drugs; all our "ailments and pains, in form, variety and degree beyond description," could be cured by the three remedies of Nature: Exercise, fasting and refrigeration.

The application of those remedies is not followed by distressing after effects. It does not develop a morbid hankering for a repetition of the prescription in constantly increasing doses.

Compare the effects of outdoor exercise with those of Dr. Quack's Digestion Bitters, as characteristic instances of normal and abnormal tonios. Both prescriptions tend to stimulate the appetite. But how? and at what expense? To the palate of a healthy child alcohol is almost as repulsive as corrosive sublimate: Nature's protest against the incipience of a health-destroying habit. Nor does instinct yield to the first disregard of its appeals: Nausea, gripes, nervous headaches and gastric spasms warn the novice again and again. But we repeat the dose, and Nature, true to her highest law of preserving existence at any price, and realizing the hopelessness of the life-endangering struggle, finally chooses the alternative of palliating an evil for which she has no remedy, and adapts herself to the abnormal condition. "The body of the dram-drinker," says a medical reformer, "becomes a poison-engine, an alcohol-machine, performing its vital functions only under the spur of a specific stimulus. And only then the unnatural habit begets that craving which the toper comes to mistake for the prompting of a healthy appetite—a craving which every gratification makes more exorbitant. For by and by the jaded system fails to respond to the spur; the poison-slave has to resort to stronger stimulants.

And, moreover, every excitation of the flagging vital energies is followed by a debilitating reaction. The bowels fail to act; disinclination to physical and mental efforts makes work a penalty. The "pleasant and exhilarating tonic" has evolved the soul-darkening mists of Katzenjammer. As a net result of his experiment Dr. Quack's customer finds himself worse than before by just as much as the unnatural stimulant has still further exhausted his small reserve fund of vital vigor.

The benefits of the movement cure, on the other hand, are not heralded by the kettledrum methods of Quackstetter & Co.; but they can dispense with such endorsements. Outdoor sports commend themselves to the instincts of a healthy child as unmistakably as wholesome food and pure air. Exercise creates an expenditure of energy that has to be replaced by stimulating the functions of every organ; effete tissues are eliminated; the heart beats stronger and faster, the lungs, liver and kidneys respond to the spur; the whole system works as a machine under an increase of steam-pressure. The same healthy, prompt and harmless tonic reacts upon the bowels; the problem of digestive stimulation has been solved without the risk of distressing after-effects. No baneful habit has fastened upon the patient; no drastic suppression of symptoms has made the remedy worse than the evil. The disorder has been cured by the removal of its cause. And all these advantages can be claimed for the Fasting Cure.

"Take away food from a sick man's stomach and you have begun, not to starve the sick man, but the disease."—E. H. Dewey, M.D.

"The principle on which the fasting-cure acts is one on which all physiologists agree, and one which is readily explained and understood. We know that in animal life the law of nature is for the effete, worn out, and least vitalized matter to be first cast off. We see this upon the cuticle, nails, hair, and in the snake the casting off of his old skin. Now in wasting or famishing from the want of food, this process of elimination goes on in a much more rapid manner than ordinarily, and the vital force, which would otherwise be expended in digesting the food taken, acts now in expelling from the vital domain, whatever morbid matters it may contain. This, then, is a beautiful idea in regard to the fasting-cure—that whenever a meal of food is omitted, the body purifies itself thus much from its disease, and this becomes apparent in the subsequent amendment, both as regards bodily feeling and strength. It is proved, also, in the fact that during the prevalence of epidemics, those who have been obliged to live almost in a state of starvation, have gone free from an attack, while the well-fed have been cut off in numbers by the merciless disease."—Joel Shaw, M.D.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

THE ONE MEAL PLAN.

The progress of culture often resembles the undulating rise of the tide, rather than the steady advance of a river current; the rippling waves surge in capricious eddies and for a time may even seem to recede. Scientific tenets familiar to the philosophers of pagan antiquity were lost sight of during the night of the Middle Ages, and in the dawn of modern civilization are apt to be viewed with doubt or accepted as novel discoveries.

The true theory of the solar system, for instance, was known to the disciples of Pythagoras; but a thousand years later was forgotten almost as completely as the existence of the lost Atlantis. Centuries before the birth of Ludwig Jahn the Greeks had recognized the truth that in thickly settled countries the lack of wood-sports ought to be compensated by gymnastic training and competitive athletics. There were fresh-air doctors two thousand years before Dio Lewis, and during the zenith period of Grecian and Roman monogamy was not half as firmly established as the rule that a health-loving man should content himself with one meal a day, and never eat till he had leisure to digest, i. e., not till the day's work was wholly done.

For more than a thousand years the one meal plan was the established rule among the civilized nations inhabiting the coast-lands of the Mediterranean. The evening repast—call it supper or dinner—was a kind of domestic festival, the reward of the day's toil, an enjoyment which rich and poor refrained from marring by premature gratifications of their appetite. Cares were laid aside before the family and their guests assembled in the supper-hall. People of wealth provided reclining couches, and their desserts included a good many things besides Attic figs. They treated their guests to perfumes, to music and dances. Athenæus describes a symposium enlivened by musical contests and juggler shows. All but the poorest had at least a minstrel who bartered comic ditties for a basketful of cold lunch. Amusements of that sort were supposed to aid digestion and keep the revelers awake during the two hours' interval between the termination of the repast and the setting of the sun, though appetite alone gen guaranteed the assimilation of a good-sized meal. Dinner, in the form of a noon-time lunch was unknown, and for breakfast a biscuit or a piece of crust, to counteract the acidity of the stomach, were considered sufficient.

There were exceptions, but they were tolerated merely as we should tolerate a sportsman unable to wait for legal holidays, and enjoying leisure periods in the middle of the week, or vacations before the beginning of summer. "To desecrate one's appetite," the Romans called the habit of eating between meals, and Suetonius mentions among the demerits of the Emperor Vitellius a "penchant for gorging himself in the early morning hours,"—the time of the day that ought to have remained consecrated to labor or study. As a rule, probably nine out of ten well-educated Greeks and six out of ten Romans did not think twenty-two hours too long an interval between meals which, with chat and other pauses, lasted more than an hour and a half.

"They were probably athletes," remarked a critic of a lecture on Roman customs; "but what about women and persons of delicate constitutions? Would they not risk to faint with hunger in trying total abstinence, in that extreme sense of the word, all the day long?"

In reply to such questions the lecturer ought to have added a few words on the subject of Diet and the Influence of Habit. A little child, according to Dr. Page's experiments, can be taught to guzzle day and night, or to content himself with being stilled about once in three hours. Little habitués of a hundred daily guzzles will howl horribly at the first attempt to restrict them to seventy-five, but after a month or two will get so used to ten nursings that it requires coaxing to make them accept a dozen.

And in the course of a few years the tapering-off process can be easily brought to an average of one meal a day. Baker Pasha (Sir Samuel Baker) ascertained that fact in studying the habits of the Abyssinian hunters. Youngsters of twelve years join the hunting expeditions of their tribe and think themselves lucky if the kettle can be set a-boiling to the extent of furnishing a good evening meal. In the repose of the kraal they might yield to the temptation of a noon-time lunch; but when game is scarce, think nothing of rolling themselves up in a blanket at night and trying a nap to forget the disappointment of the day, trusting to the chance of better pot-luck for the morrow. "Qui dort dine," say the French—"he who sleeps feasts." A good night's rest in the bracing night air of the Abyssinian table-lands will sustain strength even on the basis of alternate day meals. A daily feast is so abundantly sufficient that active youngsters would fear to handicap themselves by re-loading their stomachs before the end of the next day. With the prospect of an up-and-down hill race against time and the competition of athletic companions, the offer even of a moderate morning lunch would probably jar upon their sanitary conscience.

The subjects of the two Kaisers, on the other hand, would consider it a grievance to be limited to three daily meals. All over Germany and northern Austria a pause of four hours is thought a distressingly long time between meals, though some brands of wurst are apt to resist the assimilative apparatus of unfeathered bipeds at least half a day.

Master Karl Schulze has no springboks to hunt; the stifling atmosphere of his grammar-school room does not promote digestion; yet Karl insists on a Frühstück (breakfast) six A. M.; zweites frühstück ("second breakfast") at nine; mittagsmahl at noon; vesperbrot (vesper lunch) at half past three; and abendessen at 6 P. M. Just before retiring from the scene of their gastronomic exploits Vienna burghers often add a night-cap of beer, pretzels and more wurst, "for the stomach's sake." "In spite of the stomach" might seem more correct, but it isn't. One month's practice would be enough to supplement the horrid load of ingesta with a midnight meal. It might shorten the glutton's life one half; but as sure as the noon and night comes around his stomach, or the ulcerated receptacle retaining that name, would interrupt the nightmare circus to clamor for its perquisites; and disappointment would result in fits of insomnia and yearnings for the picnic grounds of a better hereafter.

It is the same with fluid surfeits. Hoff's Malt Extract was advertised as a cure-all till even ascetics bought a bottle at certain times of the year—say a quart per quarter, and on those terms contrived to compromise with the stimulant habit. After the end of the second month they might now and then experience a vague yearning for the office of the Hoff Agency, but on the whole get along contentedly without half way drinks. In Munich almost identical beverages have votaries that get nervous if business emergencies oblige them to postpone their trip to the Bier-Keller for a few minutes. They call thrice a day, and after supper hurry to a club that furnishes them a pretext for guzzling till midnight. "Say, I feel a vacuum," one of these far-gones used to remark, when the Sunday excursion steamer did not reach its pier strictly on time. Nay, a Wisconsin physician vouches for the fact that some of the Milwaukee brewers allow their employees twenty-five quarts of lager free, every working day in the year, and that many of the veterans begin to fret if they cannot visit the free dispensary at least once in thirty minutes. Habit, in fact, becomes a "second nature," and the limits of its influence, for better or worse, have never been ascertained. It is quite possible that gluttons might learn to hanker for a meal an hour, and that St. Jerome in his Syrian hermitage really got along comfortably with three meals a week; but it must be admitted that the old Roman plan combines advantages not easy to rival.

Like a festival at the end of the week, it sustains the energy of the laborer with the prospect of an adequate reward. The gratification of a well-earned appetite is something very different from the listless compliance with a conventional custom or the attendance at a regulation meal which a sanitary intuition denounces as an aggravation of an already grievous surfeit. A twenty-two hours' fast will make a meal of bread and baked apples more palatable than all the arts of the Freres Provenceaux could make three daily banquets to a dyspeptic.

One great advantage of frequent meals is founded on the fact that repletion does not at once announce itself to the instinct of a gormand, and that the interval preceding a decided consciousness of satiety may have been abused for a congestion of the alimentary system. Upon the one-meal plan that risk is obviated, or at least greatly lessened. After a fast of twenty-two hours it is almost impossible to eat with relish more than the system can utilize in the course of a night and a day.

The Roman custom also obviated an affliction that has turned thousands of plow-boys into tramps and driven more than one dyspeptic to suicide, viz.: the misery of hard work directly after a full meal. "I didn't mind being waked before daybreak to feed the cows," says a rural correspondent of the Chautauquan. "I could stand wood-chopping in a sleet-storm and ditching in an all-day drizzle, but if the old man routed me out of my siesta nap under the canopy of a shade tree to recommence plowing in the blazing sun, I felt things that can be only summarized in the impression that the change from wigwams to modern farms was a mistake, if the attainment of happiness has anything to do with the purposes of civilization."

And those protests of instinct are, indeed, well founded. Not only that the progress of digestion is thus interrupted, not only that the body derives no strength from the inert mass of ingesta, but that mass, by undergoing a putrid instead of peptic decomposition, vitiates the humors of the system it was intended to nourish, irritates the sensitive membranes of the stomach, and gradually impairs the vigor of the whole digestive apparatus.

"Plenns venter non studet libenter," was a Latin proverb—"a filled stomach abhors study," and immediately after dinner mental efforts are certainly quite as ill-timed as hard bodily labor. No other hygienic mistake, not even the stimulant fallacy, has done so much to make ours a generation of dyspeptics. Brain-work interferes with digestion as noise and motion interfere with sleep. Hence, the sallow complexion, the hollow eyes, and the weary gait of thousands of city clerks, scholars, lawyers, newspaper hacks, and even physicians. Hence, the gastric torments of poor, overworked teachers, who (unlike happier servants of the public) cannot shirk their work, and have to snatch their dinner during a brief interval of the hardest kind of mental drudgery.

The evening-dinner plan would obviate all that misery. The noon-recess could be devoted to a bath, a half hour's chat in the shade, and the toiler would return to his work refreshed. That contrast, once known from practical experience, would preclude the temptation of a return to the unsanitary plan. Boys in their early teens can be taught to consider eating between evening meals a transgression against the health-laws of Nature. Dr. J. H. Lincoln of Hamilton County, Tennessee, had trained his youngsters in rational dietetics till he could trust them not to break their noonday fast for the sake of any tidbits. "For shame!" he used to say, "the idea of wanting to eat before your day's work is done! It's just as if a mechanic should claim his wages before he had earned them."

Evening diners also escape the risk of sunstrokes. "Surfeit strokes" would be a far more appropriate name for an affection almost unknown in Spanish America, where rich and poor suspend labor during the heat of the afternoon. The self-regulating tendency of our organism can hold its own against a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade; it might resist the added grievance of superfluous clothing, but succumbs to a combination of sun-heat, sweltering dry-goods, and superheated, greasy made-dishes. A sunstroke fit is, in fact, caused by what physicians call a "zymotic process of blood-changes"—in plainer words, the humors of the living body begin to ferment. The system has ways of its own to counteract that risk, but may try in vain to apply them when its energies are diverted by the task of compromising a reckless surfeit. Who has not noticed the bodily and mental vigor that facilitates all sorts of work in the early morning hours? It is only partly due to a difference of temperature, for indoor-workers, too, experience its benefits, and it would be a mistake to suppose that the invigorating effects of a good night's rest are limited to the early forenoon. At least half the morning energy is due to the fact that ex from the task of digestion makes the reserve stores of vital vigor available for other work. The first meal forfeits that advantage, and by the simple plan of postponing breakfast the buoyancy of the early morning hours can be enjoyed all day.

"My body is all forehead," said the naked Indian, when his Caucasian hunting companion wondered that he did not shiver in a snow-storm; and the faster's day is all morning.

If you cannot adopt the one-meal plan at once at least avoid breakfast. Here is how Dr. Dewey describes his first forenoon without breakfast:

"I had a forenoon of such lofty mental cheer, such energy of soul and body, such a sense of physical ease as I had not known since a young man in my later teens. When the dinner-hour came there was an added relish that was a new experience, and I left the table with a stomach so supplied that there was no need of apprehension as to an attack of faintness during the afternoon. There is no natural hunger in the morning after a night of restful sleep, because there has been no such degree of cell destruction as to create a demand for food at the ordinary hour of the American breakfast. Sleep is not a hunger-causing process. To reinforce this statement and the reasons behind it, is the experience of thousands who have abandoned the morning meal, and in a short time lost all hint of a need of it. This could not have been had there been a need, for Nature is imperious, exacting; and it is not in the line of possibility that she will permit any getting used to less food than she requires to preserve her physiological balance. She easily permits you to skip that meal you do not need so soon after the refreshing sleep and which you always eat from habit; but later she will call you to account if you give less than her demands.

"Now you are to abolish your breakfast, and not to presume to eat again without keen hunger; this hunger you may have if you wait for it, even while sitting in an arm chair, or lying in bed, and it will be for food as nourishing as the axman requires. What shall be eaten at each meal will be a law for self to determine. No food is good or healthful, and therefore typical, without a special demand for it. Keen hunger, the most relishing of foods, thoroughly masticated, a recreative state of mind during digestion, these are the easily acquired conditions behind sustained health.

"But how sudden the revelation to me! Go without your breakfast and you will be hungry for your dinner! And so hungry that you will forget to take your cod-liver dose! And the dinner is so well relished, and you feel so much better after it that you conclude to omit the dosing altogether! How simple! Only to fast, no matter if it costs a whole day, a whole week, or a whole month, and with absolute safety; why, do you not recall how energetically the digestive organs will work over the keenly relished food after the long fast due to fevers? How much more, then, may be expected from fasts that are to be no tax on vital power? Safe? Yes, beyond any question. As soon as the stomach and appendages have disposed of the decomposing, unbidden meals that are still a tax on vital power, there will be a positive increase of mental and physical power, so that when Nature's own signal for food is given, there is none of the exhausted feeling that is more or less realized before the needless morning meal.

"Appetite will always come where death is not inevitable, no less in the ordinary conditions of low health than in cases of acute sickness, and fasting is the swiftest, the most effectual and the most unfailing of all devices ever conceived for inviting natural hunger. Keen hunger, hunger only, makes known the individual need."

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.

DIETETIC RESTRICTIONS.

A "fast," in the language of the medieval churchmen, generally implied the interdition of special kinds of food, and, in that sense of the word, almost every creed of ancient and modern times prescribes periods of total abstinence. The Rhamadan, or Lenten season, of the Mohammedans, has to be observed for a couple of months, though the casuists of the Koran allow travelers and busy laborers to shorten the term by lengthening the list of forbidden viands. The successors of Joe Smith prohibit alcoholic stimulants to all but invalids, and Zoroaster interdicts wine and "soma-juice"—probably some opiate—to those who can procure more wholesome tonics.

The Pythagoreans went further and tabooed wine altogether. Strict followers of the sect (whose "philosophy" was to all purposes a religion) abstained also from flesh food and, for some never wholly explained reason, from beans. Peter Bayle surmised some figurative significance of that tenet—beans of various colors being used for political ballots, but Pliny distinctly states that the mere touch of the plant was considered a defilement, and that in the war against Sybaris a squad of orthodox Pythagoreans allowed themselves to be cut to pieces, rather than seek safety in a bean-field.

That doctrine would not have flourished in Boston, though its apostle enjoyed the reputation of a Trismegistus—a past-master of wisdom, and was supposed to have entered Olympus by some gate closed to mortals of ordinary intelligence.

Both the Buddhists and Brahmans enjoin total abstinence from flesh-food, and Sir William Jones attests the fact that starving Hindus "declined to save their lives by sacrificing those of their dumb fellow-creatures."

In all those cases the interdict had a moral significance. Wine clouds the mind that should seek to obtain glimpses of a brighter world. Flesh food stimulates the animal passions, and certainly excites combativeness. A diet of bull beef imbued our North American Redskins with the ferocity of carnivorous beasts, while their banana-eating kinsmen of Southern Mexico are as placid as Hindus.

But a large number of dietetic restrictions might be recommended from a purely physical point of view. Alcohol is a liver-poison and aggravates the virulence of many diseases so unmistakably that its victims have hardly a right to complain of chronic disorders. Theirs are ailments perpetuated by a chronic provocation of the cause, and not apt to appeal to the sympathy of total abstainers any more than the afflictions of trichinosis could evoke the fears of a pork-abhoring Jew.

Drunkards, it is true, plead their "willingness to reform if the flesh were not stronger than the spirit." Temperance preachers descant on the dangers of worldly temptations and selfish indulgences, or the lusts of unregenerate hearts as if our natural appetites were tempting us to our ruin. Nay, the stimulant vice has found learned defenders; the followers of Paracelsus have worshiped the man-devouring fire as a sacred flame; for thousands of honest truth-seekers the disagreement of doctors makes it doubtful if alcohol is a friend or a foe, a health-giving tonic or a death-dealing poison. Is that uncertainty not a proof that in one most important respect Nature has failed to insure the welfare of her creatures?

What it really proves is this: That habitual sin has blunted our physical conscience till we have not only ceased to heed, but ceased to understand, the protests of our inner monitor. It proves that the victims of vice have so utterly forgotten the language of their instincts that they are no longer able to distinguish a natural appetite from a morbid appetency.