Fitness

True to his word, Will was a fantastic coach! He still managed to make his mouth-watering meals but cut the amount of fats he used. I started taking more of a role in our menu planning which gave me more control of what I was eating. We started eating a lot more vegetables and fruits and eating less junk food and more balanced meals.

We started walking again: miles and miles of walking. Will would set the pace of our walk and I would set the distance. Before long we were up to doing five miles a day. I also stopped taking the elevator at work. The stairs became my new best friend.

I was so proud the day that I came home with my first 10 pound ribbon - ten pounds lost! Will was with me all the way. It wasn’t always easy. I know that I could lose the weight on my own but knowing that your spouse is supporting you all the way makes such a big difference! He was my biggest cheering section.

By the time I lost my 55 pounds I felt like a new woman! Wait a minute–I was a new woman! I was in love with life again and I actually liked myself and didn’t mind looking at myself in a mirror. What a difference from the year before.

Will went with me to the meeting when I was to receive my lifetime ribbon and when I spoke in front of everyone at the meeting I could tell that he was as proud of my achievement as I was.

Christmas, one year later, found us at a Danier store and instead of sitting on a bathroom floor and crying my heart out, I was modeling leather skirts and jackets for my husband! I wore my new leather suit to all the Christmas parties that year and was proud to show off my new body.

I managed to keep the weight off for 12 years before a few pounds re-found themselves to my hips and butt. The onset of menopause is going to be another hurdle that I will have to figure out.

I’m in better shape now than I have ever been and I plan on keeping it that way to look fit and foxy by the time I hit fifty!

I tried different fad diets to lose weight on my own and although I would lose a few pounds, I always ended up putting it back on.

I remember going away for Christmas 1991 and having a fantastic time but when returned home and I happened to get on the scale, I found out that I had gained 7 pounds over the holidays. I remember sitting down on the bathroom floor for 3 hours and crying my heart out. When I couldn’t cry anymore, I dried my eyes and vowed that I would NEVER be in the same place ever again.

I went downstairs and asked Will for a hug and told him that I had gained 7 pounds and that I feel that I had hit ground zero and that things had to change and I needed help.

I loved Will so much at that moment. He didn’t pooh-pooh the way I felt or berate me for gaining weight. He listened to everything I had to say without interrupting and promised that he would help me in anyway possible to achieve the goals that I set for myself.

I had decided to join Weight Watchers. I knew that they were starting a Weight Watchers lunchtime meeting at my work place. He promised that he would make any changes necessary to make his cooking more health and weight conscious for the both of us. He even agreed to the reward that I would get when I achieved the goals that I had set for myself: a Danier leather suit! I had wanted one for years but felt it was too expensive for me to buy. This would be my incentive to keep me going when the going got tough.

I started Weight Watchers that week and found that we didn’t have to stop eating any of our favourite foods. Portion control was half of my battle as well as getting back to a fitness regime.

After a few years of living with Will and his mouthwatering meals, I began to lose the battle to keep my size five shape. Then I watched size eight come and go as well as size 10 and soon I was into a size 12. As much as I loved to eat Will’s sumptuous meals, by the time I was inching to a size 14 I began to re-evaluate my life. I knew I wasn’t as active as I had been when I first met and starting dating Will. Life gets busy and it seems to me that when our social life got hectic my fitness activities were the first casualties.

I remembered back when Will first started cooking for me, I would barely be able to finish a quarter of the dinner he served me but by the time I hit size 12, I was eating almost as big as plate as Will did. He played sports, I didn’t. Not that I didn’t like sports - I was just wasn’t good at any sport.

Will hadn’t said anything about me gaining weight but he could see that I was not happy with the way I looked. He probably was a little alarmed at the weight that I had put on, but to his credit he never had a negative word for the way I looked. I had always been thin when I was younger and never had to worry about weight but it seemed as soon as I hit the age of 30, weight was becoming a problem. It’s funny when I was younger I had vowed I would never be one of those wives who let themselves go. It just kind of happened.

As for Will, Will never changed. Will had always been lean and fit. He played sports all year round.

It is easy to find statistics on the billions of man-hours lost from work per year when 7,000,000 people per day are sufficiently sick to require medical care. These statistics tell nothing of those who suffered from minor but painful ailments, or of the millions whose illnesses were severe but who called no physician because they feared the expense or because none could come during the night when the pain was most excruciating.

There are no statistics available for dozens of things which really matter or really hurt; of exhausted mothers who, missing nights of sleep because of a sick child, must still go to an office the next day or drag themselves through mountains of housework, simultaneously caring for other children. No statistics tell of the billions of father- and mother-hours of worry or anguish endured per year; of the billions of spankings given annually to good children whose parents were irritable or frustrated; of the billions of meals mined per year by nagging and scolding; of the billions of student-hours wasted because so many of the 30,700,000 in school attendance receive too few nutrients to keep their minds alert; of the number of parents paying dentists with savings they had hoped to spend on college educations.

I could find no health statistics. What is health? It seems to be something we talk glibly about. We speak of health insurance, meaning sickness insurance; of health benefits, meaning sickness benefits; health plans and surveys, meaning sickness plans and surveys. People talk about health education, health courses, health books; I have taken the courses, read the books; you learn about vaccinations, contagion, and diseases. What health actually is, apparently no one knows; certainly it is more than freedom from disease or ability to go to work. The best definition appears to be one which a small boy used to define money: “It’s something we ain’t got much of.”

The less health we have, the less money we will have. It is said that 60 per cent of the savings of people sixty years old are spent on a search for health; but 60 per cent of the people sixty years old have no savings. Their sickness bills are paid by you and me. Our taxes pay for the county and state hospitals and homes for the chronically ill, as well as for institutions for the insane and feeble-minded. It is your tax money and mine which pays for schools, whether the children attend or not, are mentally alert or not, or the teachers eat breakfast or not.

In addition to the taxes, there are the fund-raising campaigns: the heart fund, the polio fund, the cerebral palsy fund, the cancer fund, and numerous others. Money-raising has become big business, for which experts are trained. To my knowledge, no money has yet been raised for the purpose of what I call prevention. The native races studied by Drs. Price and McCarrison did not “prevent” tuberculosis by early X-rays, or cancer by free clinics where frightened people could be examined; they used constructive methods.

Unless something is done and done quickly toward real prevention, I think we can expect still more irritability, fatigue, mental sluggishness, psychological maladjustment, faulty posture and bone structure, crooked and decayed teeth. We can expect more surgery: more tumors, cancers, gall bladders and prostates removed, more sinuses scraped, more hysterectomies performed. As things are now, I cannot see how an increase can be prevented in the incidence of cancer, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart and kidney diseases, diabetes, muscular dystrophy and atrophy, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and many other diseases, some still unknown and unnamed. How sincerely I hope I am wrong I can you hear the arguments being raised? Diagnostic methods are better. People are living longer, we are told, into the heart-disease-, diabetes-, nephritis-, cancer-susceptible age. Granted that these arguments contain some truth, but not all the truth. Before Iron Curtain days, it was known that the Bulgarians lived to be older than other peoples in the world without these diseases. When grains were unrefined in Denmark from 1914 to 1920, people lived longer, into the “disease-susceptible age,” and had fewer of these diseases. Diagnostic methods are better, yes; they are now so good that a tremendous increase in cancer among babies and small children has been diagnosed. A year ago a young woman sat beside my desk, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Her three-year-old child, a little girl whose picture she showed me, had just died of cancer; another child of less than two and still another of scarcely five were then dying. She herself wanted to die; she said so repeatedly. Yet she came asking for help for her two dying children. I wish I could have helped her six years earlier.

To my way of thinking, our national health began to decline at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when families began to move from self-sustaining farms into crowded cities. It declined still further with the invention of machinery for milling grains, and with each new method of processing foods, each new trick for forcing hybrid crops to yield higher tonnage per acre on worn-out soil. New problems arising every year make sound nutrition more difficult to apply, or prevent its application.

The technical knowledge for halting this decline is at our fingertips as never before. Every person wishes to feel well, to stay young; persons aware of sound nutrition are eager to apply it. But we need men and women with courage and willingness to be leaders, to set the example, and to educate, probably in the face of ridicule, cynicism, and criticism. I hope enough fine men and women can be mobilized for this purpose. I believe they can.

Thousands upon thousands of persons have studied disease. Almost no one has studied health.

Thirty years ago a dreamer-researcher named Dr. Weston A. Price traveled the world over, examining people untouched by so-called civilization. He investigated groups in lit then isolated part of the Swiss Alps, in northern Italy, on the Isle of Man, in the New Hebrides, Australia, New Zealand, central Africa, the South American jungles, the north of Canada and Alaska and on various islands in the South Pacific. The foods of many of these peoples were limited indeed. In some cases their diets were largely meat or fish without vegetables or grains; in others, vegetables and grains without meat or fish; they appeared to have nothing in common. These peoples, however, had two things in common: their diets met every body requirement; and the know-how for refining foods was lacking. The latter allowed the former to be so.

Dr. Price told of his findings in a book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He tells of people with erect posture, unbelievable endurance, and cheerful, even dispositions. These people had excellent bone structure; their faces and jaws were so wide and well developed that their teeth were not crowded together, and stayed free from decay just as their bodies stayed free from disease. The statistics concerning the incidence of cancer, ulcers, high blood pressure, tuberculosis, heart and kidney diseases, polio, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and cerebral palsy were zero, zero, zero in every case. Names for these diseases were unknown and unneeded. Dr. Price found no physicians, surgeon, psychiatrists; no prisons, institutions for the insane or feebleminded; no child delinquency, no homosexuality. Every mother nursed her babies; a non-functional breast was unheard of. Mental, moral, and emotional health accompanied physical health.

Sir Robert McCarrison, an English physician, investigated the health of the Hunzas, living high in the Himalayas. Their foods were limited, but their lands were composted and watered by glacial streams rich in minerals from rocks grinding on rocks. Dr. McCarrison’s statistics were the same as those gathered by Dr. Price: all zeros. He could find no ulcers, cancers, heart or kidney diseases, polio, or the rest; no prisons, mental institutions, child-delinquency problems. As a physician, he would have starved; as a researcher and dreamer, he made a great contribution. Other Hunza visitors have written of the cheerfulness and lack of fatigue of these people after great feats of endurance; a runner carried a message to a nearby village only 35 miles away and returned the same day with no sign of fatigue. As mountain guides, the Hunzas scrambled sure-footed over precipitous cliffs, carrying tremendous loads, laughing and singing the while.

Years ago a group of medical missionaries, Mormons by faith, collectively examined more than a million natives in central Africa; they found no disease, no cancer. A similar group found none among primitive peoples in South America.
Recently Dr. Michael Walsh studied Indians in an isolated district in Mexico, people without even a water supply. Their only beverage was fermented cactus juice, so rich in vitamin C that the amount allotted per person per day was equivalent to a dozen glasses of fresh orange juice. These people had never taken a bath; yet they were as free from body odor as they were from cancer, high blood pressure, coronary thrombosis, and other diseases.

These same dreamer-investigators also studied diseases; they did not have to go far to find them. In villages only a few miles away, white men had brought white sugar, white Hour, and less-white “civilization.” In such villages, Dr. Price found faulty bone structure, crowded, crooked teeth, rampant tooth decay, diseases of all kinds, prisons, perversions, and sexual immorality. Dr. McCarrison found ulcers, heart and kidney diseases, cancer, high blood pressure, colitis, and tuberculosis. In Africa and South America the medical missionaries found cancer rampant among members of the very tribes who, on their native diets, had stayed cancer-free. Now, only a generation later, these African natives are dying like Hies from a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor; 60 per cent coming to the autopsy tables have died of cancer. In populated areas in Mexico, Dr. Walsh found every disease he had the heart to look for.

I hunted for statistics of health in America to compare with the zeros found by Drs. Price and McCarrison. All I found were records showing people suffering from diseases in huge, heartbreaking numbers. The one group of statistics of the numbers and causes of rejections during the Korean War compared with those of World War II threw me into a depression which lasted days-the time interval is so short, the increases in abnormalities so appalling. These are not sickness figures; merely statistics of our finest young men at the height of their physical development.

Statistics can tell so little. The number of new cancer cases discovered each year tells nothing of the fear and dread in the hearts of millions of Americans who already know that some day they themselves will suffer from the disease. Statistics about the “chronics” in every county and state home, people whose illnesses go on year after year, do not mention the tired underpaid nurses ready to drop in their tracks; the stinking bedpans, the raw, running bedsores, or the looks of despair on the faces from which hope was lost so long ago. Statistics of the number of elderly people sitting or lying out monotonous and/or agonizing days in the thousands of rest homes in our country do not mention the bitterness, the fear, the hopelessness in the hearts of these still nne old people; if you see enough of these homes, you wonder whether our increased life span is always to be viewed with unmitigated pride.

The morbidity statistics all seem the same even though the diseases and numbers of people suffering from each are different. The new cases of polio per year, for example, tell nothing of the man- and woman-hours of the wonderful physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, and mothers who with endless patience help persons to some slight use of nearly useless arms and legs; of the heartbreak of youngsters who want to play football or dance, of ill mothers who ache to care for their children or of fathers who long to support their families. Each year the Red Cross pleads for blood plasma with which to fight polio. “More cases are expected this year than ever before,” goes the appeal, and the Red Cross predictions have not yet been wrong; they will probably not be wrong in the future.

Now I come to the “you-won’t-believe-it” problem which sometimes disappears, the problem of growing older. Actually I am convinced it need not be a problem at all. There, are people-not many, but a few-who seem to grow younger instead of older.

One day on a television program I may show you some of these people. For all of you doubting Thomases I could supply names and addresses, except in one case. This is a woman of eighty-two who enjoys tremendously the fact that most people think she is sixty; she works half-time as a secretary, Hitting about like a humming bird. There is Mr. G., now eighty-six, who talks about having fun on borrowed time; he loves to garden, and once when I was entertaining, he turned our house into a florist shop and in addition brought a camellia corsage for each guest. Mrs. S. must be nearly eighty by now. It is unbelievable that one person can do as much good as she does; I know how much she helps people because she sends many to me for nutritional advice. She was ill and old when I first saw her 15 years ago; now she is active and young and vibrantly alive.

Mrs. L. is one of the most amazing of this group. I would bet that in 12 years she has swallowed no morsel of food which does not build health. Her figure is that of a thirty year-old. I tell her I should pay her to visit me instead of vice versa. She is particularly amazing because she is a crack skier and is on the ski patrol, skiing down the slopes with stretchers, helping to carry youngsters who have broken bones. She does not worry about breaking bones nor does she need to.

Mrs. H. has been one of my favorites since 1936. She came to me because of pernicious anemia, exhausted, depressed, her mouth and tongue so sore she could hardly eat. Her life has been hard; money always scarce. Before child-labor laws were passed, she was taken out of school and forced to work in the New England woolen mills, leaving home when it was still dark in the morning and returning after dark at night. There was little love and few bright spots in her life until she was sixty-eight; then a childhood sweetheart found her, a wonderful physician whose record is in Whd s Who. A friend and I poured coffee at their wedding, a big occasion with the brightest bunch of oldsters I have ever seen assembled; we laughingly said we were the only persons present who could hold a coffee cup without shaking out its contents. This woman sent me a report of her physical examination from Johns Hopkins Hospital: “Although this patient claims to be seventy-four years old, she has the body of a fifty-year-old woman.” She and Dr. H. are now spending happily-ever-after summers in Vermont and winters in Florida. Dr. H. asked me to visit them in Vermont. I said I could not decide when to come; I wanted to be there for maple syrup making but also for autumn colors. His answer was graciousness at its height: “If you can come only once, come in the spring and stay till the fall.”

I wish you could all meet Mr. and Mrs. R., people whom it seems God must have made especially for each other. He is seventy-six; she, seventy-two. She had been crippled with arthritis for years, and he had the usual old-age symptoms: a tremor, fatigue, some shortness of breath, trouble with his eyes; years of hay fever and sinus infection, both still troublesome. The arthritis scarcely bothers her any more; his symptoms, too, have gradually cleared. Both are now amazingly active. She is busy with a grandchild who lives with them, with Spanish classes and social gatherings. Mr. R. holds down what could be considered three full-time jobs. He is president of a building and loan association which takes a great deal of his time; he operates three oil wells which require as much attention as spoiled children; and he has gardened their acre of land since their Mexican gardener, an old man of forty, became ill. Besides these activities he plays 18 holes of golf twice each week. I remarked that he probably played with men 20 years his junior, and he said they were sometimes SO years younger than he. If you want to taste really good homemade bread, you should drop in to see them, as I frequently do.

And lastly, there is Dr. P., who earned his Ph.D. at Columbia half a century ago. He and his family lived in Shanghai for years, then in Manila where he was caught at the outbreak of World War II. He spent the war years in the terrible Santo Tomas Prison. His health was broken then, and recovery was never complete; heart attacks followed and then polyneuritis, the American term for beriberi. His pain was too excruciating to be deadened by opiates. Although he was given B vitamins by many physicians, he became worse and was not expected to live. As a last resort, his wife and daughter came to see me. Tiger’s milk, liver, wheat germ, all three in small amounts at first, large quantities of pantothenic acid which had not been given before, calcium tablets to help deaden pain, vitamin pills of. every letter, tablets of enzymes and hydrochloric acid to digest the food combined to turn the tables; his recovery was spectacular. Since childhood, Dr. P. has had a wonderful voice, and singing had been his joy. He sang solos at churches, clubs, and weddings, including Chiang Kai-shek’s wedding, his wonderful wife playing his accompaniment. His voice failed with his illness, but now he believes it is stronger than ever; again he is singing for churches and clubs and weddings. Just before he left for Manila to be an executive of an insurance company, he sang to me a song he said he had especially selected. It was, “I’ll be loving you always.” And if I had a voice and could have held back the tears, I would have sung the same song to him.

These are young people, every one of them. The good health they enjoy, however, is no mere happenstance. Every person in this group takes his nutrition seriously, not just occasionally but every meal of every day and year after year. The rewards are pretty wonderful. With these people there is no gap between the generations. Each one of them is an inspiration, almost a vision of what could be for possibly every human being. They remind you again that aging may not be a “natural” process but the result of years and years of cumulative nutritional deficiencies. I tell them that they make me look forward to my nineties.

Many people have told me that, after dietary improvement, their sexual difficulties have disappeared; a few say a contemplated divorce was forestalled. These reports have covered many varieties of sexual problems. Several were cases of impotence; others, of restoration of libido, or sexual desire. A young husband complained one month that his wife had no sex interest and the next that she had too much. A sixty-year-old widower told me that he felt much better when eating an adequate diet but that he could no longer do so; he would gladly follow the diet again as soon as he remarried. Many reports had to do with prostate infections which had interfered with sexual expression; others concerned eczemas on the genitalia or Manila albicans infections in the vagina or penis resulting from the use of aureomycin, streptomycin, or other antibiotics. Whatever the improvement was, it came as a by-product of dietary help sought for other reasons.

Worry over possible inability to express sexual love seems to be a masculine trait. These fears might disappear if men understood more fully the relation of nutrition to sexual function. For example, the pituitary gland, situated at the base of the brain, produces gonadotrophic hormones which in turn stimulate the gonads-testicles or ovaries-to produce other hormones necessary for normal sexual activity. The gonadotrophic hormones are made of protein; the sex hormones, of protein or fat-like substances known as steroids. If the diet is seriously inadequate in protein, fat, the B vitamins, or almost any nutrient, the pituitary and/or the gonads are unable to produce these hormones in adequate quantities. For example, I was amused to find that scientists had studied the vitamin-C content of the pituitary gland before and after male rabbits were bred. When the diet lacks vitamin C, the animals do not care to breed. If the diet is adequate, the pituitary is saturated with vitamin C before breeding but depleted of the vitamin afterward. Anyone who has bred a rabbit will admit that this is rapid utilization of a nutrient.

Studies of men in prison camps, of the conscientious objectors in the starvation experiments at the University of Minnesota, and of numerous clinical investigations show that libido decreases or disappears when the nutrition is inadequate. On the other hand, as long as even an average degree of health is maintained, glands rarely become abnormal. I know of no man who worries about the function of his thyroid, pancreas, or adrenal glands; if they become abnormal, he knows he can obtain thyroxin, insulin, or adrenalin from his physician. Testosterone is also available, but it is probably never needed when the nutrition is adequate.

If neither psychological nor nutritional problems exist, sexual function is probably maintained as long as is health itself. A doctor told me of his Danish grandparents. At the age of eighty-seven, his grandfather, after working in the garden all morning and eating a hearty lunch, had quietly passed away while sitting in his chair. Grandmother, considerably younger, outlived him many years. Once when the women of the family were gathered with their sewing, someone asked the grandmother at what age, in her opinion, men became functionally unable to express love through sexual union. Grandmother answered softly in Danish, “Aldrig”which means never. This same doctor, speaking of the importance of maintaining adequate nutrition in order that the sexual relationships may be fulfilling, then remarked, “It’s putting money in the bank which will be a pleasure to spend.”

To say that obesity is caused merely by consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party. There are many causes. One, I suspect, is that our foods are so depleted of the nutrients which starved bodies crave that overeating is due to a physiological compulsion to obtain them; even that usually fails to supply the nutrients longed for by the tissues. Another cause is that people often eat too little rather than too much; the basal metabolism drops far below normal; there is no energy for work or play, none to be turned into heat. When few calories are used, few are needed. Such people sit, sluggish as lizards sunning themselves, gaining weight on tiny meals and becoming more miserable with each added pound.

If an improved nutrition program does not cause you to lose weight, I would say that the program is not adequate for you or that you should go to a psychiatrist for help.

Another reward of nutrition is gaining weight, if that is desired. In the spring of 1932 I planned a diet for a man who weighed 121 pounds and who wanted so much to gain weight; that fall he asked for a reducing diet. Not long afterward, an extremely tall, ill man came to see me; he then weighed 155 pounds and he, too, wished to gain. A year or so later he weighed 210 pounds and wanted to reduce. I still know both of these men. Although gaining was no problem and a “reducing diet” was planned for each of them, neither has reduced.

For years I have refused to make out a gaining diet for anyone. When faulty digestion and absorption are corrected, when nerves and muscles are relaxed to the extent that energy is no longer needlessly wasted and sound sleep is induced, the underweight person gains easily without increasing his calorie intake. A gaining diet usually causes him to put on too much weight.

There is another problem which almost invariably disappears if nutrition is taken seriously over a considerable length of time. For me, the most striking example of this problem is a woman I saw first when she was twenty-nine. She was underweight, pale, and listless; her hair was stringy; tension lines cut her forehead; and fatigue was stamped on her face. Her blood count and blood pressure were both low. She had trouble with constipation and hemorrhoids and was “miserable from gas.” The radio and youngsters made her “fly off the handle.” She had severe headaches about twice a week. My notes say, “Can’t sleep; stays up all night at least once each week to be sure she can sleep the next night.” She told of several miscarriages. Because of tumors her uterus had been removed shortly before I saw her.

Three years later, when this same woman came to a series of lectures I was giving, she had become my idea of genuine beauty. She reminded me of a race horse being held back at the starting line. Her eyes were bright and flashing, her skin had both color and glow, her figure was the kind any woman might envy. Her hair was resilient and amazingly alive. Her face was animated; it glowed with health even in repose. After these lectures, a group of us often went to her home for “coffee,” meaning a near-smorgasbord of cold meats, cheeses, and dark breads. I usually sat watching her, fascinated. Every time I saw her, I asked myself how any person could have met her and not been immediately struck by her beauty. I knew the answer perfectly well. When I first saw this woman, she was not beautiful: she was pale and listless; her hair was stringy; tension lines cut her forehead; and fatigue was stamped on her face.

Too much “beauty” is only cosmetic-deep, though that is better than no beauty at all. The person who is satisfied with cosmetic-deep beauty, in my opinion, has low standards.

Beauty should be at least vivacity-deep. It is better still if it can be both vivacity-deep and character-deep. Before I die, I hope mine can be soul-deep. Sound nutrition is absolutely essential for vivacity-deep beauty, a form of beauty which, I believe, any semi-healthy individual at any age can have provided it is wanted badly enough. When persons are seriously malnourished, as far too many of them are, those who could have character-deep beauty are often so ill and mentally confused and self-centered because of their illnesses that they fail to achieve this higher form of beauty. When malnutrition is severe, it prevents the serenity and calmness which in my opinion are essential ingredients of that rare and intangible quality I think of as soul beauty.

Another problem which often disappears after dietary improvement has to do with sexuality. Let us grant that perhaps 95 per cent of such problems are psychological, and consider only those which may be nutritional. Probably every nutrient plays some role in stimulating normal hormone production or in maintaining the health of the prostate, the uterus, and the penial and vaginal passages, all essential before mate relationships can be fulfilling.

Aside from having a metabolism test taken, there are a number of little tricks by which you can determine a person’s rate of energy production. One is to notice how quickly he moves or thinks or how warm he keeps his house. A neighbor once gave me quite a serious lecture on the possibility of my children dying of pneumonia because our house was so cold and they often went outside without coats or sweaters. I silently turned up the furnace, later sold her on nutrition, and now she is comfortable in our house. All energy is turned into heat; if you have no energy, you can have no heat. The energy production of a healthy child is usually much more efficient than that of an adult. In fact, the BMR of a mother can be guessed quite accurately by how much she bundles up her children; such a mother then feels happy, but the children usually feel miserable. Anyone who pays fuel bills will agree that low energy production is quite expensive.

If you are comfortable at a room temperature of 70°F., love a cold shower, need only moderate covering on your bed, and enjoy a pleasant breeze which some people call a “draft,” your metabolism is quite normal. One woman told me she slept with an electric pad at her feet under an electric blanket covered by two more blankets and still was cold. A man said the only time he felt warm was when he got into his car which had stood all day in the hot sunshine with the windows closed. After following an adequate nutrition program, these people, and dozens with milder symptoms of inadequate energy production, soon became comfortable at moderate temperatures. A physician tells me his temperature increases a degree within an hour after drinking a glass of tiger’s milk, showing the rapid and marked increase in energy production. In Dr. Thorne’s experiments at Harvard, the BMR increased within a few minutes after a high-protein breakfast was eaten.

Probably every nutrient plays some role in helping the body to produce energy. The lack may be predominantly one of the B vitamins, iodine, or protein but not necessarily so. Since the trace minerals act as catalysts, or speeder-uppers, of energy production, an undersupply of these minerals may be the major cause. Whatever the cause, if an adequate diet is eaten and well absorbed, energy can be produced in excess of human needs.

A problem which is intimately related to a normal metabolic rate and which often disappears when the nutrition is adequate is that of reducing. I myself was as slow as molasses in discovering this easy solution. A number of obese persons who wanted to reduce when they came to me have been too ill to be put on reducing diets.

“Let’s forget about reducing for at least three months and concentrate on building health,” I would tell them. “Get your basal metabolism built up, and then you can reduce while you sleep. You’ll feel like working and exercising by that time, and reducing will be easier.”

Many of these persons were so malnourished that I recommended 200 to 300 grams of protein daily for them temporarily: large servings of meat, fish, or fowl including liver daily if they enjoyed it; a quart of tiger’s milk made with whole milk; as much yogurt, cheeses, and eggs as they could eat or wanted; a green salad at each lunch and dinner tossed with a tablespoon of cold-pressed soybean oil or approximately two tablespoons of French dressing; two or three tablets of mixed minerals and usually 250 milligrams of vitamin C after each meal; vitamins A and E in capsules daily after breakfast; a capsule of vitamin D every Sunday. I told them to get tablets of digestive enzymes with bile and more tablets of glutamic acid hydrochloride in case gas became a problem. I asked them to forego foods which would fill them up too much or over-stimulate their insulin production, such as potatoes and other starchy vegetables; cereals of all kinds; honey, molasses, any concentrated sweet; desserts except fruits. Certainly refined foods had no place in their health-building regimes: they were to pass up soft drinks, refined sugar concoctions, foods prepared with white flour. They used Sanka instead of coffee unless too exhausted to live without a stimulus.

Some of these people gained weight for a week or two; then they complained they could not eat so much. Their blood sugar was high; they had no craving for sweets. When the diet is adequate, few calories are needed or desired. By the end of three months they had lost weight; some phoned or came in to ask, “How can I stop losing?” One was a seventy-six-year-old woman who had been in a wheelchair for years with arthritis; she had weighed 186 pounds; now she is 40 pounds lighter and walks well with a cane. Another was a man with heart disease, his legs swollen to twice their normal size; now his weight is exactly as he wants it, and all heart symptoms are gone. I shall never forget a middle-aged woman, whose brilliant mind worked sluggish);” and who had huge varicose veins covered with elastic stockings; she had a history of repeated attacks of gout. Three months later I did not recognize this woman: she had been transformed into an alert, slender person with a new vivacious personality and without a visible varicose vein or a tinge of gout. There are many others.

Finally it dawned on me that this method was the way every person should reduce. My advice now is: Throw away your bathroom scales and calorie charts; forget about reducing and forget about exercising, but never forget about building health. When health comes, you cannot keep yourself from exercising; you will work twice as hard without fatigue; you will find yourself wanting to go skiing or dancing or walking or swimming, your own vitality urging you into activity. Weight loss will come slowly perhaps, but if you adhere to the program, it will come. And it will be a permanent loss.

There are many people who want to reduce, but their principal hunger is subconscious. Eating is a substitute for love. The child first experiences love as his mother feeds him, at the same time cooing, singing, and caressing him. The happy old-fashioned mother loved and nursed her baby perhaps 1500 times. Under these circumstances any child soon associates love with food; later, if love is withdrawn, overeating becomes a compensation. People who suffer in this way can usually be helped only by a competent psychiatrist.

All other parts of your body are but servants of the cell.

The heart, for example, which people think of as important, only makes it possible for supplies to reach the cell and wastes to be removed. The arteries, veins, and thousands of miles of capillaries are mere pipes through which supplies and wastes are carried. The lungs are slaves which supply oxygen and throw off carbon dioxide; the kidneys are slaves which purify water and remove the wastes freed by the tearing down of worn tissue; the urinary bladder is merely a reservoir. The digestive tract is nothing more than a mechanism for changing food into the form which the cell can utilize. The bone marrow is a slave which produces blood corpuscles to carry oxygen, and the spleen is the graveyard for these corpuscles when their usefulness is spent. All of the glands are slaves which produce hormones to help regulate each cell’s activity; the master gland, the pituitary, is in turn a slave which supervises the functions of the other glands and of each body cell.

The most important slave of all is undoubtedly the liver.

This organ is the storage house which holds fats, sugars, and proteins coming from the digestive tract, ready to supply them to the cell the split second they are needed. It is largely in the liver that toxic substances which might damage the cell are rendered harmless; here the nitrogen-containing waste products from worn-out cell proteins are broken down; the protein, albumin, needed to collect urine, is made here, and still other proteins, the antibodies, which destroy bacteria, are produced. The liver makes the fat-like substances, lecithin and cholesterol; it likewise produces the bile necessary to aid the digestion of fats and the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K; it stores not only these vitamins but also minerals such as iron, copper, and the trace elements; it forms and stores the body starch, glycogen. By the help of insulin, it largely controls the amount of sugar in the blood, withdrawing sugar when the supply is generous and changing it into body starch or fat or, when the supply runs low, changing the starch back into sugar and spilling it into the blood. When no food is eaten and all the stored glycogen is used up, cell proteins are tom down into sugar and fat; the liver again withdraws sugar from the blood and feeds it back once more as needed. This servant produces enzymes capable of inactivating the hormones which would otherwise accumulate to the extent that the cell might be injured. In spite of all these duties and many others, this master servant has only one purpose: to help maintain, regulate, and protect the life of the cell. Like the nutrients, all of these slaves co-operate with each other.

Although the structure and activity of every cell in the body are similar in that each must have oxygen and food and from each waste must be removed, the cells themselves are differentiated; their hundreds of duties vary endlessly. The cells of the muscles are the body’s pulleys; their cytoplasm is so made that it can contract, and by each cell contracting in harmony, muscles are shortened and movement is made possible. The cells which make up the bones attract minerals and solidify them to give form to the body. The cells of the glands are manufacturers, turning out hormones. Thus is the function of groups of billions of cells each differentiated to make up the separate structures of the body.

Foods can be selected which will supply all the nutrients known to be needed by each cell. If these foods are grown on good soil and eaten in as nearly their natural state as possible, the nutrients still unknown can probably be furnished. Digestion and absorption, if faulty, can be improved; the destruction of nutrients in the digestive tract and the blood and losses of those nutrients from the body can be prevented. The well-nourished body can protect itself from bacterial invasion and can detoxify foreign materials which gain access to it. My belief, therefore, is that every person, if intelligent enough and financially able to obtain a completely adequate diet, can achieve perfect health provided irreparable harm has not already been done.

Dr. Szent-Cyorgyi, who was given the Nobel Prize for his early work on vitamin C, pointed out that when he was a medical student, everything appeared to be always wrong with the body. There were so many diseases that it seemed impossible to learn them all; he tells how he flunked examinations covering this subject. Later, when getting his doctorate in biochemistry, or the chemistry of the body, which is the study of health, he was amazed to find that this time everything was so right, so very right. Probably there never has been a person who has studied the detailed mechanisms which make up health who has not felt as did Dr. Szent-Cyorgyi.

In fact when one considers the healthy body as a functional structure of billions of cells having hundreds of separate purposes, yet each working co-operatively in perfect unison with absolute harmony and almost inconceivable synchronization, so far surpassing the most delicate machinery made by man, one cannot help being reminded of the philosophers who argue that there is only one perfection, and that perfection is God. Regardless of the religious skepticism of any person when he starts to study the workings of the healthy body, he usually soon agrees with the philosophers and realizes simultaneously that only disease is manmade. The God-made perfection is health, and potentially thrs perfection is you.

Fitness

— The relative ability of an individual (or population) to survive and reproduce in a given environment. The ‘fit’ of an organism to its environment.

Nutrition

— The taking in and use of food and other nourishing material by the body. Nutrition is a 3-part process. First, food or drink is consumed. Second, the body breaks down the food or drink into nutrients. Third, the nutrients travel through the bloodstream to different parts of the body where they are used as “fuel” and for many other purposes. To give the body proper nutrition, a person has to eat and drink enough of the foods that contain key nutrients.

Physical Training

— A set of attributes a person has in regards to a person’s ability to perform physical activities that require aerobic fitness, endurance, strength, or flexibility and is determined by a combination of regular activity and genetically inherited ability.

Healthy Living

— The absence of disease or injury along with physical, mental, and functionally, as the ability to cope with everyday activities, or positively, as fitness and well-being. The general condition of body and mind.