This is going to be your chief business and pursuit in life for the next few months, this reducing of your weight. However, keep up your Red Cross and all other activities, fast and furiously, so that you won't be thinking about yourself. [Sidenote: _More Warnings_] Don't reduce more than two or three pounds a week; two or less is better. If you are too cannibalistic, your heart, kidneys and nervous system are liable to suffer--you yourself are supplying too much fat in your dietary, and there are other scientific reasons against reducing too rapidly. However, you may find that the first week or so you may reduce five or seven pounds; but don't worry about this, for that is a slushy, watery fat that goes easily. If a claim like a cold should attack you, and after spraying nose and throat frequently with an antiseptic, and then denying the claim vigorously, it persists in running a severe course, better go back to maintenance diet for a few days. [Sidenote: _Not Even While Cooking_] _Don't "taste"!_ You will find the second taste much harder to resist than the first. If you have allowed in your daily program something between meals (a good plan), take it, but not otherwise. Try not to overeat at any time, and thus undo the work that perhaps has taken you two or three days to accomplish. It will be all right occasionally, possibly one day a week, to eat up to your maintenance diet, but don't, I beg of you, go over it so that you will gain. You will be tempted quite frequently, and you will have to choose whether you will enjoy yourself hugely in the twenty minutes or so that you will be consuming the excess calories, or whether you will dislike yourself cordially for the two or three days you lose by your lack of will power. [Sidenote: _I Ought Not to Do This_] I am afraid I am going to tell a story. I feel as though I were, and I don't want to. It is one I heard years ago at a teachers' convention at Riverside, when I was a tender, unsuspecting young school teacher, so it is perfectly good, albeit senile--and it illustrates my point so well--so well--well, you have to put yourself in the place of the little chaps, Billie and Johnnie, of the kindergarten. [Sidenote: _A Little Anatomical Story_] It seems it was customary to bring a lunch, and Little-new-boy had come without one. Teacher asked Billie would he share? No, sturdily; not he. But little Johnnie, he would. Some time later, Johnnie, with a frantic waving of his hand, and with just pride in his generosity, informed the class that he had shared his lunch with Little-new-boy and he felt good is his little heart. Billie stood his ground and stoutly declared that he ate his and he felt good in his little belly. 9 Autobiographical