These menus, like those given for summer, are merely for the purpose of suggesting selections, combinations, and proportions of food that will meet the exigencies of temperature, environment, and work. The quantity of food required will depend largely upon the size (physique) of the individual, the severity of training, and the feats to be performed. It is especially important that these suggestions be well considered at least one day before engaging in any athletic event or work requiring extraordinary physical effort, as the human body appropriates or uses food from twenty-four to thirty-six hours after it is eaten. [Sidenote: Exposure to extreme cold or exertion] If one is to be exposed to extreme cold, an excess of fats should be taken, beginning thirty-six hours before exposure. If much physical effort is to be exerted, the diet should be balanced as to all nutritive elements, with an excess of nitrogenous foods. In fact, these rules should be observed by every one who desires to make feeding scientific, and to make food his servant instead of his master, as our civilized habits have a tendency to do. SEDENTARY OCCUPATIONS [Sidenote: Cessation of activity means disintegration] Nature demands from every form of life a certain amount of activity or motion. Any transgression of this law means disintegration. Rest is merely the process adopted by Nature to reconvert matter into its original elements. To whatever extent one ceases activity, Nature, under normal conditions, inflicts this penalty. [Sidenote: The penalty of civilization] Man's civilized habits and customs have produced a class of workers who, while at work, are deprived of their requisite amount of motion, and who, therefore, pay the penalty by shortened periods of life, and by numerous disorders which we have come to characterize as dis-ease. There is but one method known to science by which these penalties may be avoided, and by which the worker whose occupation must be sedentary may become as healthful as his brother who can order his life in conformity with Nature's laws. That method lies in the ordering of his diet. [Sidenote: Dis-ease is merely congestion] All dis-ease may be called _congestion_, or the failure of the body to eliminate poisons and waste matter. The process of elimination is assisted by activity (work or play). The accumulation of waste and poisons in the body is measured or determined almost wholly by the diet. [Sidenote: Diet governed by work] The man who is swinging a pick or a sledge hammer in the open air may eat or drink almost anything, because his powers of eliminating waste are aided by his work. It follows, therefore, that those whose work is of a sedentary nature must procure their nutrition from substances containing the minimum of waste, and producing the maximum of energy, and the quantity must be measured accurately by the demands of the body, or autointoxication (self-poisoning) will result.