My answer to such questions is:--Any change of habit is apt to excite a protest on behalf of the body, especially when the body is not properly nourished, and is in a state of more or less disease. When the habit-hunger comes on a few sips of water will quiet the discomfort for the time being and, very likely, until it is convenient to take food comfortably and with the calm and relish necessary to good digestion. Headache, faintness, "all-goneness" and like discomforts, are symptoms, not of hunger, but of the reverse--that is, fermentation of undigested excess of food which the body cannot use. A person, thus troubled, should brave discomfort for a week, and even go without food entirely for a few meals, in order to give the body a chance to "clean house": then the real sensation of hunger will be expressed by "watering of the mouth" and a keen desire for some simple food such as bread and butter, or dry bread alone. But this healthy appetite will "keep" and accumulate until it is convenient to take food. THE TRUE EPICURE I am, personally, a hearty man in full activity, both mental and physical. I can work six hours and then satisfy the keenest of appetites on a meal of wheat griddle-cakes with maple syrup and a glass or two of milk. A young working woman should be able to do the same. If I eat such a meal with "gusto," deliberation (so as to enjoy the maximum of taste), taking not more than fifteen minutes over it, I can then go to work, or play, or to mountain climbing, or to riding a bicycle, and keep it up until I am sleepy, with no sense of repletion or discomfort. "Money, leisure and easily-accessible cafés" are the menace of right nutrition, unless one is proof against temptation to kill time in this dangerous manner. _Steady work to earn a true appetite, small means to spend on food, the necessity of going to seek it, with the appreciation which comes from rarity, are the very best safeguards to right nutrition._ I am an epicure. Yet I have never seen a boarding-house, nor a restaurant, nor a camp where I could not find something to satisfy a true (earned) appetite. During more than a year in the Far East--Ceylon, Java, the Philippines, China, Burma, India, Kashmir--and at many steamer and railway lunch tables, I always found something good to satisfy a keen appetite. If you are all right inside, and will only conquer your habit-hungers, I believe you can live sumptuously, anywhere, on less than two shillings a day. I can, and often do; and do it, too, at one hundred and seventy pounds weight and "awfully busy" all the time. It may be difficult, and perhaps painful, at first, to get the best of bad habit-cravings, but it is worth while. A week should accomplish the reformation.