If it is found by the taste-buds there located around the "circumvalate papillæ" (the teat-like projections on the tongue which I mentioned above) to be properly prepared for acceptance and further digestion, the food-gate will open, and the food thus ready for acceptance into the body will be sucked back and swallowed unconsciously--that is, without conscious effort. I now started to experiment on myself. I chewed my food carefully until I extracted all taste from it there was in it, and until it slipped unconsciously down my throat. When the appetite ceased, and I was thereby told that I had had enough, I stopped; and I had no desire to eat any more until a real appetite commanded me again. Then I again chewed carefully--eating always whatever the appetite craved. THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF FLETCHERISM I have now found out five things; all that there is to my discovery relative to optimum nutrition; and to the fundamental requisite of what is called Fletcherism. _First_: Wait for a true, earned appetite. _Second_: Select from the food available that which appeals most to appetite, and in the order called for by appetite. _Third_: Get all the good taste there is in food out of it in the mouth, and swallow only when it practically "swallows itself." _Fourth_: Enjoy the good taste for all it is worth, and do not allow any depressing or diverting thought to intrude upon the ceremony. _Fifth_: Wait; take and _enjoy as much as possible_ what appetite approves; Nature will do the rest. For five months I went on patiently observing, and I found out positively in that time that I had worked out my own salvation. I had lost upwards of sixty pounds of fat: I was feeling better in all ways than I had for twenty years. My head was clear, my body felt springy, I enjoyed walking, I had not had a single cold for five months, "that tired feeling" was gone! But my skin had not yet shrunk back to fit my reduced proportions, and when I told friends whom I met that I felt well and a new man, their retort was that I certainly "did not look it!"[A] [A] NOTE:--Some of these same friends, fifteen years later, when I was sixty-four years of age, as positively declared: "You never looked so well: Fletcherizing has _certainly_ done well for Fletcher!" The more I tried to convince others, the more fully I realised from talking to friends how futile and well-nigh hopeless was the attempt to get credence and sympathy for my beliefs, scientifically well founded as I felt they were. For years it proved so; and I faced the fact that to pursue the campaign for recognition meant spending much money, putting aside opportunities to make profit in other and more agreeable directions, and no end of ridicule. Sometimes, during the daytime, when I was "sizing up" the situation in my mind, treating it with calm business judgment, it seemed nothing less than insane to waste any more time or money in trying to prove my contentions.