How to Eat: A Cure for "Nerves"Hinkle, Thomas C. (Thomas Clark)
Science
How to Eat: A Cure for "Nerves"
Hinkle, Thomas C. (Thomas Clark)
Diet in disease; Nervous system -- Diseases; Nervous system -- Hygiene
Tennis is too violent an exercise for people who have had nervous
trouble. Anyway, there is no use in one's doing anything that will make
his heart beat like a trip-hammer. A women can toss a basket ball and
laugh and get rosy cheeks and grow younger and prettier as easily as
when playing tennis.
Golf is also good exercise, but a large number of people who work for a
living and suffer from "nerves" would have little chance for exercise if
golf were all that could be offered them. Furthermore golf is
practically only a summer game, and an individual belonging to the
pre-nervous class needs outdoor exercise every day in the year. But golf
is excellent exercise, and there is nothing better if one has the time
to give to it and has access to links.
Bicycling is splendid exercise for nervous people, but automobiles are
so numerous that it is now considered almost dangerous to ride a wheel
on any of our main traveled roads.
Mountain climbing, I believe, is not to be recommended for most people
suffering from "nerves." I have known such people to go to Colorado and
spend some time climbing mountains, and then come back much worse than
when they went away. My advice to the nervous person who goes to the
mountains is to be out of doors all the time he can, but to take things
easy. It would be better for such a person to walk about slowly on the
level ground through some of the towns or along the foothills.
Let leisure be your watchword in a hill country. I know I injured my
nerves out in Colorado one summer because I was ill advised. Mountain
air is good for you, but the mountains will do you more good if you
simply look at them. If you think you must go to the top, take a burro.
You will find that the burro will give you a lesson in how to do things
in a leisurely way. Do not get out of patience with him and whip him.
Remember that the burro is smarter than you are in regard to the
business of mountain climbing. He has never had a nervous breakdown, and
if you will let him have his own way he never will have. It will do you
good to let him have his way; he affords a tremendous lesson in
patience. Patience, that's just what we need, and we need it badly.
Walking slowly in the open air for two or three hours is the best
exercise for man. Fortunately, like the water we drink, it is free to
the poor as well as the rich.
For the nervous man who is able to do it, I know of nothing better to
build up muscles and keep the liver and other internal organs in good
shape than sawing wood. Don't scorn this sort of exercise because you
have been told that the ex-Kaiser is taking it. That is not to be laid
up against the wood or the exercise, for, quite fortunately, the wood
does not care who saws it.
Get some wood, then, and a buck saw, and saw wood for your own benefit.
You can do this morning and evening. Wood sawing brings into play every
muscle in the body, and the exercise is just enough to make a man
comfortably tired without doing him harm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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