that their agitation and fears are enough in themselves to cause you to
modify your diet). I only kept bread, butter, and milk in the house,
all other foods I was obliged to send for, and if I required a dish
to be cooked, I first learned how to do it myself and then taught the
boy. I had no fixed times for meals, and did not have a table laid,
my food always being brought up on a tray; usually I did not interrupt
the work I was doing. I deliberately adopted all these precautions
because I had become aware by experience of the extraordinary influence
suggestion, and other mind influences, such as habit, had in one's
selection of food and the amount one ate. During the first two months
in conscientiously eating what I wished, as much of it as I wanted and
when my appetite demanded food, my desires were very irregular, ranging
over meats and fish, (occasionally) chocolate, sweets, cream, cheese,
butter, milk, bread, potatoes, oranges, bananas, sugar, etc., but
during the final period my desires were much more simple and regular,
confining themselves to bread, Gruyère cheese, butter, cream, bananas,
potatoes, occasionally milk. During and subsequent to this period I
have become convinced that provided you eat your food slowly and follow
your appetite, without guidance from any other knowledge whatever, one
gets marked preferences for simple foods with increasing health and
happiness, the contentment that comes from the inestimably valuable
possession of simple desires.
"_Comments on the System_:--The great attraction the system has for
me is its frank admission that: (1) One knows practically nothing
of those chemical processes that occur during digestion. (2) The
guidance for the conduct of life afforded by such vague phrases as
'the collective wisdom of mankind' leave one on the most superficial
examination in a state of great doubt, to say the least of it. (3)
The guidance afforded by the dogmas of science are open to the most
disquieting criticism. (_a_) In the prescription of method without a
knowledge of the mysteries of digestion. (_b_) In those observations
on insufficient standards of mental and physical optimum efficiency,
and of short periods of observation based solely on nitrogenous
equilibrium and output of work that you have already shown to be
fallacious and variable. (_c_) In short, that one can say that none of
the physiological dogmas based on chemistry are not open to criticism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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