[Footnote 18: Dr. Dewey is the author of numerous books: notably, the
"No-Breakfast Plan" which he supplies to inquirers direct from his home
address, Meadville, Pa.]
It is, then, no serious deprivation to ask a person to go without
what we call breakfast--the getting-up or habit-craving--and give the
brain a chance to clean up the remnants of the last day's supply of
food fuel, and express new desires in an _earned_ appetite. There is
available, on waking from sleep, a fresh charged brain ready to serve
its proprietor with great efficiency. Incidentally it has to do some
"chores," rake out the clinkers, dispose of the ashes, relieve the
grate bars, attend to any little repairs, brush out the chimney and
generally get ready for the work of another day.
The hunger of the morning is necessarily but a _habit-hunger_. The best
evidence of this is that, when busily employed, we forget it without
trouble; and also is that European peoples, where the disease dyspepsia
is not known in the list of physical derangements, perform the chief
physical or mental effort of the day before their breakfast, the
morning coffee scarcely meaning anything in the way of what we call a
meal.
Dr. Dewey's firm assertion is that when the stomach has had a chance
to "clean up" and is ready for more fuel, it will make it known in
healthy manner by a healthy appetite, and that it is rarely normal
before noon; and not really before one has done what might be called a
"day's work."
I can assert boldly, as the result of experience, that the time to get
work out of the brain is between the morning awakening and the first
meal, and it is the same relative to endurance draughts on the physical
strength.
Then, in the heat or the glare of the day, having accomplished
something useful and disposed of pressing duties, so as not to feel
the irritation of hurry, the first meal of the day can be taken with
restful ease and it will be found that the supply demanded by the
appetite will not be so great as that demanded by the unhealthful,
habit-inflamed early morning call.
It may not seem so, but this digression from psychics to physics is
very germane to my subject and to my own experience.
Without knowing that Dr. Dewey and the other eminent physicians who
endorse his theories were living in the world, I, in the summer of
1894, blundered into a personal experience of diet that produced
wonderful results which I now recall with all the vividness of the high
lights of extreme pleasure met in foreign travel.
I was in a Southern city for two months during an unusually hot
summer, watching some developments that could not be hurried, and the
fruition of which was important to my interests. I had nothing to do in
connection with this business but to "watch and wait."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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